Australian Schools Embrace Think.com

Dr. Peter Cuttance, director of the National Quality Schooling Framework (NQSF), shares his views on the successful adoption of Think.com across Australia. Dr. Cuttance is a professor at the University of Melbourne University and leads NQSF’s campaign to facilitate the integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into the everyday life of Australian classrooms to improve learning and academic results for all Australian students.

Q: Why did NQSF decide to use Think.com?

A: NQSF is a national initiative supporting educational innovation through the use of technology. Our focus is on how to engage kids in learning so we were looking for environments and strategies that reached students and motivated them to participate more in their own learning process. We evaluated many environments and tools and were very pleased to discover Think.com. It is one of the most advanced global Internet-based environments available to support collaborative learning communities for students and teachers, and it’s available free-of-charge to all schools in Australia.

We began a trial with 40 schools. The results of this trial supported our initial hypothesis that providing students with their own Web sites and email accounts does in fact motivate them to communicate more, ask questions of their peers, express their own views frequently, and become truly engaged learners. We know that children are social learners, so it makes sense that a community environment is effective. Think.com turns the tables on traditional learning by moving children from listeners and readers to making them authors and experts with the potential of a global audience for their work.

Q: How are NQSF schools using Think.com in their classrooms?

A: There’s much variation in the way Australian schools are using Think.com. Some teachers are using it as a project environment to support their lessons, while others are using the discussion forums to encourage collaboration between students across different classrooms or schools. Teachers are also using the protected email functionality to teach students 21st century correspondence skills.

Think.com is a great environment not only for children who are social engagers and are comfortable reaching out to their peers in the classroom or online, but also for timid students, who are more comfortable engaging in an online environment. No matter how teachers integrate Think.com into their lessons, Think.com becomes the medium through which the students are able to post their work, give and receive valuable feedback from peers, and share their ideas with others. It also allows group projects where students can all work together asynchronously in a shared space – and that’s all the more powerful as the geographic distances between students expands, which is very important in a country like Australia which has a very dispersed population.

Q: Can you talk a bit more about these teacher-led activities?

A: Let us look at literacy as an example. Schools use Think.com to support kids’ reading, writing, composition, comprehension, etc. Teachers do that mainly by engaging students in discussions with one another about their reading, having them write stories about the characters, and engage with one another about those stories on Think.com. Because of the environment and the fact that their work is being ‘published’ to the world, the students are more motivated to give their best effort to their work.

Another great aspect of Think.com is its ability to facilitate mentoring between students. One student might be an expert in a certain skill, such as an animation program the class is using, and she can use her Think.com pages to provide support to her peers. The level of confidence that students can gain from being a recognized expert by their peers is fantastic.

Q. Does NQSF lead any online projects?

A. Think.com provides NQSF with our own Web site that students and teachers can visit. We are then able to bring in outside experts and put them in “the Hotseat” for an hour to two. We ran a series of online workshop events bringing high-profile children’s authors online so that the kids were able to ask questions about their favorite stories and characters, what it’s like to be an author, and anything else they were curious about. The kids loved it! Another benefit to these celebrity projects is how much they engage the teachers. The more we can encourage teachers to be innovative in their curriculum, the more we can engage students.

The Boys Education project is one of the initiatives within the NQSF. It specifically looks at how schools can do a better job engaging boys in learning, and arises from national initiatives based on mounting evidence that boys are at risk for dropping out of school, etc. To address this initiative, we brought in a number of famous, high-profile, male figures such as DJ’s, sports stars, a well-known scientist, etc. and set up an open dialogue and online discussion using Think.com. During this dialogue, the students had a set amount of time to ask questions, thereby allowing the students to directly communicate with someone of importance to them. These sessions, as well as making school more interesting and relevant, naturally underscore the importance of writing and learning and how students can better express themselves.

Our latest venture is coming up in August 2005 when NQSF will host a Writers Festival. Students can participate in virtual Q&A sessions with authors from Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, and New Zealand. Authors will be available online during a one-hour timeslot on a specified date, or at various times during the entire month. Questions can be posted in advance of the scheduled session or during the actual live session.

Q: Do you lead any projects relating to current events?

A. One of the online events of which we are most proud is the Asian Tsunami discussion we held in March 2005. Our team lined up an amazing array of guests and experts including: Tim Costello, CEO World Vision Australia; Hon. David Ritchie, Australian Ambassador to Indonesia; Hon. Greg French, Australian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka; Dr Phil Cummins, Earthquake Hazard & Neotectonics at Geoscience Australia; along with people from the Australian Embassy in Bangkok, AusAID, Habitat for Humanity Australia, several relief volunteers, and one eyewitness Australian tourist.

We had over 350 students ask questions of the guest experts. Students were inquisitive about the emotional toll on the survivors and the volunteers, the process to deliver relief, scientific facts about the tsunami and earthquakes, and the effect on children in the region. This event allowed teachers to broaden their study of the catastrophe and provide their students with access to people who are on the ground in responding to the crisis. We also published lots of great content centrally for the teachers in the weeks leading up to the event, helping them to plan a full learning experience around the event.

Q: How have you set-up the NQSF Organization in Think.com?

A. We were convinced from the beginning that we needed to support both teachers and students to engage in Think.com effectively. Our activities were designed for this purpose, but we also set-up a series of communities of practice in the Organizations area of Think to facilitate interaction among teachers across schools. We have established numerous communities for teachers from groups of schools to share their experiences and strategies they have developed to improve student learning. We manage and facilitate these communities to maintain the engagement of their members. This is further supported through the use of teleconferencing.

Q: How are you promoting and supporting Think.com across Australia, and what advice would you give to other countries’ educational leaders?

A. We basically have undertaken a large-scale, direct promotion of Think.com to NQSF schools. We use a number of tools including linking to Think.com from the main NQSF website, providing training materials and guidance on the site, as well as sending email blasts to our teachers to highlight new projects. We’ve also developed a newsletter to publicize Think.com related-activities, with examples of how other teachers are using it in their curriculum. Additionally, we are looking for ways to broaden participation by promoting Think.com to schools outside of NQSF whenever and wherever we can.

We’ve found that the early-adopters of Think.com are the best advocates. We have created online communities of practice for teachers in Think.com – where the teachers can meet each other teachers online and share success stories. They receive encouragement and new ideas for using innovative teaching methods and incorporating technology. We also run 20-30 hands-on workshops a year to showcase the environment to new teachers.

For more information about Think.com and how it can help your school, visit our Web site at www.think.com.