St. Hilda's School, an all-girls day/boarding school located in Queensland, Australia is setting the bar for K-12 schools worldwide. Using mobile learning, St. Hilda's is able to engage all of its stakeholders with a more personalized approach. Students are relating better, collaborating with one another and their instructors, and staying connected to their educational experience 24/7. St. Hilda's has dramatically increased student engagement while decreasing their carbon footprint with Blackboard Mobile Central, Blackboard Mobile Learn, and Blackboard Managed Hosting.

1. A Very Big Adventure:
750 girls, 850 iPads, Blackboard Mobile, and Managed Hosting
Geoff Powell
Director of Learning Technology
St Hilda’s School
Southport

2. A bit about me - last decade
• Director of Computing at Geelong Grammar (Vic)
• Exchange Fellow Deerfield Academy (Mass. USA)
• Principal Boarding School - Yasawan Islands Fiji
• Head of Unit and IT at Timbertop Campus (Vic)
• Director of Learning Technologies St Hilda’s
• iPad / laptop and BlackBoard LMS implementations

3. Was the move to iPads a
scary experience?
(before I talk about why and how we made the move,
…allow me to deviate for a few minutes)
In the presentation there was a film, here are some still shots

7. When do we stop enjoying the
adrenaline rush of fear?
How happy did the girls in the final
"scary movie" clip look?
ask a group of 14 year old girls what type of movie they want to
watch together…
…they always opt for scary ones!

8. What are they really scared of?
...kids can do some clever things

9. Teens use Google Earth to home in on cool pools for parties
The Age - June 20, 2008 - 8:36PM
Fancy a pool party but don't have a pool?
Teenagers in Britain are using internet satellite images to locate outdoor swimming and meet up
with buddies for late-night dips and parties.
The craze, known as dipping, involves people using pictures from Google Earth to identify homes
that have large outdoor pools, Britain's Telegraph newspaper reports. Once a cool pool is found,
teenagers use social networking sites including Facebook and Bebo to spread the word and meet
up for impromptu swims and parties.
Some residents had woken up to find youngsters using their pools. Others had come home from
work to find their pools full of beer cans, police said. To avoid arrest, party goers are often told to
turn up in costumes and bring bicycles so they can make a quick getaway.
One boastful group of dippers said party goers had held an event on Monday that saw 16 people
invade two pools near Bournemouth in Dorset. The group listed a specific meeting place for
between midnight and 3am and gave mobile telephone numbers for the organisers, the Telegraph
said.
Although there were only 16 confirmed participants at the event, invitations were sent to more than
500 users on Facebook. Police said they were telling pool owners to be on the guard.
"We would also warn prospective swimmers that using someone else's pool is trespassing and
therefore illegal," a spokesman said
AAP

10. I have to explain about where
I now live.
The Gold Coast is the Aussie
version of Miami

11. St Hilda’s Girl Response to
the article on “dipping”
“Why would you do that?
I don’t know anyone
without a pool”

12. Something to look at if you get bored
http://web.mac.com/art.sthildas
A retrospective of over 1000 pieces of
St Hilda’s girls art work WITH NAMES!
(Galleries named after students)

13. Sowing the seeds early

16. “To swear off making
mistakes is very easy…
…all you have to do is swear off
having ideas.”
*Leo Burnett

17. “Never be afraid to try
something new…
…remember, amateurs built
the ark. Professionals built
the Titanic.”
*Groucho Marx

18. Our Bb Evolution from 2007 - 2011
2007 – 2009 hosted Bb locally
2010 moved to full Bb Hosted Environment
2011 moved to iPads, Mobile Learn plus
the Mobile Central iPhone App

19. Lets look at Mobile Central
iStHildas - launched on July 18th

29. Lets look at our Bb Hosting

30. What did we do over the first 2 years that
led to us needing a hosted solution?
We developed a culture where students and parents
expected things to be posted on Blackboard.
When parents ring asking for the Maths to be posted
on Blackboard, you have turned a corner.
But then things became a bit too successful
Bandwidth began to kill us
Our core business is education we are not an ISP
plus we have 120 boarders

31. That is when I discovered hosting
At the Aussie Bb Summit in 2009 in Brisbane
two significant events for St Hilda’s
I saw Harry’s session on hosted solutions
I met Kayvon and Aaron from Mobile Learn
Those two events combined serendipitously to become central to
our planning for 2011
I went back and “did the sums”
Looked at the ramifications of Bb use increasing beyond what we
were currently generating

32. Swine Flu actually helped us!
Head of School wanted a plan if we had to close
The swine flu event led to solid review of our online learning
policy development
Could we run the school if we have to close the doors?
Could 1000 users access our locally hosted Bb server
simultaneously? In short the answer was no.
We had to plan for growth and that meant $$$ spent
somewhere

33. Hosting Cost Benefit
Analysis
It costs a bit of money, but it does offset
substantially against current outlays.
No ongoing hardware costs
No need for server replacements, this saves $$$
IT staff can be redeployed or not replaced
We had a DB administrator that left for a better offer, we left it open
24/7/365 is a reality
Pre hosting, if we went down on the Sat afternoon, it was down till
Mon AM we could not afford to have our staff on call 24/7.

