From modest beginnings...
Profiles in Success: Macarthur Anglican School
Cobbity, New South Wales, Australia: From modest beginnings with five teachers, one secretary and 90 students, Macarthur Anglican School has grown at an astounding rate to have a student population of well over 1,000 and more than 60 teachers. Almost in parallel with the school’s growth, there has been an increase in prevalence and use of Apple Mac computers and software in the classroom and administration offices.
It comes as no surprise to see Macarthur’s K- 12 students making good use of the more than 400 Apple iMacs and MacBooks located throughout classrooms, computer labs and specialty media rooms. Take a look in the infant classes, though, and it doesn’t take long to realise why students at this school are so comfortable with using Macs in virtually every area of their education. Students as young as four-years old are already honing their keyboard and mouse skills and using Macs to explore their creativity.
For the teachers, it’s a one-to-one MacBook program that affords them the levels of comfort and familiarity necessary for integrating technology into the curriculum.
According to the school’s Professional Development and Curriculum Support Officer, Nola Norris, providing teachers with their own MacBook and encouraging them to use it just as much at home as at school is crucial.
When you have teachers using their MacBooks at home to create their own movies or manage their digital photographs, it doesn’t take long before that experience shows in the classroom – and this is precisely what we want.
— Nola Norris, Professional Development and Curriculum Support Officer, Macarthur Anglican School
“An example of this is when Year 3 teachers came to me late last term, wanting to create a CD with portfolios of HSIE [Human Society and Its Environment] work done by their students,” Norris continues. “While it was intended initially to be a one-off project with the CD being presented to a much-loved student teacher, this term it has been carried on under the Digital Portfolios project banner.”
Using a combination of the Mac’s built-in iSight camera, Photo Booth, iPhoto and Macromedia Fireworks, students create photo albums of themselves and their work, which are then published to their class’s intranet page via iWeb.
In citing another example, Norris talks of the time that an English teacher, having used iTunes to access podcasts via the Internet, approached her with the goal of developing a series of podcasts for students who were studying for their Higher School Certificate (HSC).
“All that it took was to show that teacher how to use his MacBook to record his commentaries using Sound Studio,” Norris says. “Once he had done his recordings, he transferred the files to a Firewire drive and I was able to publish them directly, using iWeb, to the intranet.
“Students are now able to download them direct to their iPods or log onto the intranet from their home computers and download the podcasts to iTunes.”
But it’s not just the students who have made good use of the podcasts. “We had a teacher hold a series of classes during the school holidays for those students who wanted some help in their HSC English studies,” Norris says. “For the teacher, rather than spending an enormous amount of time developing material from scratch, he simply used the podcast that had already been developed.”
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