Green screens are an exciting and realistic addition to any digital classroom. Students become self-directed, creative learners through incorporating green screen technology into various curriculum areas eg: language, arts, history, performance, and physical education.
With an ipad, a green backdrop, and a simple green-screen app or movie editing software there are some great applications for core subject areas, as well as project-based learning opportunities. Green screen offers the opportunity for students to critically and creatively think through planning, editing and recreating learner outcomes in a challenging classroom environment.

Intellectual Stretch is about challenging and changing personal philosophies around learning.

We strive to enable students become more engaged to enhance their learning capacity and perceive discomfort as something essential for building on their existing knowledge and capabilities; to realise new meanings and understandings in what they are learning.

Intellectual Stretch – is ‘raising intellectual demand of the task at hand’
Bring our students to the ‘edge of their thinking’
Encouraging ‘self directed questioning’
Increase mind growth – develop the ‘psychological muscle’
Develop metacognitive strategies to ‘enhance the ability to enable students solve complex, unfamiliar and non-routine tasks.’

Professor Martin Westwell spoke eloquently recently at a Leading Learning in South Australia DfE Conference – “He very humorously discussed how a learning task can engage learners more with the ‘what if?’ type of question. He used the example of the alimentary canal. What is it? What does it do? and other ‘what’s the answer’ questions. What if there’s no answer at this point! The professor gave the example of a student who asked ‘what if there was no bumhole?’ You can imagine how this would have inspired noisy mirth but the question if acknowledged would generate excited speculation and the children would take intellectual flight in all directions!”

Intellectual stretch is a cognitive and emotionally adaptive approach to learning. It requires students to feel uncertain and slightly uncomfortable as they immerse themselves in a new expanded direction to their learning. Intellectual stretch does require a certain amount of struggle, along with a FAIL (first attempt at learning), risk assessment, and adventure approach. The benefits for undertaking this method is to support the development of the psychological muscle ‘our brain’ and memory to lead us into a self directed future.