At this time of year, I reflect on the discussions I’ve had with a lot of teachers in the past few months. It is an absolute thrill to get so much positive feedback on our courses and to hear how they are using HSC Study Lab. I thought it could be worth sharing the way in which the courses are being used by your peers.
HSC Study Lab (www.hscstudylab.com.au), an online resource based on the three functions ‘Watch’, ‘Play’ and ‘Apply’, has many different uses in the classroom.
Watch – Video lessons and animations
HSC Study Lab’s video lessons cover all the syllabus dot points comprehensively. They are presented as either an introduction to a topic, as tutorials, or as experiment videos.
HSC Study Lab allows for a flipped classroom approach. Teachers who would like to use the classroom time to cover the course points that students are struggling with or to solve problems together, make it a prerequisite to attend class to watch the lesson video at home the night before. As the videos are quite short yet comprehensive, they might also help in conveying a concept reasonably quickly at the start of class, saving time and allowing more time for other teacher student interaction like problem-solving or question time.
The videos are either presented by expert teachers or animated, and we cover every mandatory first-hand investigation in detail as well.
This is useful even if you do your own experiments in the lab, as the students can either watch it in advance at home or in class to know what the experiment is supposed to achieve, or afterwards if due to time pressure the pace was a bit fast to take everything in or the experiment wasn’t concluded in time or not successful. They are also excellent to review prior to any exam as this is required knowledge to pass the course.
Should your school not be equipped with a lab or miss a few of the mandatory equipment and materials in the lab, you can still cover the experiments and achieve the required learning with the help of our experiment videos.
Play – Games and simulators
In the Play section, students get to take the learning into their own hands. The games and simulators include experiments which you can’t otherwise undertake in unsupervised conditions, but you can safely make mistakes and take a trial and error approach when practicing in a virtual environment.
Students can view a video lesson as homework, and the associated practice questions and games and simulators can be done as in-class activities. This way the teacher can answer questions in relation to why the students didn’t get the correct result on the first go, as well as clarify concepts that might be unclear.
Games and simulators can also serve as a fun interruption to the monotony of study after a particularly heavy lesson.
Apply – Practice questions
There are practice questions asked at the end of each lesson, focus, and modules, as a comprehensive practice exam at the course level. There are hundreds of practice questions in each course.
The practice questions can help the student keep track of their understanding of the content. After each quiz or practice tests students can go can review their performance against the correct answers. Feedback and model answers are always provided. The related video lesson can be re-visited before attempting the quizzes again. If the questions are done as homework, in-class discussions can then be had to solve the problems the students encountered.
I hope this gives you an idea of how other teachers are using HSC Study Lab. If you have other ideas or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us to let us know. We’d love to hear all your suggestions of how to use HSC Study Lab to make the most out of the courses.
Krista Borg
Director - Development and Partnerships at Access Macquarie Limited, HSC Study Lab steering committee member
