Technology and Digital Citizenship
Black Forest Primary School acknowledges that technology has profoundly changed our communities. In order to thrive in our society, students need to confidently demonstrate the General Capabilities of the Australian Curriculum. These include managing their own behaviour, being empathetic and socially aware, acting ethically, demonstrating respect and intercultural understanding, using literacy and numeracy in powerful ways, thinking critically and creatively and demonstrating confidence and proficiency in their safe and responsible use of digital technologies.
At Black Forest Primary School, we believe we have a responsibility to support students to develop “Digital Citizenship”, the skills and dispositions to become safe, responsible, critical and creative users of technology.
Students develop these dispositions through:
- Integration of digital technologies across learning areas
- Participation in Digital Citizenship and cyber-safety focused learning, including through Health and the Child Protection Curriculum, as well as a specific school-based Digital Citizenship program
- Learning based in the Black Forest Primary School Digital Citizenship Agreement
- Participation in challenge and extension opportunities such as weekly Code Clubs and Tech Girls Are Superheroes
- The option to participate in the school’s Chromebook “Bring Your Own Device” program.
Bring Your Own Device
Since 2014, all Black Forest Primary School students from Years 3-7 have had the option to purchase and bring their own Google Chromebook to support their learning. Chromebooks were selected as the best device for Black Forest Primary School because they:
- Are relatively inexpensive
- Are highly secure in an educational environment
- Are easily monitored and managed by school IT technicians
- Require minimal maintenance and update automatically
- Have a battery life of eight hours
- Google accounts can be accessed from any device with an internet connection – home PCs, laptops, phones, etc
- Provide access to the G Suite for Education apps, including Docs, Sheets, Slides and others
- Student work saves automatically to the cloud and can be accessed and worked on from any location with an internet access
- Are designed to support collaboration and communication on learning tasks
G Suite for Education is now used extensively across primary and secondary schools:
- All public schools in the ACT (43,000 students, with a rollout of almost 15,000 Chromebooks in 2018)
- Also used extensively in the private system (eg. Catholic Diocese of Parramatta – all 80 schools)
- Used in a number of local primary and secondary schools
Additional information about the Bring Your Own Device program can be accessed in the Parent Chromebook Handbook
Black Forest's Digital Citizenship Agreement
(PDF, 110KB)
Chromebook User Handbook
(Link to Google document)
