Digital Outreach Keynote (Connections Video Conference Market Place)
“Connections” is the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) market place for advertising, coordinating and supporting learning opportunities without boundaries via video conference technology. Created by the Rural and Distance Education Unit within the NSW DEC, this facility has evolved a range of services for educators to open the world up to their students.
Internet Protocol Video conferencing has gained real traction in school education. The New South Wales Connected Classrooms Project has implemented 3,630 endpoints connecting over a million learners across its schools and TAFE networks.
This technology has begun to revolutionize accessibility for students and teachers providing amazing first source learning. Tens of thousands of students interactively participate in excursions to remote parts of the world with their experiences linked to curriculum requirements.
Content providers now sustain businesses selling their lessons and experiences to students across many time zones and in different languages. Institutions now truly deliver their charter for community accessibility.
Students both urban and rural/isolated have real choice in subjects and participate interactively with classmates dispersed across thousands of square kilometres.
Teachers seek out and engage in collaborations with colleagues in different cultural settings creating unique and authentic learning opportunities for their students.
This session will describe the Connections journey, the partnerships with technology vendors, institutional content providers and lessons learned evolving Connections to deliver global learning opportunities for NSW students.
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David Foley's Biography
David’s role as an educator and leader in educational technology has been informed by a career spanning art teacher, zoo educator, equity consultant and school principal. These roles and a passionate belief in equitable access to high quality education have driven David in his most challenging role as manager of NSW Rural and Distance Education Technology Unit.
David and his collaborators transformed isolated distance education by building the interactive video over satellite system to replace the radios of the Schools of The Air. This major project was immediately followed by the introduction of Internet Protocol video conferencing for remote rural and distance education schools providing "Access" to senior high school and TAFE programs from early 2003.
David and his team are part of the NSW Department and Communities’ support network for the $158M Connected Classrooms project. This project connects every NSW school and TAFE campus to high speed broadband and video conferencing and is now the largest video conference network in the world with in excess of 3,500 endpoints and usage growing beyond 6,000 endpoint hours per week.
The Connections program connecting classrooms to rich video conference excursions and events is David’s favourite element of his work. Connections is the first Australian educational market place linking students and teachers to high quality "outside" content providers, collaboration projects and events.
In 2010 David was awarded the NSW Premier’s Xstrata scholarship to undertake research in the United States. This research has opened up a new range of projects connecting classrooms across the world, generating student centred media, supporting the creation of new content providers and innovations in "extreme" video conferencing. |
