Hi all, this is the first of our ‘In The Know’ RE Texts blog posts to keep you up to date with all the developments on our ‘To Know, Worship & Love’ (KWL) RE resource. KWL is very alive and organic. It is constantly subject to new developments and improvements. It will also be subject to a major content revision, but more on that later.
Pope Francis has called the Church to break through the ‘dull categories’ of the Christian message. In Evangelii Gaudium he writes that the task to recover the freshness of the Gospel elicits “new paths of creativity” with “more eloquent signs and words with new meaning for today’s world.” (p. 11)
Taking inspiration from Pope Francis’ encouragement, we’ve taken advantage of being in the rare position to be able to develop our own new & improved content delivery framework to replace the current 3rd party infrastructure.
As of 2018, the KWL Digital RE resource will be moved to a brand new in-house developed iteration, offering many improvements such as:
- New colourful look at feel and easier navigation
- Offline syncing of content with Chrome or Firefox browsers (iPad app is ‘shipped’ with all content)
- Use on Windows & Macs*
- Use on iPads or Chrome Tablets
- Search and year level filtering
- Easily share links to content
- Save favourites
- Annotations
- Annotate content with study notes. They’ll be synced and accessible to you across multiple devices with the capacity to export all annotations to a PDF.
- Font size zooming
- Use any device – any size monitor – any resolution – any size window with our responsive layout
- Interactive content to deepen level of engagement with the resource
- Enrichment Resources (interactive expansions of existing year level content themes)
- All content updates added seamlessly ‘on the fly’.
All KWL Digital orders for the 2018 school year will be fulfilled using the new system. The current system will be decommissioned prior to the start of the 2018 school year. As the new system allows for offline usage, we will begin a scale back of static PDF usage.
In developing content for Primary Schools, it became evident that we needed our own system with the flexibility to create the type of content we felt necessary to achieve the high calibre user experience that we’re aiming for. So we’ve built our very own content delivery system and converted all KWL Secondary content to fit the new technical framework. We’ll be working solely on Primary school content in 2018, with the view to make it commercially available to all Primary schools for the 2019 school year.
All of this is the result of 14 months works of five dedicated and hard-working staff, whom I owe a debt of deep gratitude for their unwavering dedication to, and ‘ownership’ of the project.
The new system has been trialled at a number of Victorian & NSW Catholic Secondary schools, acquiring solid, positive feedback. Amongst the feedback were some very helpful and constructive critiques that offered our office some useful insights. Our thanks and kudos to all involved especially Genazzano FJC College.
Given our new capacities in technical development, we listed about 7 of the common requested features & criticisms, and within a fortnight, had developed and deployed a feature or solution for each item. This new-found nimbleness is key to our agency’s abilities to deliver efficiently.
On top of content revision, (both minor and major) we will continue to look for ways of streamlining the use of digital technology that counters the somewhat clumsy and bumpy ride the move to digital resources has been for many schools.
I hope schools find the new KWL Digital resource an easy to use, helpful and supportive resource in the RE classroom. We’re very happy with it, and I think school staff and students will be too.