Professionally, I wear many hats. On Mondays and Tuesdays I wear my Denstone College hat, teaching Computing and IT to students from Year 7 to Year 13 and on Wednesday, Thursdays and very often Fridays, I teach IT to all students at Edenhurst from Reception to Prep 6. This is great because it gives me a real view of the progression required in my subject all the way through school. It also means that when children say goodbye Edenhurst and go to Denstone, I get to see them again.
I love my subject and regard it as the most important skills-based subject that children learn. I honestly believe that to prepare our children for the future we have a duty to teach them the skills to not only be users of IT and software but also to give them the ability to adapt the IT to meet their requirements. It is slightly frightening that we don’t know what these requirements will be but I am confident that teaching children coding and computational thinking skills will allow them to adapt and to thrive.
We are a Google school and during the past few months, I have been increasingly impressed with this platform. I have enjoyed supporting our children, parents and staff during this pandemic in a behind the scenes capacity, to ensure that we deliver world class learning to all of our children. The children have impressed me with how quickly they have learnt to navigate this digital world, very often providing IT support to their parents. I have loved working with my colleagues from the Bellevue Group of schools and am exceptionally proud of what we have accomplished together. With that said, I have really missed being in the physical classroom with the children and cannot wait for a return to some normality in September. Our new Chromebooks and my newly acquired robots are raring to go!
