2017 has been a transformative year on the LEADing Lights project. Look at all we have accomplished together on Catholic Education Western Australia’s (CEWA) journey as a coherent learning organisation, becoming an adaptive education system!

Three hundred school leaders met in February around the Leaders’ Forum and reaffirmed the goal of delivering an intelligent, integrated learning platform for all students.

An exciting new program that is using the LEADing Lights platform to increase equity of access to learning for students across the state is the Virtual Schools Network (ViSN), launched in February and ready to deliver ten online Year 11 courses to 55 students starting in 2018. This innovative program also saves costs for schools requiring distance learning and is a first for CEWA.

The new CEWA credential and email address was received by staff in April, initiating a new era of same sign on and portability of accounts and files across schools and offices. The credential provides access to Office 365 and Claned. Office 365 gives all teachers access to purpose-built tools for learning like OneNote, Teams, Sway and Forms, as well as a huge repository of reputable digital education resources aligned to our curriculum standards. Teachers are now just one click away from each other.

Teachers quickly began using Claned to share and access professional learning and content resources produced by others in CEWA schools and offices. They have now created and shared 700 Claned courses holding 4300 resources that have been viewed 96,000 times.

As a celebration of the contribution of teachers to their communities, the EdVantages App launched in May. It is a mobile channel for teachers to learn their new credential, share resources and earn discounts and rewards from community businesses.

Keeping LEADing Lights burning brightly depends on the school IT leaders’ community, who gathered in August at the IT Leaders’ Forum to plan the Office 365 Rollout using a set of rich online resources.

Thanks to these IT leaders and CEWA’s IT partners across the state, 76,000 students were given access to Office 365 in September. Schools rapidly began to unlock the capabilities of Sway, OneNote and Teams. CEWA embraced Teams and is now one of the world’s leading users, increasing the capacity of teachers and schools to learn in Professional Learning Communities and to bring features we need to the product developers.

CEWA’s adoption of Office 365, including Teams, positions educators and leaders for creation, collaboration and communication with fewer boundaries. Nearly 100% of principals are proactively modelling the change as users of Office 365 applications. This builds confidence, connectivity and continuity across our system.

In Term 4, over 90 schools transferred their documents, learning assets, files, email and devices to the CEWA Office 365 cloud, signaling the arrival of a single username and password for multiple services, even when a student or staff member moves schools or jobs anywhere in CEWA.

With school and office staff, the LEADing Lights’ Team ran 187 PD events for over 2500 educators to help them experience how LEADing Lights can support and extend modern learning and pedagogy. These included roadshows, AmpEd Sessions, cluster groups, technical training and webinars.

What’s next?

• All schools that have transitioned to Office 365 will be ready to implement the Administration of Schools software – our new and improved system for finance, student administration and academic management.
• All schools will be able to sign into portals that provide teachers with powerful analytics and data driven visuals that will help teachers make effective teaching and learning decisions, powered by real-time information.

This is a challenging change. Challenging for schools and teams. But we know it’s worth the effort. It’s encouraging to see LEADing Lights making waves in the media too, check out this coverage:

• The Record, April
• CIO, June
• Channel Life, June
• Teams blog story, June
• Microsoft Education YouTube, October
• Microsoft Education Australia Media site with CEWA video, photos, stories, and paper, October
• Harvard Business Review story, October
• The Educator, 8 November
• The Educator, 22 November

We thank our school leaders and teachers for their leadership, innovation, and trust. Each time a school joins the CEWA platform, we become more connected, more communal and more complete… ultimately more adaptive in service to each student and community.

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