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Learning with ICT

The overarching goal of the school’s ICT Strategy is to enable a safe, secure, highly reliable, yet innovative and blended learning environment which provides all students and staff with the opportunities to learn creatively and just-in-time with ICT.

Our planning has to embrace both mobile computing and personalised learning so that we are:

preparing students to learn, live and work as global citizens
using quality digital content from around the globe
teaching with strategies and tools to create, deploy and track engaging learning experiences
using advances in high speed broadband and communications technologies as well as social networking for a trusted ICT investment

Using a Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) program for students in Years 5 to 12 from 2016, flexible and learner-centred approaches to learning allow teaching staff to integrate quality teaching practices with information and communications technologies (ICTs) in engaging, contemporary and real world contexts. Support staff participate in an innovative and highly reliable ICT business framework for support systems with equitable access to professional learning recognition services.

Please note: BYOT is also known as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

Read more about the Hutchins ICT strategy

A set of co-dependent strategies have the following features:

a well-articulated student-centred teacher pedagogy underpinning the acquisition and transformative use of ICT in the School’s K–12 curriculum
a commitment to effective ICT professional development for teachers, particularly for the Virtual Learning Environment [Schoolbox] and the engaging application of Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) environment
developing timely information portals for parents reporting students’ progress and achievement
the strategic deployment of infrastructure services for cloud based services, business continuity/disaster recovery planning and desktop virtualisation (VDI).
continuous improvement in high speed broadband communications (AARNet4) and secure wireless networking
a document and records management system for image, video and text through a Microsoft SharePoint 2013 upgrade to ensure knowledge base and intranet services in policy and document management as well as heritage record-keeping life-cycles from creation to archiving or destruction

The Hutchins School embraces the challenges and opportunities for managing the changing models of learning and thriving in the digital age and international school communities. There is widely accepted research and new knowledge about how boys learn, how students are engaged, the effective implementation of mobile technology and 21^st century skills for life. The accelerating rate of change due to the learning technologies, Bring your Own Technology strategy (BYOT) and social media in the School's community all bring about new challenges with distinctive changes in what students must learn but also in how and when they learn.The Australian Curriculum brings a focus on computational thinking through the Digital Technologies strand K–8. One example is Year 8 being part of a pilot program, Bebras, which is an outstanding international computational thinking challenge for students.

In providing innovative personalised learning opportunities that embrace practical, hands-on and local, national and global eLearning programs and services, students will be able use their digital portfolio records for tertiary studies, career pathways and industry placements. The learning platform for Hutchins is a purposeful designed online teaching and learning environment that overlaps and blends with the physical learning environments of our school. In this blended model, traditional face-to-face teaching remains paramount and the relationship between teacher and learner is central to a student’s e-Learning at Hutchins.

Students are encouraged to bring their own devices to connect to the School’s network. The ease of use of personal laptops, tablets and personal devices by students at Hutchins represents the widespread shift in learning culture in our community. Students are able to access their “work in progress” remotely as well as the online curriculum resources and their school email on Office365, Schoolbox and Microsoft Sharepoint portals. We see it as essential that students have internet connections at home to enable them to connect with our high speed bandwidth to access the Schools’ software. In addition, the School provides remote intranet access to quality digital curriculum content and networked subscription database and site licensing services.

BYOT program

BYOT Purchasing Portals

We are pleased to advise that BYOT purchasing portals are now live. These portals are provided by external vendors JB Hi-Fi and Mac1 as an option for parents for convenience, pricing and optional extras such as insurance. Please note, we are happy for parents to purchase BYOT devices from any supplier, so long as they meet our minimum specifications (listed in the table below).

JB Hi-Fi BYOT Portal - Login with code HUT2017; Apple and Windows devices; BYOT orders placed in September will not arrive in the local store until the first week of November 2017; please use the Contact Us button in the JB Hi-Fi portal if devices are needed sooner, e.g. for birthday presents.
Mac1 BYOT Portal - This portal is specifically for The Hutchins School and is for Apple devices.

