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On Thursday 31st October (2019), Sydney Catholic Schools hosted a learning and collaboration event for school library staff that yielded fantastic results.
The professional development event, for schools using Softlink’s information and resource curating tool LearnPath, included presentations from Sydney Catholic School’s John O’Brien as well as Softlink’s LearnPath Solution Specialist, Joel Loveridge and Director of Marketing, Nikki Curtis.
The main event was a workshop, or ‘LearnPacathon’, where attendees worked in teams to create new guides for their LearnPath systems.
The two-and-a-half-hour workshop yielded 28 amazing guides on both curricular and extra-curricular topics.
Demonstrating that LearnPath can be used beyond the curriculum, two teams chose sporting topics (Olympic Swimming and Rugby League) for their guides.
The Olympic Swimming team produced six sub guides in total, with topics including Events, Famous Swimmers, History, Paralympics, Technology and even Swimming Scandals!
Incorporating quality video content, links to articles, web sites, books, biographies, research, and rules, the guides present an informative and engaging snapshot for students with an interest in swimming.
The Rugby League team also selected resources and content that could engage the most avid of young fans!
With a slider of relevant library books, Rugby League Rules, Institute of Sport and NRL Team links, as well as wellbeing and sports nutrition, Women’s Ruby League State of Origin, and women in Australian sport, the guide presents positive, inclusive resources for everyone.
Another team produced a series of Religion Teaching Resource guides that provide quality content to support faculty.
Sub guides included Activities, Lesson Planning, Prayer, Reference Material and Liturgy. The huge range of content formats and specific curation provides an excellent resource to save teachers time and ensure they have the best resources at their fingertips.
A team of two primary school teacher librarians created a series of Cybersafety guides for Primary.
With sub guides based on age group – the team finished early stage 1 and stage 1 with a structure set up for stages 2 and 3 – the guides provide a wonderful example of content that is both topic and age specific.
Another team – whose members were all very new to LearnPath - produced a Year 7 History: Aboriginal and Indigenous Peoples guide.
Under workshop time pressures this team of fabulous researchers and resource curators produced a great guide to assist teachers and students. They even learned some new tricks, like how to embed a relevant twitter feed into their guides.
Two teams focused their guides on literary topics, Shakespeare and the novel, An Artist of the Floating World.
The Shakespeare team built a guide structure that includes a sub guide on Shakespeare’s Life and another one on Shakespeare’s Works. They even found the time to populate content on two further title specific sub guides (Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet) under their Shakespeare’s Works sub guide.
The inspiring selection of resources includes a 360-degree tour view of the Globe Theatre, videos, relevant web content and some excellent refined search options.
The novel, An Artist of the Floating World, guide team produced a fabulous main guide that incorporates historical context, critical readings, book reviews, study guides, film trailers and more. They also produced two sub guides, About the Author and Course Work.
The series of guides provides a strong foundation for Year 12’s studying the book and creates a springboard their learning and success.
While the purpose of the day was practical learning and collaboration, we added a little bit of fun with a ‘best guides’ prize.
Each team presented their guide, or guides, and attendees voted on their favourite.
The overall high quality of the guides, as well as the varying topics, made selecting a winner very hard, in fact, every team received at least one vote!
The result was a tie between the Shakespeare and An Artist of the Floating World teams.
The focused time to produce guides and collaboration yielded great results. All guides were shared or made available to attendees who can use them in their own LearnPath systems (via a quick import).
The ‘LearnPacathon’ guides will also be reviewed and added to the free content available to all LearnPath users.
From the team at Softlink, a big thank you to Sydney Catholic School’s for hosting us, and LearnPath users from in and around Sydney.
Another big thank you to attendees for their enthusiasm and teamwork. We couldn’t help but include a little bit of feedback from attendees.
“The Pac-a-thon presented a good way to get hands on experience.”
“The hands-on practical component was very useful for getting a taste of what could be done and also developing the skills; having a little ‘competition’ also added a bit of fun, as well as helping to set a deadline to produce something.”
“Very useful - I am going away inspired to create more Guides”
Softlink hopes to coordinate more ‘LearnPacathons’ in the future!
Sydney Catholic Schools LearnPath case study
LearnPath video case study - St Benedict’s Catholic College
LearnPath comes with over 300 pre made guides
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