Sandra Bennett

I attended a Talk for Writing PD last Friday. The Talk for Writing approach enables children to read and write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes within different subjects. A key feature is that children internalise the language structures needed to write through ‘talking the text’ . The approach moves from dependence towards independence with the teacher using shared and guided teaching to develop the ability in children to write creatively.

This was a very informative PD with many strategies I can take into my classroom and help the students on their way to believing they are writers with something important to share. 

Rory Critchley

Digital Technologies for SEN – Google Education Partnership

Earlier this year, our school was successful in receiving a $12,790 from Google. The purpose of this funding is to share our best practice in Digital Technologies for students in Education Support Centres. Last week, staff from 8 other schools from across the Education Support North Network attended the first workshop of this series. The goal of this session was to collect data on where the schools are at in Digi Tech instruction, and use this to build a model of learning support for their staff. Throughout the rest of this year, we will work with these schools by delivering professional learning to their staff, having them visit us and observe our practice, and coach them teaching in their own schools. We hope to extend this to other schools across the state as the year progresses. This is an opportunity for our school to develop a strong network of digital technologies specialists who we can draw on for collaborative planning and moderation tasks in the year to come. We thank Google for recognising the work we do here at JESC and investing in our program.

Additional information on the Google Educator Professional Development program can be found at this link: https://australia.googleblog.com/2019/05/computer-science-grants-for-australian.html