Engaging your Entrepreneurial Mindset

This term has again provided many opportunities for students in the Senior Learning Community to engage their Entrepreneurial Mindset in learning about innovations of the future. Students in senior IPT, with Mr Daren Mallett, have been studying the use of Virtual Reality headsets and are learning how to use code to create learning objects in 3D.

Doctor Kelvin Ross, a local entrepreneur, has connected with our college to collaborate on a community project investigating the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in protecting the lives of our native wildlife. This project, supported by Dreamworld, University of Queensland, Amazon web services and other local AI meetup groups, will continue in Term 3 and needs more student volunteers to train the AI algorithms to identify the different wildlife that inhabit our natural surroundings. The process of collecting images, categorising them, analysing the data and training the artificial intelligence will lead to more native animals being saved across our local region. Look out for more information early in Term 3.

These are only a few examples of the projects that are continually on offer to our students and it is just as important for our staff to keep learning about these new innovations as well. The Teaching in the 21st Century (T21C) Conference will be one such opportunity for staff to develop new tools and techniques to drive student learning through the 21st Century. This one day program is being hosted by our college on Thursday 13 July 2017 and will see approximately 200 educators from across South-East Queensland attend and share their learning through breakout sessions across the day.

The T21C Conference is being opened by the inspirational Taj Pabari who was recently announced as the 2017 Queensland Young Australian of the Year. Taj is an international tech entrepreneur and at the young age of just 18 has already built a global empire developing his business http://hellofiftysix.com/ to support his vision of educating 1 million students by the year 2020.

I look forward to sharing more of the successes, and learnings through failure, in Term 3 and hope everyone has a safe and well-rested break over the upcoming holiday period.

Mr Darren Rackemann
Director - Academic Performance and Innovation (SLC)