Beyond the Canvas: Darren Ponman

Hi. Welcome to Beyond the Canvas, where we talk about the people and the stories shaping education. I'm Gems, the regional director for K-12 here at Instructure working across APAC. And it's really great to have one of my faves, Darren Ponman. Over to you, Darren. Morning.

I'd like to start by, acknowledging that I'm coming to you from the Awabakal and Worimi lands and, pay my respects to elders past and present and, certainly any, First Nations people joining us today. Thanks, Darren. And can you tell us a little bit about your role and what you're doing just by way of introduction, just so as our viewers know who you are and so we can get to know you better? Yeah. I can. I'm, deputy principal at Hunter School of the Performing Arts.

We're a hundred percent selective performing arts high school. in the Hunter region. I've been principal here for the last couple of years, which was quite nice, but our deputy before that for a few years as well. We've been using Canvas here and building it for a long time. We were one of the first, if not the first, to jump on board in this region in a wider area.

So I have been using it for a long time, and I have been an LMS administrator for a much longer than that as well working at a variety of fairly unique sites. I've been, deputy campus leader at Big Picture Campus and set up a Big Picture Campus and then at other pretty big high schools as well, big in terms of student numbers and set up things like Moodle. And, yeah, I have been in the LMS space for a long time. Fantastic. So it sounds like, you know, you kind of have education in your blood, so to speak.

Yes. I I think I'd that's probably fair to say. Although I didn't come straight out of school and and go into teaching, I retrained into teaching relatively later in in life. I from school, I went into, I'd well, I've done got a few other trades, Worked as a musician and still work as a musician, but worked, more professionally in in that industry and as a recording engineer and also, landscape architecture and, electronics technician and quite a few different things that, brought my passion and curiosity leaving school, and which has been a big driver in how I approach education. Quite a few of the fields that I worked in, I watched evolve and change radically to the point where I I learned a whole new skill set to keep up with them.

And then, yeah, when my daughter was born, my work hours were quite all over the place as a musician and and in studios. And so I thought I'm not gonna see this kid very often if I don't do something about these work hours. And particularly technology and design teaching ticked all the boxes for exactly what I like doing and had been teaching studio courses previously. So went and retrained into teaching and haven't looked back. I've I've been very passionate about it for the last twenty years.

Well, thank you for being here, and thank you for being a Canvas customer. You know, you are doing some really phenomenal things at your school, which we'll touch on a little bit later. But you sort of talked about, you know, how you've had this very wide array of careers. And I I think that's really important to touch on as well because, you know a career is not linear and so for all of our young people that may be watching this you know it's hey you're not just going to go straight out of school and step into the thing that you love there's probably a minute number that do that but what actually drives you and I think that that's really important for me because I wanna understand a little bit about you and what sets your world on fire and how we sort of come into that story and how we support you in what drives you. Probably creativity in a word throughout probably everything that I've done, creativity and design has been a focus regardless of the field.

And, you know, hand in hand with that is problem solving, looking at, challenges. I really get a kick out of designing ways that we can either solve the challenges or improve whatever the situation is. I am very motivated by design and and creativity. I know a lot of people sort of jump straight to, oh, well, that's painting or it's writing music or it's writing a novel or, Certainly, once I got into, education, it became really clear that, you can stretch your creative muscles in just about any field that you go into if you if you go about it the right way. I think you touched on a really great point there as well is, you know, creativity kind of breeds into the tapestry as well.

Right? Like, for me, sort of I didn't expect that I would be working here at a tech company because back when I went to school, it just wasn't an option. Right? And I think the way that tech really underpins everything that we do today and how we're setting our kids up for success as well as the teachers up for success, it's kind of like you don't pick up your mobile phone and you go, oh, I'm using iOS eight point two nine whatever. You're just, hey. I'm using a piece of software that is gonna support my everyday tasks and things that I have to do. And I think that's the way that I like to see Canvas, you know, and how we fit into an educational organization and how we really provide that free will to be as creative as you would like.

But then also how we support different students and meet students and teachers where they're at in their part of their journey. Can you talk to me a little bit about sort of how you're applying that creativity, but also sort of working towards leveraging Canvas to really build out that pathological approach to really achieve those great student outcomes that you guys are seeing at your school? Yeah. Absolutely. As I said, I have been administering and leading, LMS design and and implementation for well, since I started my career pretty pretty quickly. I recognized that LMS is a well set up and well implemented LMS, and there is a clear distinction, an amazing way to facilitate not just great learning, the most important aspects of education, which are relationship building, which are inspiring students because Collaboration.

