From the Principal 

Welcome to the beginning of 2022

It is wonderful to have our staff and students back at school. It has been an unusual beginning with all staff and students using RAHT to check for COVID-19 twice per week but fortunately, we are able to be at school enjoying each other’s company again.

We welcome our new students and staff.  We will also have opportunities during the year to welcome the families of our new students to the community.

During the holidays I visited the art exhibition The Lume at the Melbourne Convention Centre, which is currently featuring the extraordinary work of Vincent van Gogh.  The exhibition is different from traditional art exhibitions as it combines digital forms of the art choreographed to music and movement.

This style of gallery experience has emerged as curators wanted to introduce a new audience to art and so they moved from a static display to an immersion experience. 

The result is wonderful, to sit in a large room with the work of Vincent van Gogh transformed into digital formats and displayed across whole walls, combined with the story of the artist, and set to music.  I was able to sit in the space for an hour and appreciate his work all over again.

Education is undergoing a similar transformation; teachers, schools, and parents are reconsidering how we engage students who have been born into a technologically advanced world.  While we need to rethink our teaching techniques, technology does not replace teachers; technology offers us access to information, but the key is to teach students to evaluate, analyse and synthesise the information so they can use it to solve new problems to improve lives.

The teachers at Moama Anglican Grammar use technology as a tool for learning and focus on the skills of analysis, evaluation and problem solving in a collaborative way.  The school’s attention to  ‘Deep Learning’ focusses on the explicit teaching of these skills for students. 

One of the wonderful elements of this experience for me has been the preservation of art from the late 1800s for people today and into the future.  We have not lost this beautiful art or the stories of the artist but transformed the medium for another generation.  These creative solutions and innovations are a key goal of education.

Carmel Spry

Principal