“The Schoolbox Professional Services Team are able to help guide schools through every aspect of their transformational change. Get them involved as early as you can and plan for their involvement in big steps of change.”
—Kate Maccoll, St Andrew’s Catholic College
St Andrew’s Catholic College wanted to streamline the processes used within their Schoolbox instance across junior and senior curriculums and introduce staff to best practice in digital learning environments.
To do this, they approached our education consultants, the Schoolbox Professional Services Team (PST).
About St Andrew’s Catholic College
St Andrew’s developed objectives and goals for their use of Schoolbox and personalised it with the name, AndIE. However, before rolling out AndIE across the entire school from Prep to Year 12, St Andrew’s wanted to look at ways to enhance their implementation of their new education technology solution. The goal here was to ensure they could deliver a learning environment that would be highly engaging to students and build a sense of community.
We recently spoke with the Leader of E-learning and Innovation at St Andrew’s Catholic College, Kate Maccoll, about her experience with our Professional Services Team—this is her story.
The Challenge
To deliver a highly engaging and meaningful learning experience, St Andrew’s decided the use of Schoolbox needed to be consistent amongst all year levels—from Prep classes to Year 12 classes. So, they needed to develop a standardised practice or minimum requirements for their system to provide this consistency.
A common approach to class, course, and unit pages was therefore needed. However, St Andrew’s reached a roadblock as each year level has distinctly different teaching and learning needs.
Enter Schoolbox Professional Services Team
“Sometimes you just get more out of seeing someone face-to-face.”
St Andrew’s approached the education consultants at Schoolbox to assist with their roadblock. After an initial conversation about the needs of St Andrew’s, two members of the Professional Services Team from Schoolbox’s head office flew into the school for an in-depth consult.
Over the course of a three-day consult, PST members assisted St Andrew’s with the initial design and development of the school’s resource area and provided staff with professional learning opportunities.
“Conversations with the Professional Services Team constantly remind me of things that I have learned but not applied in the best manner, or suggest new ways of working that we had never considered.”
Educators themselves—members of the PST quickly built relationships with the staff members of St Andrew’s.
“Schools can be chaotic and complex places however the team members [of the Professional Services Team] that we see, always take the time to understand our context and help us use Schoolbox effectively within our context.”
Our consultants organised small group training sessions to address points of need and also held one-to-ones with year level leaders to get close to the goals and aspirations of the school. Through this process, our Professional Services Team was able to provide a targeted solution for St Andrew’s and assist the school to reach its goals.
“One of the greatest gains for staff has been to understand that some of the most effective use of technology in teaching and learning comes when the technology enables the learning rather than being the focus of the learning.”
The Result
First and foremost, a higher engagement level was achieved with staff— by the end of the consult, 100% of staff were using Schoolbox for at least one of their classes. This, of course, translates to 100% of students using Schoolbox.
“Quite honestly, they have saved me hours of work.”
St Andrew’s was also able to set minimum expectations based on best practice use of Schoolbox, so that a superior digital learning environment could be delivered for all year levels.
The greatest value? A transformational shift in the use of Schoolbox for junior teachers to achieve meaningful engagement in technology for the junior years.
“These people are superb. They have made all the difference to the success of our projects.”