Exactly. Right. If you've got the LMS set up really well, then you're undoubtedly providing and and setting up an environment where where teachers have more time to do the really important stuff, the human stuff, getting to know kids and talking to kids and inspiring kids and and sharing their passion and and whatnot. Obviously, like, you know, in in most classrooms, we have a wide variety of of students that we're catering to. LMS helps with that.

But in in most schools, we have a wide variety of experience levels and staff. And, so knowing when and where to be consistent in your approach, with with an LMS and the setup of an LMS, absolutely, it supports differentiation and great personalization for students, but it also supports differentiation for teachers at different levels of their career, at different levels of understanding of of how to educational best practice. And I do spend a lot of time looking at the challenges to things like differentiation is, you know, one of, if not the most challenging aspect of the life of a teacher. Meeting the needs of every single student in the class when those needs are so varied, if we're being perfectly honest with ourselves, and those varying needs and levels and abilities change from minute to minute, from day to day, from period to period. It became pretty apparent to me pretty quickly that spending the time to get set up well as a as a teacher in LMS and as an institution with an LMS was a great way to ensure that students have access to the learning they need when they need it.

Yes. It takes a bit of work in the setup, but it certainly saves a lot of work in the long term. It is only as, well effective and and powerful, as the system and the the the procedures and the policy set up by the institution. And so you're you're really hamstringing and in some instances completely restricting the benefits associated with that if you haven't, as an institution, thought about how are we gonna facilitate that for our staff and more importantly for our students. So, like, in previous discussions, we've talked about how you even go one step further to support the parents on how they they can actually access and utilize the platform through the application.

And that was just Darren, you gave me goosebumps when you talked about that. Right? Because that is such an important element that, you know, also you are incorporating not just these main users, but also on the peripherals. Like, who else is gonna be leveraging this system, and why is that important? Because I know that at my son's school, they do not have a learning management system set up yet. I'm coming for you. But in saying that, the platform that they do have in place, like, it for me as a parent who is familiar with technology is really frustrating.

Right? So, you know, for you to be able to include not only just the students and the teachers to support them, but also keep the parents updated and informed and, you know, coming from a state school, you know, and how you have implemented and how you support other schools to adopt and to set up those best practices. Just it's part of the reason why I wanted you on Beyond the canvas. Right? Because it's really just to shine a light on all the great work that you were doing and how when implemented well. And to your point earlier, yes, there's a little bit of work, but when you've got that set up, it just flows. And then the consistency and I'm sure the sentiment throughout the school to your point, you know, you have different teachers at different levels of their technical journey as well as their ability.

But once implemented well, high five to you. Darren, can you talk to me about how you are removing that administrative burden from your teachers and how you're leveraging platforms to do so? So whenever we we put anything together and design anything, obviously, we do that in a very collaborative way. And we are believers in the idea of the learning team, and the learning team is the student, the teacher, and the parent. We design and and set up our our courses with end users in mind. You can use Google Classroom and you use Canvas and you use Teams and you use Moodle and because then you've got a situation where the students are going from class to class and not just you're having to get used to how a teacher's mind works for the navigating of that Canvas or that Google Classroom or whatever.

They're having to navigate a whole new platform, and all of that for me is just taking away from the the the core focus, which is the learning. You know? So I think it's really, really important. And then, you know, people among the parents who who are then trying to well, not even having access to some of those LMSs, and all of that is solved quite simply. And I was really excited when when Canvas came along as I said, I've worked in a lot of LMS. And when Canvas came along and had the option of the observer role, I was really excited by that.

And so we we design and we build with all of that in mind that, you know, the students and the parents as well. I'm a really strong advocate of having consistent structures to a point and then and knowing where to say, well, here's the agency. And so an example of that, which is a little bit hard to to verbally explain, but we have one of the templates we have that we call it the when, what, how page. And I'm really excited about the block editor. I hope it does in my mind, I can picture it doing, which is give us as an institution the opportunity to develop a template for our when, what, how page, which at the moment, we've had to hack the CSS in the back of Canvas, to make it do what we we wanted to do.

But, I'm hoping Block Editor will will allow us to get around that and actually have a legitimate template that we can use as an institution and design ourselves based on a lot of years of experience and evolution. And the when, what, how page simply does that. You know, as a student, you you you in any one of our courses, our home pages all look pretty much the same. You you as a parent or a student or a teacher, you can go into our home page and go straight to the scope and sequence for the course because it's a big green button in the same spot on every home page. You can go straight to the mark book.