34. Hosting Cost Benefit
Analysis
Load balancing during busy times
I doubt we even blip the switches of the data centre, but offsite access
is as fast as the connection you have allows. 95%+ of our students
have broadband. How to you put a price on your student’s time?
No more planning upgrades around term
breaks
Upgrades were tasks that took IT staff time planning and implementing
at the expense of other tasks. We moved from 8.0 to 9.0 during
hosting with zero effort. We moved to 9.1 in Jan this year with an
email request.
No more backup worries
No need for the expense of backup hardware/media, nor the continual

35. Bb, Mobile Learn & iPads
We have been developing our online curriculum via
Blackboard for some 5 years
We moved to a fully hosted environment in 2010
• With the advent of the iPad program in 2011 we adopted the
Mobile Learn Blackboard App
• We also moved towards iBook / ePub distribution
• Lets look at our students quantifiable levels of engagement
with blackboard since 2009, and what Mobile Learn has done
for student engagement

36. iPads from yr 5-12 in 2011
I predicted Bb traffic would double
We were confident our decision to
move to hosting would allow us
the headroom for success in 2011

37. Mobile Learn & iPads for the environment
• Last year 4.6 million A4 page prints
• Aim for 2011 down by 1 million copies
• Aim for 2012 down by another million
• iPads and Bb Mobile are key to this

38. We have data to show that
Bb Moblie and Hosting has
significantly increased student
engagement

39. Bb Summit 2009

40. Bb Summit 2010
Our move to hosting
greatly increased traffic Students spending
much more time in
the Bb courses

41. Bb World 2011
Massive increase in traffic

42. Bb 2010 vs 2011
2011
2010 weekly average = 2011 holiday hits
2010

43. Our school day

44. 800% lift in traffic
Y axis 200 to 1600
Our school day

45. Year 10 English 2010 vs 2011

49. 10 fold increase
in traffic
relative to 2010
Weekend traffic increased from 25 hits on Sunday in 2010 to 1250 in 2011

50. How do 10 year olds use Bb
Mobile Learn?
Why not have them show you.

51. The film that was embedded in this presentation can
be found at the St Hilda's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/sthildastube#p/c/40F3251B6B550F01/0/J7gskajsnkI
or
http://youtu.be/J7gskajsnkI
or
Go to http://sthildas.qld.edu.au
Then click on St Hilda's Tube and then click the iPad playlist

52. How does pre-prep use Bb and Mobile
Learn?
They don't, but Mum and Dad do.

60. How has our iBook strategy developed?
How is this carbon friendly?
By distributing PDF, Doc, PPT and ePub format to our
iPads via Bb, we are well on track to taking over a million
pages per year out of our print budget.
Over two years, if successful, we are near cost neutral on
hosting.

61. During the presentation, the following use of
school generated iBooks was demonstrated live.
For the purposes of this edited version I have
supplied screen shots of the process.
Hopefully this illustrates what we are doing.

64. We moved all 60 poems into a single ePub via a Pages export.
We are really pleased that the new Mobile Learn update will read and open
ePub formats directly into iBook Libraries.
Prior to iBooks, we had 60 PDFs of war poems loaded into Bb Learn

65. The girls opened these individually as they needed them.

66. Rather than access poems individually as required, students now
download the ePub War Poem Anthology into iBooks.
What are the advantages?
We cut down network traffic, and have access to the full range of iBook
features.
Bb Mobile Learn is the perfect distribution portal for us to achieve this.

68. This is a selection of poems in iBook format.
Our year 9s call these "books on steroids"

69. You get full access to a dictionary, great for ESL students

70. You can highlight and leave yourself notes.

72. Notes are date stamped, and full sets of notes can be
emailed to the staff member.

75. You can embed video and audio, so students can both read
and hear the war protest songs being studied.

76. This is our year 8 Elective Subject Selection Handbook

77. It has examples of work shown by last years students.
The idea is to help students make more informed decisions

78. Where are we heading with this?
Our aim is to decrease printing by 1 million A4 sheets a year
Moving our existing publications to this format and distributing via
Mobile Learn is key to this.
The year 8 elective book alone saved over 7500 A4 pages
Multiply this across the school, it adds up to big savings
We also have deals with our publishers so our Maths, Science, Business
and a number of English books are now on the iPad. This is for all years
7-12. It has taken several kilograms out of the backpack, and a
substantial amount off the booklist.
You need a distribution model. Bb Mobile Learn will do this for us

79. What has influenced my thinking so
heavily on all of this?
We want to give a Tertiary (college) experience
That is why we put in place
Managed Hosting
Mobile Central
Mobile Learn
Essential to this we developed a BYOD iPad model
BYOD = Bring Your Own Device, the student is fully responsible
Everytime I come to a conference like this, I become more determined that what we
offer our girls is not a watered down version of a quality Tertiary (College) level program.
We don't have tertiary budgets, but we can have the same desire for quality outcomes.
K-12 is, I feel, the building block of a sound education. So it needs access to tertiary level
quality resources. That is what we are determined to put in place.

80. Thank You
Questions?