copy of email (with permission) from Insool (Lee) McMillan Co-ordinator of IT Citipointe Christian College to Chris Smith (Shamblesguru) in April 2011 following a workshop in Brisbane, Australia TOPIC: Citipointe Christian College iPad and iPhone App Hi Chris First of all thank you so much for a great session with many useful tools. I learnt a lot and enjoyed it. About our school app ‘Citipointe Christian College app’, it was developed by a Year 9 student Jordan Hankins last year after discovering his great talent and passion in computer programming. The first version (current version) is very basic and primitive but Jordan is currently improving it to include other functions like school events calendar, assessment recordings, college news as RSS feed, college photos and improved time table. The second version will be released at end of this term. The significance of this app is that it has changed the culture of the college in terms of mobile phone usage within the school. Until last year, students were not allowed to have or use mobile phones in class. This year after my plea with the launch of the school app on the iTunes store (2nd high school in Australia to have a school app on the iTunes app store), the school has accepted to allow Year 11 and 12 students to use the app instead of the school diary and lead to further use of smart phones in class under teachers’ discretions. This has been also prepared through providing ‘Digital Citizenship’ courses which taught students how to use technology responsively rather than just banning or limiting it. So far, the new mobile phone use policy has been implemented successfully and students love it. They look up definitions immediately on their phone rather than logging on to computers and waiting for ages, take notes on their phones, carry most of their texts on their iPads, use scientific calculators, read bible, access dictionaries and more! As a result of the initial school app development and its success in making changes in the classrooms, iPhone application development is now becoming a part of the IT course curriculum and in the future we can hopefully offer Android application development as well. This means that the tools you have mentioned today (Brisbane workshop http://australiaworkshops.com ) can be utilised more effectively in and outside the classrooms! Hopefully this can be useful information for you and you can inspire other schools to follow similar steps of allowing and teaching the students to use technology responsively at school instead of merely banning the use of mobile devices in schools including mobile phones. Kind regards, Insool (Lee) McMillan Co-ordinator of IT Citipointe Christian College email: insoolL@brisbane.coc.edu.au ph: (07) 3347 5899 fax: (07) 3347 5900 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer Warning - This email transmission may contain confidential information. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify us immediately on +61 7 3347 5899 or by reply email to the sender. You must destroy the email immediately and not use, copy, distribute or disclose the contents. If you believe you received this message as a result of SPAM, please forward the entire message to mail@brisbane.coc.edu.au. This email contains information that represents the views and opinions of the author and therefore does not necessarily reflect those of Citipointe Christian College Brisbane. ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1325 / Virus Database: 1500/3601 - Release Date: 04/27/11