Day 3 - Thebarton Senior College

Visited our second school today, I will be taking loads of intereresting ideas back to the classroom with me on my return:). Below are my notes....

Mostly adult education, but a number of 16-18 year olds are also on role. Students tend to be re-entries, having already completed their statutory education elsewhere. There are also a large number of migrants and refugees. This is similar to our colleges in that the are a range of qualifications that can be taken from low level for those who have not completed high school with satisfactory grades, to the highest level courses that allow students to go onto work or university.

5 main programs - new arrivals (none english), study skills (basic level qualifications, designed to prepare for the SACE), SACE (normally completed at the end of compulsory schooling), adult education (for university entry) and vocational education.

There has been a drive in recent years to promote more vocational education to encourage more students to stay in school. Schools that cannot offer certain vocational qualifications to their students will send their students to the college one day a week.

Wherever possible, students are given opportunities to get real experience of the work place. Several of the classrooms are set up to mimic real life work environments, including a technical support centre, a green screen studio and music studio.

Success for the college is judged on whether students finish with the qualifications that they need to progress in to the profession they want.

Every subject area is expected to to have an area of the VLE to aid learning. Students are expected to hand in their work typed and electronically. Each classroom has a cabinet of Mac Books for the students to use, because of the diversity of the student backgrounds, this seemed the more sensible option than supplying them directly to the students.

The school has a subscription to Atomic Learning, which includes tutorials to pretty much all the software you would need.

We were then shown round some classes that were taking place, we got to see some excellent uses of iMacs to deliver IT multimedia and a class working with computer hardware and building networks. It was also very interesting to see a class of lower ability students who were developing their literacy skills using games, writing about their experiences of playing the game and accessing the literacy assessment criteria.