Digital Learning

Digital Tech News

The use of Digital Technologies at Brookside College has been then centre of our Remote Online Learning. I want to begin with thanking parents for their patience, persistence and determination when working with new applications, services and devices.

The beginning of a new semester at Brookside means that Digital Technologies Specialist Classes are now being undertaken by new students – those in Year 3 and Year 5, along with the Year 9 Coding elective.

Students in Year 3 are developing their skills in conducting Internet Research, exploring word order, the order of returned results and Internet safety. Throughout this unit, students will be able to understand how word order affects the results returned, identify how I should behave online, research different types of online communication and explain why particular results are returned by a search engine. In Week 3, students explored ‘Key Words’ by identifying how many times student selected key words appear in the page, title and url by using <ctrl + f> to search for text. Thank you to Amaya from 3A for the outstanding example and to all the students who have engaged in this unit of work so far – I hope you are enjoying it.

Students in Year 5 will be working toward developing their own website using Microsoft Sway. Microsoft Sway is part of the EDUPASS education suite provided to all students by the DET. Throughout this unit of learning, students should be able to identify the features of a Webpage, create a new webpage and format it, create webpage elements including images and hyperlinks and share a webpage so it can be viewable by others. In Week 2, students explored some features of the websites that they had chosen and recorded feedback on the elements that they liked and those that could be improved. In Week 3, students used that feedback to begin to develop their own websites – starting with the layout and design. Thank you to Maxen from 5B for sharing a snippet of the website you are developing. I hope each and every one of you will learn something new during this unit of learning.

Finally, the students partaking in the Year 9 Coding elective (9CODEA) have been investigating flowcharts. Flowcharts are used as a way to map thinking when coding or programming. Students will be able to put their flowcharts in to practice when we begin coding. The languages which we will be exploring for coding are Code Block and Python. Python was selected as it is what students at Lakeview use and it is one of the most universal languages, and for Code Block – it is a great initial step into coding for those who have never had the opportunity to write code.