Centre for Innovation

Pioneering new technology with impact

Guided by it’s mission to be “pioneers that change education, by transforming teaching and learning as active leaders, and rethinking what is possible”, our Centre for Innovation faculty is continually challenging the status quo.

Key to this is the way in which the Centre uses impactful technology. Using the SAMR model – substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition – Linda Chong, Audrey Campbell and Nicole Lloyd are helping students and their fellow teaching staff to find novel and immersive uses for technology, at the same time fostering young problem-solvers and innovators.

Audrey Campbell says: “SMC has been intentional in allocating time for our Centre for Innovation faculty staff to explore how impactful technology can support teaching across the board, ensuring we are preparing our girls for the future world of work. Often students access this learning as a result of their current teacher’s personal passion for technology, but we have the resources not only to engage students through our own classes, but to provide tailored professional development to staff across SMC, so that they can make technology relevant to their own teaching.”

The faculty is engaged in a number of programmes currently across a wide range of subject areas. Green screens

Caitlin is a Year 13 student studying textiles and enrolled in SMC’s project based learning course Project X.

Linda Chong says: “Caitlin’s passion is clothes and she has been experimenting with green screens to promote her reversible blazer. Taking a green screen image and overlaying this with her colour palette, Caitlin has been able to mimic the colours of the fabrics she has selected for her clothing range, to create engaging content for Instagram.

“The ability to move from being a discerning consumer of information to a creator of compelling information is key to our teaching.” Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is the integration of digital information with the user’s environment in real time. Unlike virtual reality (VR), which creates a totally artificial environment, AR users experience a real-world environment overlaid with generated perceptual information.

AR is being applied to a range of learnings at SMC, including Year 7-8 mathematics, helping students to visualise, understand and estimate Commonwealth Games athletics records. In Year 3, it has been used to completely immerse girls underwater off the Kermadec Islands, northwest of Aotearoa, introducing them to marine life and the effects of pollution. Supported by the Blake Trust NZ, the headsets have opened the eyes of our students in wanting to become kaitiaki – guardians of the sea.

EPro8

SMC’S Engineering, Problem Solving and Innovation teams have grown from two teams in 2019, to seven in 2022, with our older students mentoring our younger teams.

EPro8 stretches students’ minds but is also stretching teachers’ professional development. Tasks require students to work cooperatively in groups to build complex structures within a set time limit, requiring collaboration, determination and a flexible mindset. The teachers leading this programme are learning alongside students in this space. 9