You can go go straight to, the the learning for unit one or term one, and that'll be a big button on the home course that's in almost the same spot. Now that's we're fairly inflexible about that. That has to be there because that's the same those conditions are the same for every teacher. They do and every student needs to have access to those things. So there isn't very much agency about where you put that, and that's to do with, I want students to walk into a classroom and parents walk go into Canvas and just go, I know where to find the scope and sequence.

I know where to get to the learning of the important stuff. I don't have to worry about, how does my teacher how does this particular teacher think and how does you know, when you click on unit one, you would be taken taken to a when, what, how page. That when, what, how page literally lines out when. So at the moment, it'd be term one, week five. So as a parent or a student, you'd follow your notes straight through term one, week five laid out on the page.

And the what is an overarching, statement on what's happening at the moment. This is the seminar type material. This is the self directed type, the expectations we have for this week. And then there's a how a column called how, the when, what, and how, and the how links to pages, quizzes, discussions. That's how we're doing the learning.

And that doesn't mean that everything's done on the computer. We're a performing art school quite often. It isn't there in a being a room playing with a band or they're dancing or, you know, putting together a Exactly. And and so, but when they click on that how button for that particular topic concept, whatever it is, it might just be a a page that's brought up under the screen at the front of the room so everybody can see it that's outlined. It has the learning intention, and and he's outlining what's happening.

That's where the agency lives. And for me, that's where the agency should live. The teachers can put whatever they want in the help page. I want them we've got amazing teachers here at HSPA. We're we're really lucky to come up with a wide variety of really engaging and creative ways to inspire and motivate students and to teach them.

I want them to have full agency there. That's where the agency belongs, not whole as well as picking because more of more often apart from that, the teachers then have to go and learn an LMS. If we're saying take whatever LMS you want, they have to get their head around all that. It's a big picture version, I guess, of how we're, but and then it gets much more granular from there. But what's really great around that is not only are you giving the kids structure because they know how to find it, but also you're basically setting the teachers up for success as well.

Right? So there's a a standardized flow. It doesn't matter where they are. They know that this is their flare. Add your flare. Go gangbusters.

Make it as amazing as you want. Right? So you're removing that. Hey, I'm needing to think about X, Y and Z, but giving them access to be creative and the parts that are important to them, which is how they educate their kids and, you know, bringing their own creativity into that. And I'm sure that there's collaboration. Right.

And I know that in previous conversations, we've spoken about how you're using commons within the institution to support teachers to have that collaborative space, build that sense of community, you know, and not having to sort of go out to external pages or external groups or and also, you know, within the school, you've probably got, let's call it a tone, a tone of how you teach and also a tone of that community. Right? So it's that consistency for teachers. You know? What's the sentiment around sort of leveraging Canvas Commons in the institution? Yeah. We we use it quite a bit, less so than we used to now that templates is an option for us. That's been fantastic.

So we use templates at the start of when we wanna roll out, you know, an assignment template or something along those lines. We'll generally now put it in, the the course template, take everything else out of out of the course template, and just put the new thing in the course template at the start of the year. So every course, starts with whatever new things that we've designed collaboratively together, assessment, task, notification, whatever that might be. And so that's taken back a little bit of the use of commons. That was one of our big uses early on was, you know, when we, came up with, something new we wanna draw out across the school, we would put it on commons.

We still do that to a degree. The commons for us is being used. We're sharing a lot of what we do with other schools. Wow. Fantastic.

Thank you. You know that there's some really good stuff up there that we put up there. I love the idea of transparency in terms of how we work across the school and inspiring teachers, inspiring each other. So every one of our teachers is set up, you know, and people have varying thoughts on this, but I I strongly believe it's important. An administrative account that allows them to see all courses, and we call it the see all courses, account.

And so all teachers can go into any other course and have a look at how other people are doing things, and they certainly a lot me included, we learn a lot from each other in that way. And send then what we can do is copy, content from other courses quite literally straight copy Canvas course, select that item, and bring it in rather than go through Commons if we need to. And so that happens quite a bit. That's the approach we've taken for about nine years now. It's working.

It it's it's absolutely working. And people ask occasionally, well, aren't you worried about losing work or people breaking things and whatnot? And I think, again, one of the things that I was really excited about right at the get go with Canvas is things like the beta environment, the test environment, and then the version history in pages. Yeah. It'd be great if version history in discussion was just putting that out there. Yeah.

