NEWSLETTER | Issue 32 5
News from the Australian Community
Overview: EduTECH Conference 2016
by Georgina Johnston, NSIP
NSIP was one of over 200 exhibitors at the EduTECH conference in Brisbane on the 30 th and 31 st May. The conference was a great opportunity for NSIP to promote SIF, the Access 4 Learning Community and work NSIP is doing in privacy, data standards, integration support and data mobility to over 6500 attendees representing all aspects of the education industry – educators, school leaders, technology directors, policy makers and solution providers.
Presentations: NSIP sponsored two presentations during the conference. The first was by NSIP Staff member Matt Farmer( Program Lead – Products and Market Engagement) launching the Learning Services Architecture to the K- 12 IT Managers stream. The Learning Services Architecture( LSA) is an agreed national approach to making information systems that need to share data about learners in schools work together, effectively and safely. The benefits of the LSA to schools include a unified view of information about a learner, reduced administrative burden for teachers, and procurement flexibility and choice. The benefits for school systems include consistent, wellmanaged school data, enabling rich decision-support and analytics, and consistent approaches to managing information privacy and duty-of-care risks. The benefits to education solution providers include a nationally consistent integration interface, market choice by schools, and nationally agreed school business use cases – common ways of doing core school processes that use student data. Judging by the number of attendees that come to the NSIP stand after the presentation to ask for further information, Matt’ s presentation, and the LSA were well received.
The second presentation was a panel discussion on the topic of“ Making a Difference with Data”. With the growing focus on individualised learning, the increasing use of online learning and assessment, and the demand for evidence based decision making, school leaders need integrated information systems that support learners, empower teachers and optimise parent communication. Most importantly these systems need to help teachers and parents avoid drowning in the deluge of education data and make changes that lead to improved student outcomes. The panel which was led by Mark Huxley, CIO of the Australian Capital Territory Education and Training Directorate included Andrew Blair and Tim O’ Leary from Wesley College, Adam Kuss, Director of Student Achievement Year 7 & 8 at Cavendish Road High School in Brisbane, Warren Armitage, CIO at Brisbane Catholic Education, and Matt Farmer from NSIP. The panel discussed a range of strategies to harness data and analytical tools to make a difference in the classroom.
NSIP Interoperability Challenge & Tour: NSIP held the annual Interoperability Challenge in the lead up to the conference. The challenge asked vendors to identity a problem their product set out to solve, how they knew it was a problem, how their product solves the problem and how their product works with other products to ensure that learners, teachers, parents and decision makers always have access to the information they need.
The‘ prize’ was a four minute pitch to all the CIOs of the states and territories and other key stakeholders in the education industry. This year there were thirteen successful vendors. The vendors and products were:
� Annikken Pte Ltd – Annikken Andee � Behavioural Reading – Behavioural
Reading
� Be Social. Be Smart – Social Media Education Initiatives- Positive Posting Programs
� Campion Education – Campion Digital Access Solutions � CloudeNotes- CloudeNotes � Datacom Education- Literatu � Google – Google for Education � Internet Safe Training( iness) –
Internet Safe Training � Sentral Education – Sentral School and Student Management Software � SEQTA – SEQTA Suite � Texthelp – The Read & Write Suite � uTeachMe- uEducateUs � Yellow Edge / Rosetta Stone – Rosetta Stone Language Learning Solutions
Vendors Forum Breakfast: Over 40 vendors attended the vendor’ s forum breakfast on the second day of the conference. The purpose of the forum was for vendors to share stories of their experiences in the market place, hear from some of the CIOs about what’ s happening in their jurisdictions and be updated on what NSIP is working on and how they can support these initiatives and benefit from them.