BYOT Program rationale and benefits

As part of The Hutchins School Strategic Plan, the Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) program is supporting our blended learning curriculum model in Years 5–12 in 2016. There are minimum and recommended specifications for student devices being authenticated on the School’s computer network for internet and printing services.

The School continues to gather educational evidence of learning outcomes where a BYOT strategy enables students to maintain control of their personal device to use seamlessly between home and school. This evidence includes their capacity to have greater technical knowledge and familiarity, capabilities to differentiate their choice of tools, to have an interest in taking responsibility for their own learning and to have more opportunity to demonstrate safe, responsible and creative uses of digital technologies.

The part that online learning plays in our students’ lives to create, communicate and collaborate is explicitly addressed in teaching and learning at The Hutchins School. Students are shown how to manage and connect their own wireless-enabled devices securely to work on the School’s wireless network. Students have a generous monthly allocation of colour and black and white printing in the School’s libraries.

Online learning

Students learn how to use Rory our virtual learning environment from Schoolbox, choose their free and preferred cloud storage, such as OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive, and to use their free version of Microsoft Office 365 email effectively.

Using Office 365

Students can go to https://outlook.com/hutchins.tas.edu.au and then click “Office 365” in the top right hand corner of the page. On the next page click on the install now button and follow the prompts. If you have any questions, please ask the IT Team.

Hardware

To maintain the integrity of the teaching and program, no student will be disadvantaged in any way in relation to the availability of hardware. There will always be some school-owned laptops or tablets available for a day loan. Minimum operational specifications allow the development of ICT skills and capabilities, such as computational or coding skills, video and audio recording, desktop conferencing and collaboration, effective keyboarding input, image manipulation, music composition, web and graphic design functionality, programming or handwriting recognition, use of Asian language characters, and mind-mapping, prototyping, complex visual thinking, and 3D visualisation.

The Hutchins School will not endorse or mandate particular vendors’ products or brands but we do offer a minimum set of specifications to consider when purchasing a device locally or online for use at school. To work correctly, school funded-software applications and e-texts require a certain level of capacity and performance for any device. The care, maintenance and repair of the device rests with the student and family, and not with the School. Therefore, this may influence warranty and insurance choices.

Minimum specification and additional recommendations for BYOT devices
Operating system	Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or Mac OS X 10.9 or higher
Wireless	5GHz 802.11n
Size of screen	12″ – 15″
Storage capacity	120GB
Memory	4GB RAM
Battery life	6 hours
Keyboard	Attached keyboard not optional extra accessory
Accessories	Bag with shoulder strap or protective cover/case
Weight	Maximum weight: 2kg
Warranty	Extra warranty for accidental damage protection or home insurance covering accidental breakage or loss
Disk configuration	Solid State Drive (SSD) disk configuration

The device needs to be running licensed versions of all software to access the School’s enterprise level network. Unfortunately, Chromebooks are not supported on our network. A form factor recommended is the 13″ Ultrabook PC or the 13″ MacBook Air.

It is in the Early Learning Centre and the Centre for Excellence that teachers are using class sets of Apple iPads in their classrooms. Teachers in the Power of 9 program will continue to request a personalised device or a smart phone to take as a pocket device and camera on expeditions and challenges. Digital texts and publications can offset the cost to families of the personal or mobile learning device. The Hutchins School has two e-platforms called Overdrive and Wheelers for downloading e-texts, eBooks and audio-books which are supported for use on any laptop or smart device.

Further details will be available at:

Libguides – eBooks
Rory – Tech Support

Further information

For further information please contact Mrs Louise Bender, Director of Teaching and Learning on 03 6221 4307 or via email at louise.bender@hutchins.tas.edu.au. These details are provided in the Communiqué newsletter and updated regularly with expanded detail in student guides in the Rory Tech Support area online.