So version history and pages gives us a sense of security on that front. So if worst comes to worst, we can not only see, we can go back and find like, if somebody does actually and they're not gonna do it maliciously, but if someone accidentally breaks the page or something like going into another course, go into version history, roll it back. You can actually even see who it was and get to them and say, hey. Do you need some support with using Canvas pages? Because, you never we noticed that you deleted your search and such and such. But don't worry.

Because we'll help you out. Yes. We can fix it. Yeah. And if not, your CSM and the support team will help out anyway.

Right? You've given your people license to explore, to play, to be creative, to get in and have a crack. Right? And I think, you know, the LMS across whole of school and sort of you touched on, obviously, how you're sharing content out to other schools. You know? I think a lot of other schools are not sort of met with the affordances of, you know, working in Sydney or sort of around your area. Yep. More Canvas schools.

Right? I was speaking to a school up in, Tamworth the other day who was considering adopting. Right? And they're rural and remote. How do we ensure that those schools are met with the same and supported with the same equity, right, from, you know, you and building out that community, but also sharing and the collaboration. And I think that that is so important and you really are championing that. And thank you.

Yeah. You're welcome. Thanks for the kind words. And then from the Department of Education, and I'll talk to New South Wales point of view, I think it's important that they have a look at how we could use a well designed LMS to facilitate and and greatly improve, not just equity for our students in rural and remote areas, but also a more manageable workload for the teachers out there because quite often they're in KLAs that are not their trained KLAs, they're in smaller sites with not as many we've got one hundred-odd staff here on-site. On a smaller site site where you don't have near that that many people to collaborate and work with, this is a a really, really powerful way to to be able to develop and and share, you know, Canvas offers with the Commons.

It it offers the opportunity to share, go shopping for you know, we're all teaching the same outcomes. We're all teaching them the same syllabus or which would be in in in the same place. If we're not, there's something wrong. So, you know, if I was a PE teacher out west having to teach, English for the first time, I would love the opportunity to go into the Commons and have a look at resources that have been designed to deliver that outcome for English and and ideally have the option of ten of them to pick from the actual that suits my teaching. So I'm gonna and with two clicks, have it imported into my course and be delivering and have it up on the board, and that seems to me like a far more sensible way than having over five hundred secondary schools reinventing the wheel everywhere.

So I'd love to see that happen. And it's also it comes back to the consistency and the standardization to kids. Right? We know that that families and teachers and and kids all move around as well. Right? So if they've gone from a Tamworth school down to a Sydney school and they open, an LMS, oh, cool. Yeah.

I was using this at x y z and the same for the teachers. Right? Circumstances change. And also to your point around Commons about just having that ability for the standardization to jump in and go, oh, yeah. Cool. This is this is what I need.

This content has been approved by x y and z. I know that it's been utilized happy days. I don't have to use my brain as much, and it just sort of gives me back a certain amount of time back in my day. Like, I think that that's even, you know, not not just the department, but there are so many organisations that I've seen coming back that I see so much opportunity for campus commons and I think people are a lot more open to that collaboration. Something that stands out for me that you're doing at your school though that I'd really love to talk about is around that HSE monitoring and the compliance requirement and how you're sort of leveraging just our platform to do that.

Well, time saving, firstly, but also peace of mind for HSC teachers knowing that they are compliant because in in New South Wales, the HSC, it's a pretty big base. From a teacher's point of view, there's quite a bit of responsibility that's placed on teachers to ensure that they are compliant with the requirements of the HSC from an SM department point of view. In a lot of schools, they use a more manual based HSC monitoring system, which is a big binder folder, and when I say big, I mean, several inches documents, whether that's programmed, roles, you name it, that have been printed out and placed in the folder for compliance checks and then are pretty much out of date two days after they're put together. And so, you know, to keep on top of that is and to to have it authentically compliant, for want of a better term, but have it authentically up to date, let's let's put it that way yeah. Yep.

Is a really big job, and it's a really time consuming job, which is taking away from, as I as I said over and over again, the opportunity to to build resources with kids and, more importantly, build relationships with kids. We've put together, we call it core docs, and it's a discussion in, Canvas. Mhmm. It's not open to students. It's for teachers only, so it's it's not published.

And that discussion is built around a template that we use, and it has all of the requirements from NESA and Department of Education in it around programs, scope and sequences, student PLSPs, all of that kind of stuff. But because we integrate, pretty nicely with SharePoint, things like scope and sequences and assessment schedules, they're all on SharePoint and they're live documents. And those two, scope and sequences and assessment schedules are on we keep them on public SharePoint because, again, to make sure that parents can access them as well, they just link directly to the Canvas core docs discussion page. A lot of strategy in behind, building that and getting it set up so that it's sustainable, and it's not just about the Canvas course or about the core docs page. It's the things that it's linking to.

