CRN Summit: The classroom of 2020

CRN: What is Scollaborate?

Field: It's a 3D environment; students have avatars that represent them and they meet in virtual islands. It's completely protected, you can't leave the environment or come in if you don't have a police check. It's a very safe environment set up on four sectors of learning - cultural, social action, living or education.

Schools might run a debate with journalists about water issues in Kenya. So they have students from all around the world come on with their own avatars and sit and listen and it's very interactive.

You might ask the American students about water safety and they might say in San Diego it's not a problem, we have plenty of water. The Australian students might say we're having issues because we've been in drought so we can only wash our cars on Tuesday and Thursday.

Whereas the Kenyan kids would say that unless we go out and search for water every day we're going to die. So you get this different global understanding and perspective. But you can't just come in and talk about it. Adults probably could and they would find that really interesting and stimulating but students wouldn't. So how do I run that discussion and maintain the interest of students? And that's the learning. That's about teachers collaborating.

CRN: So you have to limit time on the program because of bandwidth constraints?

Field: We haven't got to the point where it's a problem because it's still so cutting edge that we haven't had many kids going on. But certainly if we had more than 60 - we've run a meeting of all those schools in Sydney a couple of years back, and that was pushing it.

Quinn: We saturated a 100Mbit feed on campus. It was full for three hours.

Field: If you had a school doing 300 then you're in serious trouble.

CRN: Let's look at the trends for front-end technology over the next couple of years. We've heard a lot about projectors and digital whiteboards; what else will we see?

Paxton: Firstly we want what MLC has, which is seamless [use of technology], so we have a situation where it's not an issue for teachers to engage with the technology that we have. We have digital whiteboards; we don't have a videoconferencing centre yet but that's something that's easily achieved. Staff have their laptops, we're wireless in most of the school. We have a lot of the peripherals to do whatever's possible, but it's about it being seamless, and that's my main concern. That it feels natural for teachers to transition in and out of technology, and to keep that balance between the teacher being effective with technology serving them rather than driving the agenda.

CRN: Digital whiteboards - you have them in every classroom?

Potter: All our classrooms are equipped with projectors and sound systems, and 40 percent of classes have interactive whiteboards.

CRN: How are the whiteboards being used by teachers; how comfortable are they with using them?

Paxton: Well the comment I made earlier holds true here. The full range of people who will just not even engage with the switch, may not have a laptop on their desk, to the teachers who might naturally assume that it's going to be part of their lesson every day. The challenge is to move that range of people forward.