Zoe Wilkins1
1Department Of Education And Training, Coorparoo, Australia
The Futures Academy is an academy within Brisbane School of Distance Education designed to inspire learners and cater for motivated students wishing to engage with a future-orientated curriculum. Focusing on 21st century skills and design thinking, students are provided with the skills to be able to take their place in an ever-changing, global technical world. The Futures Academy adopts an Integrated Real World Learning (IRWL) approach. This approach is characterised by STEM units, Global Challenges with local solutions, Digital Citizenship, links with industry experts and access to anywhere, anytime learning experiences.
This presentation will focus on an example Real World Learning project completed by our year 7 students in 2017. Students worked on this project collaboratively even though they were located in Canada, Singapore, Thailand, Western Australia, New South Wales and locally across Queensland. This project required students to select and build their own super sporting team based on player analysis and statistical data. Students accessed experts from various sporting bodies providing them with a real world application of mathematics. An excursion to the Queensland Academy of Sports demonstrated athletes in action and the devices and technology used to collect the data. As the excursion was web conferenced, students not able to visit physically were able to participate virtually.
This presentation demonstrates real world learning, learning collaboratively with students from across the world and how to conduct a physical and virtual excursion simultaneously.
Biography:
Zoe Wilkins is currently a year level coordinator and teacher in the Futures Academy at Brisbane School of Distance Education. She has a passion for eLearning, STEM and loves teaching students from across the world using 21st century communication tools. Zoe has launched and managed many state wide projects and online events. These have included OneChannel (an online professional development service for DET), iSupport (an online program for at risk students) and the Online Literature Festival (an online event for students to interact and collaborate with their favourite authors and illustrators).
