NBN Co Blog

In my 15 years as a school teacher, I've witnessed many changes to the way we teach in the classroom.

The most profound transformation has been the emergence of digital technology and the availability of high speed, reliable broadband that has empowered PLC Armidale to expand our students' learning opportunities far beyond the four walls of the classroom.

Students now have the opportunity to learn directly from field experts like Dr Bridget Murphy of University of NSW, pictured above giving a lesson in medical pathology using broadband over the NBN.

They can also interact and collaborate with other students who could be based anywhere in Australia, or the world, all without setting foot outside of our school campus in regional NSW.

Jonathan Roberts came up with the idea for a museum robot during a chance encounter with a curator in the lunch queue at a museum cafeteria.

The pair started talking about how museums could make use of robotics, "and by the end of the lunch queue I'd come up with a concept", says Roberts, Research Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory in CSIRO's ICT Centre.

The result of that conversation in May 2010 is the museum robot launched this monthat the National Museum of Australia.

The robot allows people all over Australia to experience a visit to the museum through images and sounds sent from the robot to their homes or schools via high speed broadband connections such as those the National Broadband Network provides the infrastructure for.

Students can choose what they look at and ask questions of the educator - or guide - who moves around the museum with the robot.

At the launch students from Townsville in North Queensland and Kiama south of Sydney were given a tour of the museum. Among other exhibits they were shown Pharlap's heart, and in a demonstration of the robot's capabilities, the tour seamlessly switched to Melbourne Museum so the students could also see the famous racehorse's skin and ask questions of the museum's Pharlap expert and curator Michael Reason.

Do we underestimate today's high school students? As time goes by and the evidence walks in the doors of the Powerhouse Museum for our Mars Yard project, I am increasingly convinced that the Years 9 and 10 students we deal with are not only different learners because of the increasingly interconnected world, but they bring with them a mostly unleashed sophistication that is hard to miss.

We are aiming to explore this capability with a new broadband-enabled education project over the next few years in which students will remotely connect to the Mars Yard to carry out their Mars missions.

The Mars Yard at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum is a highly-detailed simulation of the surface of the planet, with a robotics lab, including a battery operated, six-wheeled, all-terrain vehicle the same style and a little bit smaller than than NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity, which has been on Mars since 2004.

Between June and September last year, sixty teachers from three NBN enabled schools, Willunga High School, PLC Armidale and Armidale TAFE, participated in the 21st Century Teaching Strategies for a Highly Connected World pilot project.

Over the course of ten weeks these teachers explored "what is now possible for our students and our classrooms in a NBN connected world?"

What did these teachers find? Read more to find out.

ARIA award-winning musician Tim Freedman has joined forces with students at a Melbourne school to trial an app to enable school children to write and record their own music and stream video of their performances to iPads.