How Michael Rose inspires self-directed and visual learning with Atomi

Inspiring self-directed and visual learning. An Atomi teacher story: Michael Rose, Academic Dean of Health and Physical Education at The Cathedral College.

The challenge

A dynamic co-educational Catholic school with vision, The Cathedral College seeks to empower its students to realise their full academic potential. In its quest to fulfil that mission, the college invests in ‘gifted, dedicated and professional teachers that ignite student’s imagination in well-resourced facilities’. Michael Rose, Academic Dean of Health and Physical Education, is one of those teachers.

Committed to upholding the school’s strong reputation for delivering a sophisticated and progressive Curriculum, Michael began his search for engaging online content relevant to the Queensland Syllabus. Frustrated by a lack of appropriate content elsewhere, Michael was relieved to find Atomi in mid-2019.

YouTube and other online resources only have so much PE content and it is usually not tailored to our syllabus, that is what makes Atomi so great.

In Atomi, Michael found engaging and interesting videos with “perfect alignment to the new Queensland Syllabus”. From informing his teaching with data to using quizzes to encourage active learning, Atomi has become an integrated part of Michaels teaching strategy.

Strategy

Incorporating Atomi into his teaching strategy in multiple ways, Michael can rely on the platform to advance his student’s knowledge in and outside of the classroom. In a nod to asynchronous learning, Michael uses Atomi in a flipped approach to teaching, assigning upcoming content before his next lesson.

I find when the students engage with the videos and questions at home before attending the lesson in person, they have a much greater base knowledge of the content to build on in the lesson.

Supporting the visual learners within Michael’s class, Atomi provides an opportunity to visually unpack complex concepts that are otherwise difficult for the students to understand. As his students complete Atomi lessons, Michael can access data to help him determine how well his class is performing comparative to key benchmarks.

Atomi provides an analysis tool that lets you compare your classes results against not only the school but the whole state! I find this very useful leading into an external examination.

By further unpacking this data student by student, Michael can then diagnose concerns, assign revision, or allow those with a solid understanding to progress to the next level.

Impact

Combining engaging videos with high-quality quizzes and timely feedback, integrating Atomi into his class has given Michael’s students a helpful overview of how they’re going with each topic. Inspiring self-directed learning, uptake of Atomi amongst Michael’s students has been impressive.

We are at a point now where we don’t even need to assign content as tasks, the students just choose to take them on their own accord!

Supporting innovative educators like Michael to enrich their students learning is an important element of how Atomi measures success. Seeing students like Michael’s evolve to increasing levels of independent learning in less than a year of engaging with the platform is a success worth celebrating.

• School type: Co-educational Catholic Independent Boarding College
• Established: 1991
• Students: 1214
• Teaching staff: 80

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