Professional learning for lower primary teachers

My favourite hero is Dusty because he helps people.

I like River he helps people when they’re not sure about technology.

River is my favourite because she's a sugar glider and I think sugar gliders are cute.

My favourite is Billie because he’s a detective and he helps others.

If there’s something on the screen that you don’t know what it is, we need to ask an adult.

Hi, this is a Mini Beast store. What would you like to buy?

There’s a TV for you - You have a look at that TV.

Does that look like a good one to buy?

No. Why not?

Because it doesn't work

It doesn’t work - how do you know that?

Because of the reviews

Ah, the reviews tell you - ah ok.

We believe that play based learning is sort of an underpinning part of learning.

Just students and a teacher sharing knowledge at different levels of understanding throughout play.

So within everything that we do, whether it be literacy or numeracy or R.E., we always have a play foundation that comes into it

Developmentally, that's where they're at and that's what they need.

So we utilise the play with the learning and it just really gives this beautiful holistic experience to all of our students and what they need to help grow and develop and learn.

It'll say allows for conversation, development of pragmatic language and the more humanistic side of learning.

It gives students opportunity to learn at their level.

River helps us to show respect when we’re online.

So what we have here are some different emojis that people might use online.

And what I want you to think about is - are the emojis disrespectful?

Are they respectful?

Could they be both disrespectful - none of them might be neither disrespectful or respectful.

What's this one?

Laughing

Sometimes you can laugh with them

when you laugh at them...

So it’s like - can be both ways

Can be both ways.

I was really excited to have eSafety and Deakin work with us to help us understand what we need to be teaching these kids about the realm of safety, because they've just grown up in such a different world to what we all have.

I knew that e-Safety was an important part of students education.

Knowing that people are targeting younger students.

It seemed like a really important thing to add to our education.

We’ve got the lanyards and the lanyards talk about Billie the bilby, do you remember what Billie the bilby does?

Yeah, he teaches us to be safe online.

To be safe online.

And what does he help us to think about?

He helps us to think about how to in...

Investigate.

That's right.

So when you're wearing the lanyard, you now have to think really carefully about what you're buying.

There's so many things that they already know that absolutely blows my mind.

But it's about teaching them that in-depth, next level that they don't know...

and especially at this age where they're still developing the skills to be able to read and understand things.

How to teach that in a nice, structured manner.

This school is amazing at embedding the play-base across all the years at the primary school.

So they were very keen on understanding the digital component of digital play, and they started to embed a lot of these concepts within their play.

So initially we had a look at all the documentation that was surrounding each of the characters, just to see what would align with our two classroom spaces.

So I have the Foundation space, Marty has the 1/2’s.

The first one we looked at was being respectful online, and we chose that one because it aligned well with our ‘Respectful Relationships’ that we were doing across the school.

River the sugar glider fitted in well with... yeah, being respectful.

The second one we chose was Billie and being an investigator and looking for truth.

That one fitted in because of the growing access to artificial intelligence.

Being able to recognize when something is AI or when something is human-generated is a skill for them to be aware of and to develop.

It really worked and resonated with our kids, which was really cool.

What does Billie the bilby help us do?

Investigate!

So we look deeply at some of the things and find out what's real or not

Billie the bilby can help you find out a little more about why -

Yeah, so it helps you investigate to find out what the truth is.

You know what, it was actually quite guided by the kids because they, every now and again, would bring up “oh, I wish Dusty could help”

or like “oh, Dusty could help me figure out this thing”

And it was very unprompted. So it worked really well and flowed into the curriculum.

The play allows for them to engage with it over a longer period.

When it's a lesson, it's suddenly got a short shelf life because it's not student-driven.

The outcomes of this research are really starting to show how flexible teachers are, how they are able to take resources such as eSafety into their classrooms,

but also how they modify these to fit the context of their own children in their classes,

and just the way that the children themselves start to learn by using these resources.

Because they made a connection through play rather than, say, a standalone lesson, it's really organic, and it's not just a one term situation or a one lesson - it’s ongoing. It’s always.

I think all kids should learn about E-Safety

Because anything can happen when you're online.