Creative and Digital Technologies

The school recognises the importance placed on Digital Technologies..

Digital technology can make a substantial contribution to this improvement agenda by enriching education across all areas of Curriculum for Excellence. If used effectively and appropriately, digital technology can enhance learning and teaching, equip our children and young people with vital digital skills and crucially, it can lead to improved educational outcomes.

The key benefits are:

• Offering learners the opportunity to collaborate with their peers within the school. This will allow for more leadership of their learning.
• Reduction in workload by using appropriate digital assessments and digital submissions which can provide instant results and personalised feedback. This creates additional time for focusing on next steps and learner improvement.
• Utilise digital resources for the sharing of resources and tools for learners. This again reduces workload be eliminating the need to reproduce resources and creates additional time for next steps and improvement.
• Offering teachers and learners range of digital tools and services (apps, games, websites, etc.) and learners can choose the approach that best suits them.
• Educators can provide learners with access to a range of digital resources which allow ‘anytime/ anywhere learning’ and build a level of digital skills which will be vital in today’s digital world.
• Live video streaming and digital tools and services allow the potential for learners to study subjects via online distance learning.

Key targets for 2019/20:

• Pilot of Microsoft Teams to be introduced by the Digital Technologies Improvement Group. This will take place over a range of BGE courses and classes. The pilot will also look at several year groups.
• Creation of faculty Teams to support learners currently out with the classroom (pupils in support, long-term-absentees, and non-attending pupils)
• Introduction of whole faculty Teams structured by year group. This will allow for learning to continue in the event of a whole school closure.
• Training for teachers on using teams in the classroom. This will allow for further dialogue and feedback on how Teams can be used more effectively across a range of faculties

Our initial aim will be to work within the Improvement Group to refine the practical side of Microsoft Teams. We intend to investigate the different functions, advantages and restrictions, and pupil engagement with a digital classroom.