So it's making sure that you've got your your administrative system, whether that's central or whatever it might be. But the bottom line is once it's done for the course so it's linking out to assessment. All of our assessment notifications are on Canvas and, consequently, rubrics. And then, consequently, students are submitting their work to Canvas, if it's a submission, but, setup and teachers giving feedback through SpeedGrader and Canvas. So with a single link to an assessment to assessment task one, we're covering things like, not just providing samples of the exemplar student work high, middle, and low.

We're we're we're keeping a record of student work and the feedback given by the teachers for every single task in every single course. The task notification is still in Canvas. The rubric is in Canvas. And so the teacher's marking and giving feedback through Canvas. And, again, that's all linked to the core docs page.

The the consequential huge benefit of that is at the end of the year, that rolls over and the course is in its setup. Nothing changes. We change the assessment note notification if we need to, but the links, everything I ran about the the documentation. So you can have your HSC monitoring compliance page, if you like, set up in sort of ten, twenty minutes at the start of the year compared to you know, there are some schools where it takes hours to put together the and and then it's out of date pretty quickly. Ours take not very long at the start of the year to set up, and then they're constantly up to date because everything's linking to a live environment.

And the reason we have it as a discussion is because supervisors, head teachers will go through and the teacher will respond to the discussion themselves saying, yep. This is good to go. For example, in an English course, we got six teachers. Each sit in in sections, each teacher will say, good to go. The supervisor can come through and look at the look at it from a compliance point of view and comment, yep.

That's great. Or could you just quickly tweak this? That's time stamps, date stamped in terms Yep. You know, all of that kind of stuff. Then as, a deputy, I can go through and have a look at all of those really quickly from my end desk. I'm not getting like I used to, trolleys full of folders wheeled down to my office that would take two weeks to go through which the teachers don't have their folders at that point while I'm taking the time to do it.

So, yeah, again, that's a that's a whole topic on itself and it's just been the time saving there. I think it it just really sort of highlights how innovative you have been with canvas. Right? So you've seen an opportunity, you've seen a pain point, you've tried to remove that administrative burden not only from your teachers, but also I'm sure from your admin team and then what that looks like moving forward To your point, it's time stamped. You know, the person, the teachers got their own unique login, so you know who've completed that feedback. It comes to you.

It's a quick check, and everyone is singing from the same sort of sheet. You know what I mean? I think that, you know, it's just a testament to your innovation and how you're leveraging the platform to support so many different elements throughout a teacher's journey as well as also supporting the student. So, you know, for me, it's just shining a light on, okay, cool. You implemented Canvas quite a quite a while ago. Yes.

As far as your journey is concerned, you guys are well and truly advanced. But in saying that, it's about sort of looking at, okay, cool. What else can we do? How can we support? What administrative burden can we pull away? And then also how does this underpin everything that we're doing at the school here? Because you're right. Right? With your school, it's creative, you know, but then it's also, okay, cool. With the mobile app, are you using sort of recording to capture a dance performance then uploading that a teacher can watch it provide all of the comments put it into a discussion kids can leave feedback you know like the opportunities are endless and that's what I really love about how you're leveraging Canvas and then the willingness to support other schools.

It just makes my heart so happy. Like every time we talk, I always get goosebumps because for me, it should be about sharing, you know, education is something that it's a lifelong journey I'm still learning right and so for me when I reflect upon my learning and my relationship with education it probably would have been really different You know, if I had have had, you know, you're talking about teachers building that relationship with students, you know, we can all remember our worst teacher, yet we can all remember our most favorite teacher ever. Right? And I think that's sometimes what's missing, and you're giving teachers back time and license to do that, and I love it. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. And look. And I'm really fortunate to have an amazing team here at HSPA. Their staff are just incredible. They they're absolutely inspiring in terms of working with the kids full stop, but even in terms of taking on board what they need to do to to make sure they they they can all see the benefits of Canvas now.

We don't even run very many Canvas training sessions anymore for our new staff. It's a little bit of an overview of how we run it at HSPA, but we have that many gurus around the school that they can just turn to anybody and get upskilled. And I'm also very lucky to have the amazing Ben Peters. I'm not sure if you've met Ben, but he's our head teacher admin and technology coordinator here who's as passionate as I am about making sure that everything runs as smoothly, appropriately, and effectively as possible. So he he's been a fantastic sounding board all the way through.

