From the Desk of DLTV’s President
Ben Gallagher

Lockdown 5.0... WOW!!! How things change and so suddenly.

Just when we all thought it was safe to back go in the water, another quickly applied lockdown with no real certainty of when it will end. At my school we had just returned from holidays and were looking forward to a relatively “normal” term. It made me realise how as schools we should be forward planning for lockdowns to occur and not take things for granted.

At DLTV we were also trying to return to Face to Face PL, as we consider this the gold standard for us. As you will see we have had to postpone several events (apologies to those teachers who had already booked). Our strategy this term is to review our position on our workshops each fortnight. The intention is to still run some even if we have small numbers, but we will need to be flexible. Please feel free to confidently book for events, you will be contacted personally if they are postponed and be alerted to the next date.

With that in mind the ability to swing to virtual events becomes increasingly important. We had tapered off our webinars so we could put our energy into Face to Face workshops. However, that said our small team do have some virtual content which we will be rolling our soon. This is mainly due to the hard work of Nathan Alison our PL coordinator. We have also been extremely lucky to be supported by Catherine Newington from The Australian Computing Society.

Coming up we have the following;

Some Python and JavaScript coding workshops and Object-oriented programming resources, both face to face and virtual. This is courtesy of a successful Google grant.

We have created DigiTech Virtual workshops as part of our Strategic Partnership Commitments. Again, these will be published soon and will sometimes replace and also supplement some of our Face to Face content.

We have created content focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its connections to the secondary Digital Technologies curriculum, to be delivered along with a series of webinars this term. These have been produced courtesy of some funding we received from Education Services Australia.

We are also working on a DigiTech Careers Project which has been funded by the Department and is managed by The Career Education Association of Victoria. All being well this should be ready to roll out for Term Four.

As always please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need a hand in these troubling times

Cheers Ben

Australian Curriculum Review: Report on members' contributions

Many of our members participated in our online webinar and contributed via email and our google form. It was an exciting and collegiate time for us. We have now passed on this important feedback to ACARA.

We look forward to seeing the Australian Digital Technologies and Digital Literacies curriculum documents when the process is complete.

For those who would like to view our response, it can be found at https://bit.ly/2UtQefE