WOMAN: My name's Debra Evans.
I'm the coordinator of teaching and learning for Years 8-10
at Mount Alvernia College Catholic girls secondary school
in Brisbane on the north side.
We have approximately 750 students at our school.
The New Zealandj
was initiated by me through my membership with MYSA.
I was able to make contact with the principal in a school in New Zealand.
In actual fact, he made contact with MYSA.
So through that I thought, "This is a perfect opportunity
"to engage in some professional development
"and to get some sort of a program happening
"where both teachers from Mount Alvernia College
"and teachers from Rotorua Intermediate School
"could make some connections."
I'm hoping at the meeting today
that we'll see some sharing of ideas across the ditch, so to speak.
Marg and Helen will share with the New Zealand teachers
where we've come in our learning, I suppose,
with our iCentre getting to where it is now
from where it was only six months ago.
I'm hoping also that the New Zealand teachers
will be able to share some of their experiences
and we'll be able to have a bit of a comparison
between the two schools
as to where we're at in our learning.
The sharing of programs and ideas
not only within a country, but across nations
is going to truly enhance our learning and your learning
and, hopefully, this is just the beginning
of sharing our programs
and working with each other in a collaborative way.
Leading up to making contact with the principal in Rotorua,
we emailed each other to see whether or not we liked the idea
and what our thoughts and ideas were about such an exchange,
then as we moved into the process we made phone contact,
had an extensive phone conversation
about the sorts of outcomes
that we would both think that an exchange such as this
would provide for our teachers.
Well, the project that we've been involved over a number of years,
and we think we've sort of got to that stage now
where we've transformed our library into an iCentre.
So that's been quite a journey.
When kids blog,
they're actually writing more than just in the classroom
because they want to do it
and some of the things that I've seen lately have just been amazing.
So I was really, really interested to see that blog...
-Their reflections... -They were fantastic. Yeah.
WOMAN: I went on a course
and they said they were actually using blogging for writing
and the skills were going up
because they're getting peer feedback,
but they enjoyed writing on the blog instead of writing on paper
so that was a real improvement.
So we sort of took it from there.
WOMAN 2: I think it's too
that they know the audience is going to be so much bigger
than if they were writing a story in a book,
that more people will access it
and so maybe they care more about what it's like.
You also mentioned this morning
about trying to go as paperless as possible in the classroom.
How did your staff deal with that?
That's only part of our school.
WOMAN 3: It's only 7 classes out of 24.
The rest of us are still heavily in books.
WOMAN 4: That's sort of a vision, I think.
Further along the track,
more classes will become e-learning classrooms.
The benefits of such an exchange -
for example, for me, going into a school
has always been the best professional development that I could experience.
I've been able to do that at conferences
where we have school visits at a conference perhaps.
So I've been able to go into schools in Australia
and if you're wanting to develop a program within your school
or even create spaces within your school
for various learning activities,
going and seeing what other people do and seeing that in action
is the best possible way to go about it
so I believe that for other teachers that they would feel the same.