Well, I'm just saying that off the back of this, I'm sure that you are gonna have a lot of inquiries. So we're probably gonna have to meet Ben, and he's gonna absolutely be the man of the match, and there'll be a lot of questions questions coming for both of you. I think also something that really, stands out for me as well as, you know, we've touched on quite a few different elements of of Canvas, but I know that you're also, you know, Canvas is a, is a part of what makes up your tech stack and your ecosystem. Right? And I know that you're working with quite a few different different partners, and we we love to hear that. Right? Because for us, we wanna make Canvas open.

We wanna make Canvas easy. We don't wanna make put a wrap around it and say, no. You can't use this. You know? And I think you've really embraced working with partners as well. So, you know, every time I talk to someone in the ed tech space, I always go, oh, yeah.

You know, I'm talking with Darren. Everyone knows you. So you're obviously a bit of a standout. So, again, thanks for championing that as well. Yeah.

You're welcome. Can I just speak to that a little bit in terms of Sure! It certainly was, again, one of the things that I got really excited about in terms of Canvas as an LMS and that ability to integrate, and we do take advantage of that. We're lucky here in the Department of Education that all students have access to Office 365 and and Google in terms of, Google Docs and and whatnot. And that LTI integration is fantastic, and and it's used a lot. And, again, like, that's where coming back to that conversation around agency, that's used pretty extensively through classes, whether that's collaborating in a shared word doc on OneDrive and or whatnot.

The one that I'm I'm most impressed with is we've worked with a third party, Edalex and Credentialate to develop, a learner dashboard that we've embedded into Canvas and that ability from the Canvas point of view to to have APIs which can facilitate the pulling out of outcome data. So our learner dashboard is comprehensive. We're we're we're delivering, digital credentials, verified validated digital credentials to students on their learning, both in curriculum, cross curriculum, and co curriculum. So things like active citizenship badges that they're working towards over the course of their schooling through to, you know, outcome four point three in stage four, you know, with their digital badges. And all of that, again, is generated just purely by good practice, and and that's the that's the heart of our design is the focus has to be on education.

And so what that means in this space is we went, okay. I just want the teachers to be marking a rubric in SpeedGrader against the kids' work. That's all I want them doing. I don't have to worry about anything else because that's good practice, giving that regular feedback and then using that data. And then I want them to be able to use that data to look at automatically, not not generate it, not make up a spreadsheet.

Just look at the data and see which kids need some, more support and which kids need, some more challenge. So the mastery learning grade book in, in in Canvas is huge now that we've got our mastery system set up. Teachers just marking speed grader, go into the mastery learning grade book. Everything is there written out for them. They can see what outcome students are excelling, when where they're not, where their mastery levels are at a glance automated for them.

And then to take that even further, you know, and and so then they're developing enrichment tasks for those students that have have reached mastery in certain concepts or corrective tasks for those students and they and, again, we're bringing that differentiation. But to my point, to go even further, we've then got Edalex able to come in and run APIs to, pull out the the outcome data from that learning mastery dashboard and distribute digital badges and credentials to our student, automatically and put that on their dashboard, and the teachers still haven't done anything other than mark the rubric. They're not having there's no even even our admin team are not having to shuffle data, and that's really, really important. That's that ability to to get outstanding authentic outcomes from just going about. And your your normal work as you would in terms of best practice education.

Yeah. And I think that's it. Right? You've you've built it so is the teachers and not having to do, yet another task. It just automatically happens and then it allows them to make data driven decisions as well. Right? It's one of those things.

You really can't lie with data. You know? Like, it's it's there. And so I think the fact that we're starting to understand a little bit more about the power of data and then also how to collaborate on what that looks like as well. I also love that you're using obviously credentialing for not only just those, you know, educational outcomes, but also those soft skills. Right? It's like, cool.

You're a great person. Oh, cool. You've demonstrated empathy. What does that look like? I think, you know, for me, who is a little competitive bunny, you know, I see it as going and collecting all of those different badges and something that I've started doing, a bit of a bit of a noob, but, I love the canvas community, right? Because it collects all of those badges about, you know, how many times that you've done a post or you've supported. And I think that's something else that I would really like, maybe to encourage is for people to jump back on the Canvas community a little bit more and start to build out their profile.

