Virtual boost to learning

The
Catholic Weekly
Online

Sydney
23 November 2003

Sydney welcomes its newest cardinal

Not to be missed

Help for Jenny, Luke

Take heart from teenagers

Caritas stays put

Irishtown revisited

The company they keep

Pregnant pause: Making room for the little person

Editorial: Young hopefuls

Letters: Quiet revolutionary

Conversation: Fr Michael Anghel, parish priest and grandfather of three - Priest made rite choice

Chance or Hand of God?

Presto, adagio, it’s art Caravaggio

The last retreat

Virtual boost to learning

‘Big kids’ meet ‘littlies’

Teacher, student in De La Salle double history win

Prize for playground plan

Gospel values alive in L’Arche

Virtual boost to learning

WAY OF THE FUTURE: The Bishop of Wagga Wagga, Bishop Gerard Hanna, is pictured with Daniel Finn and Ryley Menz at the launch of CASTnet at Holy Trinity Primary School, in Ashmont, Wagga, where the two 12-year-olds are in Year 6

More than 40,000 students across 100 schools in urban, regional and rural NSW are about to enter the electronic learning age with the launch of a world-class broadband and internet education initiative.

CASTnet will link schools in the Catholic dioceses of Wollongong, Wagga Wagga and Broken Bay (stretching from Sydney’s north shore to the Central Coast) in an electronic learning environment that will revolutionise their education.

CASTnet provides students from Kindergarten to Year 12 with an electronic virtual learning environment that delivers a wide range of quality resources via a high-speed private network, while giving students the opportunity to develop high-level computer skills.

This virtual environment also enables teachers to share resources and collaborate on teaching projects, and students to interact on lessons with students from other schools, as well as doing homework and ssessments on-line and accessing a variety of resource materials.

CASTnet has been developed over the past two years by the Catholic Education Office in Wollongong.

Greg Whitby, Wollongong Catholic Education Office director of schools, said schooling in the digital age was changing rapidly, and CASTnet put schools in the three dioceses in a position to be at the forefront of the revolution in e-learning.

“CASTnet is the first of its kind - a managed learning environment that creates the capacity for teachers to harness a range of technologies to provide students with new ways of learning electronically,” he says.

“It is a powerful tool for powerful learning.

“There are many advantages for the schools involved, not the least that CASTnet is a managed service so individual schools don’t have to worry about the computer hardware or software, which is particularly important for more isolated rural schools.”