During Semester One, a number of our staff were involved in a range of innovation projects looking at different, creative ways to help students improve their learning.

Our EALD (English as additional language/dialect) teacher, Mrs Kreis wanted to investigate ways to support non-English background students, looking at whether AI can help students to improve their writing without simply just doing it for them. The key with the strategy was to find ways for students to identify errors in their writing and create or refer to lessons for them to develop their skills to improve these areas rather than AI just correcting it for them. It is an interesting area and relies on a precise prompt being created. In testing, AI was very good at identifying writing errors and categorising them. It can be a very useful tool for assisting learning but care needs to be taken to ensure learning still occurs and any writing is the students work, not AI. As such, Mrs Kreis continues to work in this area and we are looking at Microsoft Co-pilot as an option as only certain AI platforms are accessible at school.  

Our languages teacher, Miss Morris had noted our senior French students were lacking confidence in speaking conversational French with her. As their upcoming assessment involved doing exactly this, she was interested in finding ways to help students improve. She decided to use iPads with different apps and headphones to help students practice speaking. Students had access to DuoLingo, Google translate and Speechling. These could be used in different ways including having the app pronounce or speak the phrases for them but also practice speaking the phrase whereby they would get feedback from the app. Prior to using the apps students were surveyed and it was found 87% of them believed their speaking skills were not good. The great news was 100% of them believed they could improve and by the end of the unit a new survey revealed 100% believed they improved. When asked which strategy helped them the most, 70% nominated the apps with the remaining 30% stating the teacher was their preferred way to practice. Amber was our winner of the Digital Pedagogies award for Semester One for her work on this project as well as her involvement with the Digital team.

Finally a special thanks to all our innovation project teachers who had great success in Semester One covered here and in our previous newsletter. Your time and effort in looking for new ways to improve student learning is admired and appreciated. We look forward to working with other teachers and seeing the results of new projects in Semester Two.

Adam Christie
HOD Innovation, Technology & Interactive Teaching