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St. Hilda's School, an all-girls day/boarding school located in Queensland, Australia is setting the bar for K-12 schools worldwide. Using mobile learning, St. Hilda's is able to engage all of its stakeholders with a more personalized approach. Students are relating better, collaborating with one another and their instructors, and staying connected to their educational experience 24/7. St. Hilda's has dramatically increased student engagement while decreasing their carbon footprint with Blackboard Mobile Central, Blackboard Mobile Learn, and Blackboard Managed Hosting.
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A Very Big Adventure:
Geoff PowellDirector of Learning Technology St Hilda’s SchoolSouthport
750 girls, 850 iPads, Blackboard Mobile, and Managed Hosting
• Director of Computing at Geelong Grammar (Vic)
• Exchange Fellow Deerfield Academy (Mass. USA)
• Principal Boarding School - Yasawan Islands Fiji
• Head of Unit and IT at Timbertop Campus (Vic)
• Director of Learning Technologies St Hilda’s
• iPad / laptop and BlackBoard LMS implementations
A bit about me - last decade
Was the move to iPads a scary experience?(before I talk about why and how we made the move, …allow me to deviate for a few minutes)
In the presentation there was a film, here are some still shots
When do we stop enjoying the adrenaline rush of fear?
How happy did the girls in the final "scary movie" clip look?
ask a group of 14 year old girls what type of movie they want to watch together…
…they always opt for scary ones!
What are they really scared of?
...kids can do some clever things
Teens use Google Earth to home in on cool pools for partiesThe Age - June 20, 2008 - 8:36PM
Fancy a pool party but don't have a pool?
Teenagers in Britain are using internet satellite images to locate outdoor swimming and meet up with buddies for late-night dips and parties.
The craze, known as dipping, involves people using pictures from Google Earth to identify homes that have large outdoor pools, Britain's Telegraph newspaper reports. Once a cool pool is found, teenagers use social networking sites including Facebook and Bebo to spread the word and meet up for impromptu swims and parties.
Some residents had woken up to find youngsters using their pools. Others had come home from work to find their pools full of beer cans, police said. To avoid arrest, party goers are often told to turn up in costumes and bring bicycles so they can make a quick getaway.
One boastful group of dippers said party goers had held an event on Monday that saw 16 people invade two pools near Bournemouth in Dorset. The group listed a specific meeting place for between midnight and 3am and gave mobile telephone numbers for the organisers, the Telegraph said.
Although there were only 16 confirmed participants at the event, invitations were sent to more than 500 users on Facebook. Police said they were telling pool owners to be on the guard.
"We would also warn prospective swimmers that using someone else's pool is trespassing and therefore illegal," a spokesman said
AAP
I have to explain about where I now live.
The Gold Coast is the Aussie version of Miami
St Hilda’s Girl Response to the article on “dipping”
“Why would you do that? I don’t know anyone
without a pool”
http://web.mac.com/art.sthildasA retrospective of over 1000 pieces of St Hilda’s girls art work WITH NAMES!
(Galleries named after students)
Something to look at if you get bored
Sowing the seeds early
“To swear off making mistakes is very easy…
…all you have to do is swear off having ideas.”
*Leo Burnett
“Never be afraid to try something new…
…remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.”
*Groucho Marx
Our Bb Evolution from 2007 - 2011
2011 moved to iPads, Mobile Learn plus
the Mobile Central iPhone App
2007 – 2009 hosted Bb locally
2010 moved to full Bb Hosted Environment
Lets look at Mobile Central
iStHildas - launched on July 18th
Lets look at our Bb Hosting
We developed a culture where students and parents expected things to be posted on Blackboard.
When parents ring asking for the Maths to be posted on Blackboard, you have turned a corner.
But then things became a bit too successful
Bandwidth began to kill us
Our core business is education we are not an ISPplus we have 120 boarders
What did we do over the first 2 years that led to us needing a hosted solution?
At the Aussie Bb Summit in 2009 in Brisbane two significant events for St Hilda’s
I saw Harry’s session on hosted solutions
I met Kayvon and Aaron from Mobile Learn
Those two events combined serendipitously to become central to our planning for 2011
I went back and “did the sums”
Looked at the ramifications of Bb use increasing beyond what we were currently generating
That is when I discovered hosting
Head of School wanted a plan if we had to close
The swine flu event led to solid review of our online learning policy development
Could we run the school if we have to close the doors?
Could 1000 users access our locally hosted Bb server simultaneously? In short the answer was no.
We had to plan for growth and that meant $$$ spent somewhere
Swine Flu actually helped us!
It costs a bit of money, but it does offset substantially against current outlays.
No ongoing hardware costsNo need for server replacements, this saves $$$
IT staff can be redeployed or not replaced
We had a DB administrator that left for a better offer, we left it open
24/7/365 is a realityPre hosting, if we went down on the Sat afternoon, it was down till Mon AM we could not afford to have our staff on call 24/7.
