A classroom filled with eager children and a teacher scrawling lessons onto the chalkboard seems like a lifetime ago. Today’s classrooms are lit up by interactive boards and the ability to draw on a multitude of sources across the internet. Silkroad school has led the way, using Collaboro in an ingenious way to seamlessly integrate technology with the syllabus.
In the last decade, we’ve seen a remarkable leap in the way students digest educational content. There are a plethora of online educational tools in the market. A huge opportunity for teachers, parents and educational bodies to use technology to support students. However, it’s how we’re able to collate this information in conjunction with required learnings, that provides power to students and teachers alike.
Every year, specific themes emerge within subject curriculums. ‘Human Experience’
for instance, a current major focus in the English syllabus. Modern History, ‘Specific Moments In time’ where students explore political uprisings, elections, propaganda, or failures of leaders at a point in time. There are so many resources that we can give to students to inspire and educate but finding these key elements can be time-consuming.
Seeing the frustration of students and teachers alike in searching for specific resources, Andrew Kemp of Silkwood School, had an inspiring idea. “If we found that key moment for students in a book – it was simple. You just dog-eared the page, and that moment was frozen in time to go back to at any point”.
So how can we do this efficiently with online video?
Andrew reached out to Digital Asset Management Company, ‘Collaboro’, asking if he could provide his own media resources already compiled, in conjunction with Collaboro’s state-of-the-art metadata tagging to freeze these moments in time. The answer was yes, but to understand how truly powerful this really is – let’s delve into the regular day of a teacher or student trying to find complimenting material for their studies.
In 2018, students were asked to create an essay on understanding challenges of the human experience which has been shaped by a director’s use of mis-en-scène. As a student, you probably already have a few themes you’re particularly confident in exploring. You just need to find relevant material to draw on, to make the foundation of your argument. ‘Silkwood’ school makes this incredibly easy by allowing you to simply log into your ‘Collaboro’ homesite, search through your own educational materials, including movies, scenes from TV, recorded teacher lectures and video lessons. You simply funnel this information by searching, just like Google, ‘human experience’, ‘use of scenery’, or specific themes within the human experience, such as ‘mortality’, ‘politics’, or ‘religious faith’. In just a few clicks, a webpage is generated with all the scenes featuring these themes ready for student use supporting essay success.
Pretty clever huh? Not only is this smart and time saving for current students, but 10 years into the future, all materials will have already been tagged and ready for future use.
The library continues to create and develop an exceptional incredible pool of resources that support both future teachers and students alike. I for one, am jealous this didn’t exist when I went through High School. Spending countless hours looking for relevant materials that perfectly matched the exploration path I wanted to take, making my HSC experience more difficult than it could have been.
Collaboro and Silkwood launched in January 2019, we look forward to seeing the results enriching and improving your student results.
