Our Journey
The Gardens School
Staff from the Department of Education travelled to New Zealand with a Social Ventures Australia (SVA) school tour where they saw the use of Hero at The Gardens School in Auckland.
Software Customisation Session
Glenys Williams, the Chief Operating Officer from Hero, was invited to run a software customisation session for representatives of our schools. We were highly motivated to engage with this software further.
Why Hero?
We decided to trial the Hero software to support our i See Learning project as it is able to facilitate our five project strategies: visible learning, community engagement, sustainability, student reflective practices and student agency.
Digital Learning Portfolio
Over time, students will post evidence of learning, annotate evidence and tag current learning goals.
Student Agency
Students are empowered to select the evidence they share, discuss their learning and self-select new learning goals to work on.
Real-Time Reporting
The regular assessment data and learning goal updates from teachers can drive ongoing live reporting to families.
Visible Learning
Regular evidence sharing, the learning goal functions and capability to host feedback to drive learning forward.
Community Engagement
Consistent messages to the community as well as facilitating rich family engagement with learning.
Streamlining Work
The platform hosts internal information, assessment data, student evidence of learning, learning goals, feedback and real-time reporting and automatically analyses many aspects.
Building the NSW Version
As Hero is a New Zealand based tool, our i See Learning project facilitator needed to work closely between in-school coordinators from the schools and the Hero team to build our NSW package. This involved reflecting and refining current school processes and systems to create:
- Internal pages and related tags
Internal pages included:
Behaviour
Wellbeing
Learning Support
Medical Incidents
Parent Contact
These pages are private to staff only and the tags that represented our diverse contexts also prompt automatic analysis in the system. Each page could then be customised further by individual schools to meet their school needs.
2. Assessments
The assessments that were created include:
Running records (2 versions)
Educheck: letter sounds and phonemic skills
L3: Vocabulary and Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words
Jolly Phonics: sounds and tricky words
Letters and Sounds program tracking tool
LIPI 1 & 2
Phonics Hero program tracking tool
Phonological Awareness Diagnostic
South Australian Spelling Test
Sutherland Phonological Awareness Test
PAT
SENA 1, 2, 3 & 4
NAPLAN
NCCD
3. Learning goals
We received permission from ACARA to use Version 3 of the Literacy and Numeracy Progressions as learning goals which were aligned with syllabus expectations and tracked against a five point scale in six month milestones. Literacy and Numeracy experts from each school collaboratively reworded the 'teacher speak' in the learning goals into student and parent friendly language. This is making learning accessible to all stakeholders.
4. Digital badges
For the areas of the Literacy and Numeracy Progressions that we were monitoring during the trial, we decided to create digital badges for the site. These would be awarded to students as recognition for the time and effort they utilised to complete a set of learning goals within a level of learning.
Some schools chose to also create a set of digital badges to represent their learner dispositions/qualities, in preparation for creating a set of levelled learning goals for these skills.
Customising Software
After developing the 'NSW Version' of the software, schools were supported to customise their individual sites through:
Individual weekly check-ins
Weekly professional learning sessions, recorded for staff unable to attend
Starting the Trial
Strategic Planning
In-school coordinators and school leaders collaboratively engaged in strategic planning for the trial of the Hero software in their schools. This day involved:
Engaging with school leaders in New Zealand and a representative from Hero
Reflecting on survey results
Time to plan within school groups
Time to provide feedback and reflect across school groups
Professional Learning
Staff across the CoS engaged with regular professional learning opportunities to build understanding of Hero and establish a community of practice across our network, including:
Principal conferences.
Individual school check in sessions.
Co-ordinator days to personalise generic professional learning packages.
Initial trial teacher training sessions, followed up by ongoing support through Spirals of Inquiry and coaching sessions.
Strategic planning days and collaboration days across CoS.
Optional live & pre-recorded professional learning sessions, run by the project facilitator, Hero representative or staff from New Zealand.
Networking opportunities for Aboriginal Education & Learning and Support teams.
'CoS Connect' collaborative and networking monthly sessions for co-ordinators & principals.
Newsletters with updates and links to professional learning.
Due to restrictions from Covid, most professional learning was run remotely through Zoom. There were some initial delays during the trial in 2020 as we awaited for safety and security checks so we could get permission to transfer student profile information into the software. This was eventually granted in October, with a process of informed consent approved.