The ACT Education Directorate's online learning platforms are provided in a one-stop-shop portal, called 'The Digital Backpack'. This portal enables students to access their learning at school, at home, and through the growing network of publicly available Wi-Fi in the ACT, both on their Directorate issued netbooks and on their own devices.
Students can access The Digital Backpack by going to https://backpack.ed.act.edu.au/ or, if using a school issued Chromebook, the site will launch automatically.
G Suite for Education (GSFE) is a cloud-based education platform, offering online productivity tools for learning and classroom collaboration. GSFE provides students and teachers with unlimited cloud storage in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. G Suite also provides student emails, and other modern online learning tools (like Google Classroom). This is where we do all of our online learning.
Our Google Apps platform is hosted by Google, on a separate ACT public schools domain called 'act.edu.au'. This domain is only accessible by known users from ACT schools. Student accounts are also managed by our internal ACT Government identity systems. This means that our students are part of the Directorate's domain, where we have enhanced security controls to provide a safe and supported online learning environment.
OLIVER is the Library Management System, where students can search the library's physical collection, or access eBooks and audiobooks.
CLICKVIEW offers a collection of educational video resources.
CYBERSAFETY HELP provides students easy access to cyber safety information from the Cybersmart website.
There are also a number of other applications, in The Digital Backpack, that are available to students to access.
Q: Can parents have their own login to The Digital Backpack or any of the G Suite for Education?
A: No, The Digital Backpack and the programs within it are a secure Teacher/Student environment. You can ask any of your child's teachers to add you to the Classroom Guardian Summaries list, where you will receive a daily/weekly summary of activity on Google Classroom.