Hosting Cost Benefit Analysis
Load balancing during busy timesI doubt we even blip the switches of the data centre, but offsite access is as fast as the connection you have allows. 95%+ of our students have broadband. How to you put a price on your student’s time?
No more planning upgrades around term breaks
Upgrades were tasks that took IT staff time planning and implementing at the expense of other tasks. We moved from 8.0 to 9.0 during hosting with zero effort. We moved to 9.1 in Jan this year with an email request.
No more backup worriesNo need for the expense of backup hardware/media, nor the continual manpower associated with a regular backup cycle.
Hosting Cost Benefit Analysis
We have been developing our online curriculum via Blackboard for some 5 years
We moved to a fully hosted environment in 2010
• With the advent of the iPad program in 2011 we adopted the Mobile Learn Blackboard App
• We also moved towards iBook / ePub distribution
• Lets look at our students quantifiable levels of engagement with blackboard since 2009, and what Mobile Learn has done for student engagement
Bb, Mobile Learn & iPads
iPads from yr 5-12 in 2011I predicted Bb traffic would double
We were confident our decision tomove to hosting would allow usthe headroom for success in 2011
Mobile Learn & iPads for the environment• Last year 4.6 million A4 page prints
• Aim for 2011 down by 1 million copies
• Aim for 2012 down by another million
• iPads and Bb Mobile are key to this
We have data to show that Bb Moblie and Hosting has significantly increased student engagement
Bb Summit 2009
Bb Summit 2010
Students spending much more time in the Bb courses
Our move to hosting greatly increased traffic
Bb World 2011Massive increase in traffic
Bb 2010 vs 2011
2010 weekly average = 2011 holiday hits
2010
2011
Our school day
800% lift in trafficY axis 200 to 1600
Our school day
Year 10 English 2010 vs 2011
10 fold increasein traffic
relative to 2010
Weekend traffic increased from 25 hits on Sunday in 2010 to 1250 in 2011
How do 10 year olds use Bb Mobile Learn?
Why not have them show you.
The film that was embedded in this presentation can be found at the St Hilda's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/sthildastube#p/c/40F3251B6B550F01/0/J7gskajsnkI
or
http://youtu.be/J7gskajsnkI
or
Go to http://sthildas.qld.edu.au
Then click on St Hilda's Tube and then click the iPad playlist
How does pre-prep use Bb and Mobile Learn?
They don't, but Mum and Dad do.
How has our iBook strategy developed?
How is this carbon friendly?
By distributing PDF, Doc, PPT and ePub format to our iPads via Bb, we are well on track to taking over a million pages per year out of our print budget.
Over two years, if successful, we are near cost neutral on hosting.
During the presentation, the following use of school generated iBooks was demonstrated live.
For the purposes of this edited version I have supplied screen shots of the process.
Hopefully this illustrates what we are doing.
Prior to iBooks, we had 60 PDFs of war poems loaded into Bb Learn
We moved all 60 poems into a single ePub via a Pages export.
We are really pleased that the new Mobile Learn update will read and open ePub formats directly into iBook Libraries.
The girls opened these individually as they needed them.
Rather than access poems individually as required, students now download the ePub War Poem Anthology into iBooks.
What are the advantages?
We cut down network traffic, and have access to the full range of iBook features.
Bb Mobile Learn is the perfect distribution portal for us to achieve this.
This is a selection of poems in iBook format. Our year 9s call these "books on steroids"
You get full access to a dictionary, great for ESL students
You can highlight and leave yourself notes.
Notes are date stamped, and full sets of notes can be emailed to the staff member.
You can embed video and audio, so students can both read and hear the war protest songs being studied.
This is our year 8 Elective Subject Selection Handbook
It has examples of work shown by last years students. The idea is to help students make more informed decisions
Where are we heading with this?
Our aim is to decrease printing by 1 million A4 sheets a year
Moving our existing publications to this format and distributing via Mobile Learn is key to this.
The year 8 elective book alone saved over 7500 A4 pages Multiply this across the school, it adds up to big savings
We also have deals with our publishers so our Maths, Science, Business and a number of English books are now on the iPad. This is for all years 7-12. It has taken several kilograms out of the backpack, and a substantial amount off the booklist.
You need a distribution model. Bb Mobile Learn will do this for us
What has influenced my thinking so heavily on all of this? We want to give a Tertiary (college) experience
That is why we put in place Managed HostingMobile CentralMobile Learn
Essential to this we developed a BYOD iPad modelBYOD = Bring Your Own Device, the student is fully responsible
Everytime I come to a conference like this, I become more determined that what we offer our girls is not a watered down version of a quality Tertiary (College) level program. We don't have tertiary budgets, but we can have the same desire for quality outcomes.
K-12 is, I feel, the building block of a sound education. So it needs access to tertiary level quality resources. That is what we are determined to put in place.
Thank YouQuestions?
