My name's Jesse Black. I teach at Mount Sinai College in Sydney, Australia. I've been here for four years, and three out of those four years, we've been using technology in the classroom. I teach year three, a nd that involves a whole range of courses from math to English to creative arts, and we teach 41 children between two teachers. So we're responsible for all in all 41 children. I think the main reason behind us using technology at this school in particular was not so much the fact that it's coming, and we need to adapt, but more about how do we enable the best pedagogy for our students? And when you look at it from that perspective, there is a whole world that opens up when you're willing to kind of take some risks and adapt, and put technology back into your curriculum. So I think for us it was more about answering the question, what is going to drive the best outcomes for our students? And when you look around, it's really hard to deny the power of technology, to help us meet those outcomes. iPads that we all use, and we use computers, and smart books. We use Stile, which lets us learn all different stuff. >> So, one of the core technologies we use at Mount Sinai College is called Stile, S-T-I-L-E, and Stile is a little bit hard to describe. It's not a learning management system, it's more like a content creation and delivery system. There is some pedagogy actually embedded into Stile, and in short, it allows me to create lessons that I can then push to my students on the iPad. Okay, so you're looking at the home page of Stile, once you log in. And you can see down here on the left side there are various subjects. These are what you would have access to as a teacher. So I'll just walk you through one briefly. My favorite is probably how I'm using Stile in math. So, when you click on your subject, it will load up for you any lesson that you might have created, and this is really where it's powerful, because for example, I have a lesson topic called YouTube, and underneath here lives all of my pre-recorded YouTube videos. You'll see this black line here called Students and when I slide that, I can make the videos visible to students or invisible which is really nice. It keeps them focused and engaged so that maybe they're not spending time on topics you've already covered or that they shouldn't be on. I'll give you an example of one we've done recently. This is called a YouTube session on Elapsed Time. I'll flip to student mode so you can see what they see. So a student might open their iPad, go to this, log in Stile, go to this link. They'll read the instructions and they'll scroll down and they'll watch this video. In this video I'll walk you through in a moment, I've created and uploaded via YouTube. So it's kind of, Stile you can think about as the wrapper that delivers the content which is on YouTube. The software I use to create all of my YouTube videos is up here on the tab. It's called SmoothDraw. It's free, which is nice, and it's quite powerful. SmoothDraw lets you pretty much do any annotating you want on your screen. I record with Open Broadcaster Software, which is also free. This is a really easy, painless program to use. Once I've recorded my lesson, I upload via YouTube. YouTube is obviously quick, painless, and it's almost never down, so you can rely on it quite well. Now, I could just send my students links to my videos, if I click on Video Manager over here, I can pull any link that I've made, but I find Stile is really that extra step, and I'll give you an example as to why. So here I am in my video that I made. Let's go look at one of the lessons that I've done. It's called Sam's Alarm Clock. So I've taken some screenshots of a problem I really liked. They have to solve it, and this is where Stile really shines. I can make these multiple choice questions that the students can answer and it will mark it for me, and then give me feedback on how they've gone, and that's really, really powerful. So this is what the students see, and it was so simple to set up. So just kind of two little insights into what Stile is doing. It's allowing me to send my lessons to the students via YouTube, and it's allowing me to collect data on them, and give them feedback. So when I record my lectures on YouTube. It's a pretty simple process. I use a number of different ways but probably the most basic is I record myself drawing on my computer and speaking at the same time. So, I can give any kind of didactic instruction straight into the computer. It's recorded. I save that recording, maybe do some editing, upload it to YouTube. Then I can use Stile to push that YouTube content to the students. And Stile, it's contextualized, so they're looking at it exactly how I want them to see it, and I can put follow-up questions that can be automatically marked, if I need. So, Stile's kind of like the wrapper. YouTube it's how it's delivered, and it's recorded on my computer. I think my main problem was I had this mindset of I need to find the killer app. I need to find that one thing that's going to make the iPad worthwhile and it took me a long time to realize that that one thing is me. The killer app for students is their teacher. So once you realize that, you try to think about how does the iPad enable you to spend more time with your students. And that to me, it sounds like a very simple lesson, but it took me a few years to even figure that out, because I just kept looking for that one app that's going to solve solve everything, and it doesn't exist. You still need to develop that teacher student relationship. I think we often wondered how much technical skill do we need to use this kind of technology in the classroom. And my answer to that would be the absolute bare minimum is what's needed. And I think I can say that because if you have the mindset that you will work with your students, and that you will learn from them as much as they learn from you, you can approach it almost with them in a collaborative sense. If your school's supportive and you have at least one person in your school that you can go to to ask. I start from, what do the students already know? So there would be some kind of pretest involved, a way that I can gauge where they're at, so that when I do deliver the content, we're really doing two things. We're not boring them, and we're not giving them something that's too difficult, and so we can individualize. The second kind of tier of the preflight checklist is going straight back to the syllabus, what are the outcomes that we're kind of beholden to? And I find it's nice to go back to that frequently, because you do forget, and you do realize that you see them again, you think oh, I could be doing that in a different way. So it's asking where the students are from using the syllabus. And then finally just thinking about what technologies are going to fit, how you want to deliver the lesson. I mean, sometimes it might be YouTube, sometimes it might be Stile, and that's only going to come with experience. I think when you first start it's fine to not know what to do, just jump in, but after a few years it'll be very clear to you, oh, this lesson needs this technology to be enabled. >> You can watch videos in Stile, and you can upload photos, and have writings everywhere, for depends what subject. You can make a link for any subject you want. >> You can get a lot of subjects. You can put loads of things that they teach us. I find that the student's response to technology is evolving. If I had to answer this question a few years ago it'd probably be a bit different. I'd say now it almost feels second nature, the way they respond to it. I would say they expect it. It often creates a feedback loop in your classroom. So in the past, if a student wanted feedback from their teacher, it's kind of bound to time and space. In a funny way, it kind of releases you from time and space. You can give students feedback at home, you can give them feedback at different parts of the school. It's and that creates kind of a, like I said, a feedback loop and it enables them to then push their work further. We've been on a three year journey, really, to embed technology deeply at our school, and it could not have happened without the support of everyone. I mean, it is a collaborative enterprise, what we're doing here.
