Maths teacher Audrey Woodhouse demonstrates the depths that teachers can provide with Nazareth College’s new electronic whiteboards, including images of graphs that can be edited, moved, drawn on, and drawn from scratch.By Shaun Inguanzo
STUDENTS at Nazareth College are expected to make leaps and bounds in their education after the school took the same line and invested heavily in the cutting edge of educational technology.
The Noble Park secondary college’s $2.4 million year seven and eight complex has been four years in the making, from dream to reality, principal Greg Clarke said.
It holds a massive 164 ultra-fast, flat-screen computers; data projectors in each room, and a total of 12 leading-edge ‘Rolls Royce’ equivalent electronic whiteboards.
The two-storey complex was officially blessed and opened at the Catholic college last Sunday, and Mr Clarke took the Star on a tour of the new facility, including a demonstration of the electronic whiteboards by mathematics teacher Audrey Woodhouse.
Sitting alongside a conventional whiteboard – the standard learning interface in most classrooms – Nazareth College has taken a gigantic stride towards integrating information technology in the classroom with the new whiteboards, which offer a new dimension of learning interactivity.
The whiteboards are connected to a nearby computer, with the image projected directly onto it from a roof-mounted data projector.
Ms Woodhouse showed the Star how by using a special whiteboard marker, she could manipulate the projected image by drawing on the board – opening programs, accessing the Internet, and editing graphics and images in front of student in real-time, and just as easily as writing with a conventional whiteboard marker.
“This is the Rolls Royce of interactive whiteboards,” Mr Clarke said while watching the demonstration.
The technological challenge that now lies before the school is keeping up with the industry’s leaps and bounds, and future demands placed on current technology, which as history shows, can lose its edge as years pass.
Mr Clarke said it was the school’s objective to “make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology”, if it means students will have access to a better education, added it would remain the school’s challenge to maintain its newfound stance as a technological leader among colleges.
He said the new technology would enable students to become more engaged, offering them the chance to interact on a level conventional means of education can not allow.
The new facility is strictly aimed at years 7 and 8, but Mr Clarke said the whiteboards were being installed throughout the school, and plans for year 9 and 12 facilities were already underway.
The Year 7 and 8 Complex was entirely funded by the school, Mr Clarke said, with “borrowings and reserves”, and it is now working towards paying off what it owes.
The past six years have been one of growth for Nazareth, with a new Science, Performing Arts and Physical Education facilities, a new chapel built born out of a revitalised chapel transported from Neerim South, and works in progress on the Peace Garden – a place of respite for students where shady trees and furniture, built by the college’s Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning students, will generate the expected peaceful atmosphere.
Amid the development, Mr Clarke said the school’s vision was still engrained in its principles of Catholic faith.
“As a school, we would be saying that any student who comes through the school, we wish for them to graduate with faith in themselves, in God and to have confidence in themselves to go out and have a significant impact on the world.”
The year seven and eight complex was officially blessed by Association of Canonical Administrators of Nazareth College president, the Reverend Roger Ryan, and officially opened by Catholic Education director Susan Pascoe, of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