And I think that here we, we are a really strong community here in APAC. We're doing some really great things and I really want to put our name on the map. So I would encourage anyone who is watching to jump on the community and build out your profile. And my name is Gem K12 hype girl because that's me. And Darren also to your point, I think, you know, with that community, people are going to come and they're going to ask you questions and because you're so open and sharing, I think that, you know, go gangbusters on there.

Look up Darren. We'll share his, community profile a little bit later at the end, and you'll be able to ask him questions. We know that Canvas supports student outcomes in education and, you know, the teachers and people think of LMS as just educational. Right? I know you're doing some really great things in leveraging Canvas for looking at the student holistically and understanding student well-being, which is super duper important. And, again, just got goosebumps.

But can you tell me a little bit about how you're utilizing sort of Canvas and the student well-being portfolio? Yeah. Pretty comprehensively. And and it and, again, it comes back majority of it is to two things. One, consistency of message, but also consistency of implementation and making sure that every student and every family gets access to your best practice processes. So for for an example, I know a lot of schools don't tend to think about the idea of a year group as a course, and so that's something that we did pretty early on.

We've we've year seven have their own course. Year eight have their own course. Nine have their own course. We've also got an all students course, which has got all students in it. And, that's for a number of reasons.

Communication is one of them. So it means that if rather than send an announcement out to the whole school or an email to the whole school, we can send announcements out to, just to year seven about a camp that's coming out. And I know we can do that via an email, but we're, again, trying to keep them all in the same environment all the time doing it through Canvas. Not to mention, in doing it in Canvas, we can put videos in it and all that kind of stuff really easy, and it's it's encouraging. Teaching is the same in environment.

Along with that, year group course, though, we we call them a check-in course, and we run a it's kind of a pastoral care check-in program. Here, each morning they start with the same group of students and the same teacher and and it's literally literally about a check-in and how's it going and what's on for the day, all of that kind of stuff. There's a program that it that runs with it, you know, runs through the the whole school. We start at year three here. We have a hundred and sixty primary schools, students, then about a thousand secondary students.

And, and so it runs right through to year twelve, year three through to twelve. And our head teacher well-being, Mark Simmons, who's an absolute legend, not just in the well-being space, but also, an amazing, designer of LMS resources and whatnot. And he's off-site of Blake Robinson, have put together this incredible program. And we knew right from the get go when we introduced check-in that the the obstacle for check-in in a lot of schools is that some teachers, it's their bread and butter and they love it and they, you know, they they are quite comfortable having conversations around building resilience and all of the things that we wanted to talk about and touch on. And other teachers, it's not in their wheelhouse, you know, and so they they feel less comfortable about doing it and so consequently might not do it and it's hard to get that consistent approach.

So our check-in courses, the year seven, for example, check-in course is resourced and and Mark and his team have done an amazing job of It's a full year of resources broken into, you know, fortnightly chunks of discussions and videos on, you know, like I said, developing resilience or you name it. It's a full, holistic well-being program that runs through to year twelve on different topics as they need it. You know? And so we can bring things in to check-in. If we've got a certain issue that's facing the community at a certain time, we can, you know, bump that in there and get that really quickly out to the whole community through that check-in, course. And it is a course, and we have discussions in there.

So the whole year group, you know, there might be competitions around who can get a photo in front of such and such and all of that kind of stuff, and it is just using the tool to facilitate best practice. Along with that, we've got about three or four courses that are public courses. In in other words, obviously, exactly that. They're all more more like a website than than a Canvas course. One of them, we have a student learning support course, and it's got numeracy, literacy, technology, and and academic supports for sort of sections.

And so students at any time can go in and get support on writing an essay if they're writing an essay for an assignment and videos walking through that or how do I submit an assignment on Canvas. That's all in the technology cum section. The reason we make it public is because that just sits on a you can click on an image on the on the home page for literacy or tech support and go straight into it. If that was a course in a term, then every time it rolled over, you know, we'd have to be reuploading updating links in two hundred and sixty other courses. Just by having it public, there's nothing confidential in there.

Nobody's enrolled in those courses. By having it public, it makes it nice and easy to use that link. So another one of those public courses we have is the parent support course. So we've developed a course for parents for conversations around kids that are not wanting to come to school. We, fortunately, don't have very many in here because we got a bloody great school.

That sort of thing. You know? And and the conversations with parents, are inevitably going to have to have with a teenager and support to do that and links to things like whatever it might be, Lifeline. Yeah. We're not we're not claiming we're not writing it all ourselves, but we're we're providing access to the the most up to date support through that course. And that in itself has been really successful in terms of, you know, we might push certain things out at, you know, every couple of weeks in a newsletter or if I'm having one one family that I'm talking to that needs a bit of support in a certain area, I can just send them a link to that parent support course.

