An exploration of the 'bleeding edge' applications of data in K-12 education.

2020 marked a year of massive disruption. During this time, digital capabilities rapidly improved and technology and tools transformed the way education has had to work. Teaching remotely was challenging for many reasons, not least of which was the inherent ‘disconnect’ teaching staff experienced in no longer being able to interact with students or colleagues in person. One outcome of this has been that alongside the continuing focus on measuring growth, schools are increasingly concerned with measuring ‘engagement’, whether it was within their student cohorts, their communities and importantly, their teaching staff.

Whether you’re trying to solve a technology problem or you’re about to begin a major IT project, the planning phase is critical and guess what? Your experience planning curriculum is transferable to IT planning and projects as well. In this blog post, I’ll walk through a few key steps for nailing the planning for a complex project.  

While Covid seems to have stretched time making six months feel like a decade, it wasn’t actually that long ago that the pandemic hit us and we had to scramble to set up remote learning and distribute our workforces. We digitised en masse and that well-trodden adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” could be seen virtually (boom, boom) everywhere.

Restricted travel due to COVID-19 is already having a well-documented impact on Australian universities. With their existing digital infrastructure, most have strategies and technologies in place to support students studying remotely. K-12 schools are likely to be impacted in one way or another in the coming months but established systems and practices to support fully online remote study are rare.

With remote learning becoming the 'new norm' for schools in response to the recent virus pandemic, the adoption of remote learning differs from school to school. This is influenced largely by the current adoption of technology already taking place within the school's learning environment, together with the capacity and confidence of its teaching staff.  

More often than not, RTG are brought in to schools to help confirm a hunch the Leadership Team has regarding everyday operations and business improvement. This hunch is usually based on thoughts of inefficiency and/or ineffectiveness in everyday school practice - either in or out of the classroom. Whatever their suspicions, they know it's having a negative impact on their staff and students.