Snapshots of Learning, Making, and Inquiry in my STEM Makerspace

  In 2015, I was inspired to establish our school makerspace as a result of my experiences and learning at the International Society for Technology Education Conference. As I have reflected in past posts, it took me years to understand that effective STEM programs were built on inquiry learning pedagogy, curriculum integration, and hand-on ‘maker’ […]

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Empowering girls’ learning & creativity through @Scratch #scratched

Over the course of the 2017 school year, my approach to teaching Scratch changed dramatically as I came to better understand how to support my girls’ learning and engagement with Scratch visual programming. As I have previously explored here and here, my students thrive on challenging, authentic visual programming tasks which focus on storytelling and game […]

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CEWA LEAD Awards for Excellence 2016

A few weeks ago, my library colleague and I accepted, on behalf of our school, a prestigious Catholic Education WA LEAD Award for Excellence in Learning. This award recognized our work in establishing our school’s makerspace and robotics program, which includes a research partnership with the Schools of Education and Engineering at Curtin University. Unfortunately, due to a […]

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Facing the Challenges of the new Digital Technologies Curriculum

As schools around Australia prepare for the implementation of the new Digital Technologies curriculum, teachers are starting to come to terms with some difficult new terminology, content, and skills. While Western Australian schools have been given two years to implement a slightly more user friendly version of the national Digital Technologies Curriculum, we are facing a number […]

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