PiL Spotlight: Edge Hill State School

Edge Hill is a primary school situated approximately 8km from the centre of Cairns in Far North Queensland.

The school has a proud tradition of providing innovative, quality education to students from P- 7. With an enrolment of over 1000 students and a teaching staff of 50+, our school is a bustling, thriving learning community.

Our students come from a multitude of different cultural backgrounds with many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Japanese families living in the area. As an Education Queensland international school we also service a growing contingent of international students from many countries including Japan, Korea, PNG and South Africa, choosing our school as a place for their education.

Our School Vision:

At Edge Hill State School we will educate the leaders of the future in an environment that endeavours to challenge and support them, to prepare them to be healthy, confident young Australians, living and working in a global society and economy.

Our Curriculum

Historically Edge Hill has been known for innovation with regard to teaching and learning, particularly having been a part of the New Basics Project which included development of Rich Tasks used for student assessment.

During 2012 Edge Hill State School will begin implementation of the new Australian Curriculum for English, Mathematics and Science. This is a huge undertaking for our teachers and students but provides us with a powerful opportunity to explore and enhance our school wide pedagogy and in particular our digital pedagogy.

Our Charter for Excellence

Edge Hill State School believes challenge leads to personal growth - it provides motivation for positive change. Support helps to ensure successful adaptation to meet the challenge.

•Our teachers will challenge our students with high expectations while supporting them by developing meaningful relationships and providing for individual learning needs

•Our curriculum will challenge students with high expectations whilst supporting their intrinsic motivation to learn with differentiated learning

•Our school will challenge students with high expectations for social and emotional learning while providing them with whole child support

•Our school leaders will challenge teachers to improve performance while supporting their professional growth

•Our school will challenge students to become adaptable and flexible, contemporary learners by supporting them with a rich and diverse digital pedagogy.

ICT@ Edge Hill

The school’s eLearning plan encompasses 4 focus areas:

Working Digitally:

Focuses on how the school uses digital technology as a way of moving from traditional to transformational ways of working. Planning for this requires consideration of community, student and staff their access to and purposeful use of digital technologies.

Enabling Learners:

Focuses on establishing the effective learning environments necessary to address the needs of learners in a complex changing world. Considerations here include implementing consistent, school wide standards for and making use of online learning environments to optimise students opportunities to use ICT for learning at school.

Developing Professionals:

This focus area addresses development of teacher and leader capabilities necessary to deliver quality teaching and learning, including teacher acquisition of minimum standards of competency with ICTs and developing teachers’ knowledge and understanding of embedding ICTs as tools to enhance learning outcomes for students.

Harnessing the Enterprise Platform

Focuses on the processes, systems and practices necessary to develop and maintain effective learning productivity. This domain covers management and enhancement and investment in infrastructure, devices and software and ways to leverage these to personalise learning and extend it beyond the classroom.

Our Microsoft Partnerships in Learning Project Plan

Our PiL Schools Research data showed us that one 21st century learning capability that we could be doing better with is “Skilled Communication”; Connecting our community with student learning is also a regional priority; therefore our PiL project focuses on developing our students and teachers as skilled 21st century communicators.

The PiL project has been opportunity for us to look at our practice around 21st century teaching and learning and move forward with an agenda of enhancing our digital pedagogy to enhance learning outcomes for students at Edge Hill State School. The powerful networking opportunities and learning it has provided have allowed us to expand our thinking and contemplate an educational horizon so much wider than we might otherwise have been able to imagine.

Thanks to Kirsty Edwards, Paul Campbell, Cecelia Brook; Edge Hill State School Partners in Learning Team for this guest post.