Hello  

Welcome to 2021!

We hope you enjoyed your holiday season and well deserved break.

Have you started planning for 2021? We’re here to help and have put together a checklist that will  get your 2021 Digital Technologies classes off to a flying start!

✅ Sign up for our New to Grok webinars 

We have put together a webinar for teachers new to Grok to help you or your colleagues get started.

There are six webinars over the coming weeks, where we’ll walk you through the Grok platform, showcase some new features and answer your questions.

Find the best session for you and your team and book in now (you don’t need to be an existing account holder or have students enrolled in our competitions or challenges to join us).

Explore all sessions on our eventbrite page.
 

✅ Sign up your school for 2021 

As announced last year, due to the funding for the DT Challenges coming to an end, there is now a cost associated with accessing our online resources hosted on Grok Learning (other than the Schools Cyber Security Challenges).   Details of our new pricing are set out here.

Our pricing system allows you to share Grok in other faculties or year levels. We provide a "tailored whole school site licence" based on your estimated usage. Once subscribed, you are able to encourage any other students and teachers in your school to try out Grok at no extra charge, during 2021. Contact us for a  tailored quote specific to your school's needs. As always, we are willing to assist if your school has budget constraints.

Reminder: if your school previously only used the DT Challenges without purchasing subscriptions, we are offering you a 50% discount for 2021 for students in years 5-8. Please contact us to arrange this discount.

✅ Check out the competition schedule

We run 4 competitions a year - one each term for Australian/NZ schools.

Competitions run for 4-5 weeks and teach students as they go along. The NCSS Challenge  runs in February and July and teaches students of all levels coding in Python. Web.Comp  runs in May and October and teachers students the fundamentals of HTML/CSS and web design.

Entry to competitions is included in our subscriptions. 

✅ Take a deep dive into the Australian Curriculum with our Unpacking the Curriculum resources 

Our Unpacking the Curriculum resource was created to help you understand the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies in detail.

Explore the ten key concepts embedded in the curriculum. With examples for different year levels, you can see how the key concepts progress and develop, and also find examples of how those concepts look in the classroom. 

Once you’ve explored the concepts you can download a free poster for your classroom to keep the concepts front of mind.

✅Brush up on your skills

Head to the ACA's Youtube channel for recordings of all our previous webinars, covering a wide variety of topics related to teaching Digital Technologies.

✅Explore new resources

If you haven't checked out the ACA’s Resources page, take a look. There are a tonne of unplugged activities (called ‘DT at Home’), downloadable card decks, posters, and blog posts to name a few. 

You’ll also find all of the Schools Cyber Security Challenges on the resources page. Primary students can explore the key ideas of cyber security in our new challenge aimed at year five and six students.

✅Join our Facebook group

Want to know the latest things happening with Grok Academy? Would you like support from fellow teachers? Join our Facebook group - Teaching Tech with ACA and Grok!

If you have any questions about signing up to Grok, learning pathways, curriculum mapping, or you just want to chat, send us an email!

Happy Coding!

Christie and Nicola

Grok Learning and ACA
 

     Call us: 02 8627 8686

     Drop us an email: help@aca.edu.au

     Join our Facebook group

     Following us on Twitter  

    Catch up on our Youtube channel

     Call us: 02 8627 8686

     Drop us an email: help@aca.edu.au