School of the Air
School of the Air is a special type of school in the sparsely populated regions of Australia. Pupils of primary and lower secondary I are taught in distance learning.
The transfer was carried out initially by means of short -wave radio and is now set to Internet technologies. The homework will be sent by e -mail or via the Internet also for teachers. Each student receives per day about an hour group or individual lessons. The rest of the day he learns with the materials sent to them under the guidance of parents, older siblings or a set tutor.
A School of the Air, there are, among others, in Broken Hill, Alice Springs, Mount Isa and Meekatharra. The school in Alice Springs was the first school of its kind and was established in 1951. It currently has around 120 students, spread over an area of 1,000,000 km ². Approximately 15 percent of these children are Aboriginal.
The facility in Alice Springs has a visitor center that is open every day of the week for tourists. Here you can watch the morning broadcasts.
In January 1960 the first School of the Air in Cloncurry Queensland, in line with the Flying Doctors, founded and four years later moved with the Flying Doctors to Mount Isa. Currently, about 220 children are educated ( about 150 families), from pre-school to 10th grade. The catchment area reaches from the Northern Territory border in the west to Richmond in the east and from the north to Burketown to Birdsville in the south. The school is fully funded by the school district of Queensland. The families get a phone and headphones from the school asked to give all students the family have left the school.
In a 30 -minute lesson a teacher speaks with a maximum of 10 students. There are also two pairs of teachers, so-called field teams. Visit in their 4WD cars all registered students. It takes 40 weeks travel time of the year to visit all students. Subjects are language, mathematics, geography, science, art, media, and librarianship. German is a second language. From the fully automated library CD -ROMs, videos and books are sent to the students. It is now thought about this also to integrate the Internet with. Teachers and students communicate via webcam and headsets. Teachers can so students switching on and off, depending on the individual interview or group work. A guided tour takes place on school days at 9 clock and 10 clock.
Since the children live in relative isolation, the School of the Air is their first opportunity socialization with other children outside the family. This is funded through annual meetings, where the children of a class travel for a week after Alice Springs and spend time with their classmates and teachers.