Avonside Girls’ High School

Opening sequence (background music): title of the strategy, Connected Ako: Digital and Data for Learning, appears with graphical images of a puna (spring). Transition to moving icons of punas that represent the 6 areas of mahi in the strategy.  

Question appears on the screen: How does building teachers’ digital skills spark imagination in learners? 

Transition to footage of the story. Interview style format mixed with background images of students and educational environments.  

- [Ginni Orr, elearning Integrator, Avonside Girls' High School ]  The world of digital technology is growing so fast and changing so quickly. It's really important for me to be able to tap in to a lot of different types of professional development. 

- [Zoe, Student, Avonside Girls' High School ] It's really beneficial to have teachers who know what they're doing because we can communicate with them and ask them questions. 

- The importance of having confident teachers to deliver digital technology is that realisation that we're not always the experts because we don't really know what the future is going to hold for a lot of our students. 

- [Ginni] It's really important for me to be able to sort of tap into lots of professional development to keep me aware of what's going on, and also just giving me different ideas of things that I can then take to students. 

- [Renee, Student, Avonside Girls' High School  ] Digital technology is used, like, in day-to-day life and just kind of the fact that you can create those things really inspires me. 

- [Ginni] My thing is trying to ignite some excitement around digital technology so our students can see it as a potential career pathway and somewhere where they can make a real difference to the world. 

- [Wilj Dekkers, PLD Facilitator, impactED] We talk a lot in education about developing lifelong learners with our students, but to develop lifelong learners, we need our teachers to also be lifelong learners and that's why upskilling and professional development continues to be so important for us as professionals. 

So it's important that we provide a range of teamwork, communication, critical thinking, collaborative skills. Those are the sort of skills we need to focus on. To allow them to work together in groups, to allow them to make choices for how they present their learning, how they share their learning. The Shark Tank event was a prime example of that here. 

- [Ginni] Last year we were involved with Shark Tank, which was an event that ImpactED put together. We had 10 teams at the event. 

- [Trinity, Student, Avonside Girls' High School  ] Yeah, when we got up on that stage, I just felt like, you know, excited, you know? We got to share our idea to this whole audience of people, you know? 

- [Ginni] They were put in a situation where they got given the very broad problem of how can we make school better using digital technology? At the Shark Tank event, they honed in on the issue of toilet use. 

- [Renee] What drove us to coming up with the idea is whenever we'd go to the bathroom, there'd always be people there and it would take us forever to find a stall. 

- [Zoe, Student, Avonside Girls' High School  ] We started off thinking of, like, an app because that's something based around what we use day to day. So most students would be able to know how to navigate through apps. 

- [Wilj] Students who would be able to use their app could track where a free cubicle was for them to use, but the discussion then moved on to, well, what could this transfer to in industry? 

- I think it's really important that industry connects with learners at this level. At the end of the day, I think it's a two-way relationship. We can help communicate the opportunities that we see going forward and what the workforce of the future needs to look like from an industry perspective. 

- [Wilj] We're at a point not just in education, but in industry, where they're beginning to meld more, which creates the most exciting opportunities for teachers to actually be able to grab. 

- [Simon Brown, Co-CEO Banqer, Ed Tech Industry Mentor] In terms of getting more women into tech, I think it's really important to focus on what that opportunity is and ensuring that we're providing that context so women and young girls have an understanding of what a future in tech could look like. 

- [Ginni] Digital technology is changing so fast, so it's really important as a teacher that we all keep up and that means that we can produce things for our students that really light the flame and get them thinking about what they can do in the future. 

Closing sequence (background music) with graphical image of the puna.  

Onscreen title appears: Connected Ako: living, learning and working in the digital world.   

Final screen shows logos of the education agencies. Top line showing agencies leading this work which will develop workplans based on the strategy: Ministry of Education (MoE), New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) and Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). Bottom line showing the broader education agencies who have contributed to the strategy and will use it to inform and guide their own plans and decisions: Education New Zealand (ENZ), Education Payroll Limited, Education Review Office (ERO), Network for Learning (N4L), Teaching Council, Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (Te Kura) and Research Education Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ)