About the Learning Place

• Private courses can be offered to your students or peers.
• Public courses can be offered through the Learning Place for a wider audience.
  Note: Public courses go through a quality assurance process.

Education Queensland staff can also request their own Virtual Classroom. This is an online Blackboard space to support student learning and activities, homework, assessment, student research and inquiry.

You can set up your own courses and Virtual classrooms in the Learning Place Administration System (LPAS). Simply logon with your LP username and Add a course. You can also manage your students access to your courses in LPAS. Read our FAQs and find out how …

• Communicate online with your peers and your students;
• Provide a safe communication space for your students;
• Develop a project area with forums, chat and blogs; and
• Participate in online events covering a variety of topics.

• Create a project room for colleagues or students; or
• Invite special guests and experts to communicate with your participants;
• Add a poll, more information page and as many chats, forums and blogs as your project requires; and
• Archive your project room when it's over.

Playground: Adults need to play too! A playground area is available so staff can hone their skills before setting up their actual project or chat areas. Using this area also prevents our real communication areas from being clogged with 'plays'. Just have a go and play as long as you like. Everything is deleted in the Playground every 24 hours.

Asynchronous forums (threaded discussions) provide a forum for staff, students and the wider community to discuss a range of topics.

Synchronous chats (real time chat) provide a chat room for your educational projects and chats with experts. Staff also use chat for formal and informal meetings with colleagues.

Blogs are online journals used by staff and students for reflection and to promote deeper understanding.

Voice and data conferencing allows participants to have discussions via telephone while, at the same time, sharing graphics, text and software over the Education Queensland network. Staff can use the conferencing facilities to hold online meetings, learn new skills and work collaboratively on projects.

Media room is the first stage of a full web conferencing system. When completed, you will be able to view live video and audio, video conference, podcast with RSS feeds, download large resources overnight, create your own video project rooms and access quality evaluated video/audio via the CX resource centre.

Professional Communities

The Learning Place offers staff two community places so you can:

• Find professional learning opportunities to suit your needs and location;
• Develop your own professional community; and
• Run events and projects using the flexible community areas to promote, liaise and share ideas.

1. You can manage and/or participate in Education Queensland Professional Communities (PCs) through a flexible, dynamic website accessible to all Internet users. Contact the Learning Place to enquire about setting up your own community.
2. You can develop a closed community space using Education Queensland's learning management system, Blackboard. This can be set up through LPAS.

Each community area has all the tools a vibrant community might need including authoring, communication and collaboration tools.

Student communities: Collaborative Online Projects

Collaborative Online Projects (COP) are student learning community project areas providing four project types:

1. RAPS including music, film and book
2. Travel Buddies
3. Virtual Field Trips
4. General project areas

Teachers can coordinate their own projects or join their students in an existing project. The tools in the COP areas allow student authoring and online collaboration.

The Curriculum Exchange is a gateway to a wealth of student and professional learning resources. It is an integral and important component of the Learning Place providing:

• quality assured resources for connected teaching and learning
• delivery of significant online content including learning objects and digital resources from The Le@rning Federation (TLF)
• regular updates about new eLearning resources
• access to external repositories of resources including Merlot and edna.

The Curriculum Exchange provides resources, and tools for finding them, through the new Curriculum Exchange resource centre, including its integration with the Learning Place learning management system, Blackboard. The Curriculum Exchange resource centre supports Learning Place teachers and students by:

• providing access to an extensive selection of online curriculum content
• providing access to efficient user-driven resource discovery tools
• assisting the discovery and classroom use of learning objects, including those from The Le@rning Federation.

• TIPS - useful teaching ideas, strategies, activities, lesson plans and units of work provided by Queensland teachers
• EduSites - evaluations or descriptions of websites with content useful for teachers or students
• Learning objects - interactive multimedia curriculum resources from The Le@rning Federation and Education Queensland
• Gateways to curriculum resources that support new syllabus and other strategic initiatives
• Digital resources such as video, audio and images.

Passwords are not required to access the CX resource centre from Education Queensland (EQ) schools. EQ teachers and students may access the CX resource centre from home by using their Learning Place logon details. If you are a teacher and not currently registered please join the Learning Place. Student registration is completed by a teacher at the school.

The Learning Place hosts and maintains PLOT: Professional Learning Online Tool. This is a strategic leadership resource that supports whole school professional learning. It is authored by Joan Dalton (Handson Educational Consultancy) who is a leading educator and author.

PLOT is a rich and comprehensive resource, offering you the practical strategies, processes and tools needed to build and sustain a dynamic professional community focused on quality learning and teaching.

Access to PLOT is via an annual school subscription: www.plotpd.com or individual subscription.