Connected Learning

What is Connected Learning?

Connected learning is a way of utilising technology to enhance and increase learning and teaching opportunities for students and teachers. It can be used for professional learning and for classroom teaching. It is an aid that gives schools the potential to realise the often-stated goal of individualised learning as well as access to more advanced learning. It serves as a means of ability grouping, bringing together like-minded students regardless of their location.

For many gifted students this may mean that acceleration in one or more subjects is available with less concern about timetable clashes or small classes that are unable to run due to staffing stipulations.

Baulkham Hills High School will be working with some local public schools and with a variety of other high schools in Stage 6 courses later this year. A teacher from one of the schools will plan and run the lessons to the group of identified students. This is an enormous opportunity for asynchronous communication and interaction which is a major strength of online enrichment and extension.

Connected learning is conducted via a video-conferencing unit, a computer, cameras set up in each participating school and a digital whiteboard capable of transferring data from one location to the next.

We are all aware that authentic pedagogy requires higher order thinking, deep knowledge, substantive conversations and connections to the world beyond the classroom. Teachers who raise the bar and close the gap have a repertoire of strategies that require higher order thinking, that require students to be critical and present intellectually demanding work with a connection to the real world.

Baulkham Hills High School will also be one of only five schools in Western Sydney that will be working with the Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI) which runs and organises an enormous variety of online learning opportunities.

Online learning is a powerful learning model and when used effectively “lights intellectual fires, makes the world of learning and ideas self-propelling; that is, engenders in students the desire to know’ (Sarason).