So I need that link. I have a, almost thirteen year old, curator who is not wanting to go to school. So probably also because he doesn't have canvas and it's not set up the way that you have, but, you know, I don't know if you saw my face, but I almost cried when you were talking about sort of that student community and again, that collaboration point and how you're using, like, it just makes sense. Also how you're communicating with parents and sending that out to just all your seven groups or what that looks like. You know, I referenced to someone the other day that I need an EA just to, like, go through my emails that I'm receiving from school.

It is absolutely mental. So, you know, again, I am just throwing it out there. You are gonna have so many people that are just gonna wanna, you know, hey, Darren. How can we or show us how or, you know, and I think it's a testament to you and your teachers and your staff are really just as a leader. They just they just get behind you because it's who you are.

We can see your passion. We can see your drive and also the impact that you're making, and that is not lost on us. Hence, why you are here today. Because it was an absolute when I first met you I still literally looked up at our director of SC and just went, wow. Like, we need to tell Darren's story.

And I've seen and spoken to a lot of people, and Canvas has always been sort of, you know, held a special place in my heart even when I wasn't working here. And just so just why we created this series was to shine a light and to share because there are people to your point who have Canvas who are driving it like a Corolla. It's a Ferrari, and you are absolutely winning the F1. Like, you are smashing it. Something though, this is my favorite.

We are now gonna do our hidden gems. I coined this this morning on my four fifty flight down to, Sydney. So we're calling it the Hidden Gems, and I have three questions for you. Fire away. And we are asking all of our guests this.

Alright. Darren, first question. What did you wanna be when you grow up? I didn't exactly know what it was, but it was along the lines of an inventor. And in my head, an inventor looked like, what's his name? The the professor from Back to the Future. You know? Doc.

I wanted the doc. Yeah. The doc. I wanted to do that. I wanted to just sit in the garage and tinker around and, you know, make, Got a DeLorean? I don't have a DeLorean.

I would have loved the DeLorean. That that yeah. That that's what it looked like in my head. I was gonna, you know, just make and design and tinker and create and make things. I think that you're doing that really just in a different form.

You're playing with tech. You're creating cool courses. You're building out great programs. So you're really just doing that. But Yeah.

That's right. Just my my shed's a little bit neater. Probably. Absolutely. And your hair looks better just quietly.

Thank you. No worries. Touching wood. Next one. If you could have one superpower, what would it be? Probably flight, I think.

Just the fun. Yeah. Just says it looks like fun. Yeah. At home, I I concur.

I would love to be able to fly. Absolutely. Nice one. And lucky last, what do you love most about Canvas? I think the flexibility. Like I've said, integrate with other tools, the ability to keep the focus on educational and pedagogical best practice and use it as a as a really effective tool to make that happen.

I've been caught up in all of the trends and all of that kind of stuff, and some things come and go. I'm I'm a pretty staunch advocate of looking at the long lasting, but we know explicit teaching and and and, feedback and, mastery learning. You know, Bloom's come up with that in '68 or whenever it was. Those things, are super important and and the things that we should be focusing on. And as I said, motivating and inspiring students is is really our job.

And I'm I'm all over the AI thing. I do think it'll play a great part in education. Agreed. And and is already. So I'm excited to see how Canvas can integrate, but it's gonna be a long, long time before AI can take the place of a human because in terms of education, because there's no substitute for the ability to inspire and and motivate kids and and, you know, get to know kids and build those relationships.

Canvas, for me, it's the most effective and efficient way I've found of getting the robots to do the robot work so we can get on with the really important human way. I love that. I wholeheartedly agree. And if you were there, I would high five you so hard that I would be that great hand. You know, that's that's really wonderful.

And to your point, yes, AI, I think is a phenomenal tool but it is just that it is a tool that we are using in our human everyday lives, relationships and the connection that you have with your students and your kids and for them to look back just like I do to my teachers and go oh my gosh You know, poor mister Bukit. I gave him hell or, you know, mister Siri, my science teacher. He was cool. Do you know what I mean? And I think, you know, that that those memories follow you. And I think you won't remember AI.

Like, you know, you might remember That's right. And you won't remember Canvas. You remember that you use a platform, but you're really just making space for your teachers to be teachers, to teach and inspire and to shape our young people to be the best version of themselves and to reach their true potential. So thank you. I love it.

Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me. Alright. Easy choice.