The Sydney Olympic Park Authority (SOPA) Education Unit delivers curriculum based school excursion programs and events to over 30,000 K-12 school students annually. These programs focus on Geography, Science, History and cross-curriculum priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History and Cultures and Sustainability.
Our suite of place-based school excursions are (usually!) experiential, immersive, hands-on learning opportunities that share our unique story of sustainable development, environmental conservation and heritage management across the Parklands, urban township and Heritage Precincts of Sydney Olympic Park. We also have annual marquee education events, the Primary and Secondary Youth Eco Summits (YES) which involve more than 40 partnering organisations.
As a response to the service delivery challenges we are facing with customers unable to attend school excursions, SOPA currently has live-streaming virtual excursions and customised resource packages for teachers in rapid development. From next week under the mantle of ‘Park Live’ these interactive programs will enable classes and/or individual students to connect directly to our educators in the wetlands using Zoom conferencing. Here is a glimpse of a what the students will be involved in during a live-streamed virtual excursion in their classrooms. They will be able to interact with the SOPA Educator and any other presenter partners that we have joining the virtual excursion. This video clip is starring one of our casual Educators Tom who also runs nature based public tours with his company “Hooked on Nature”.
Where possible we will engage other partners and industry experts to enhance each live-stream session. Our next steps will be to extend this approach to our heritage programs, technical tours, ArtExpress at the Armory and courses for Wetland professionals. We will then look at the potential for interactive live-stream models to deliver our YES events out to schools. We have immense pride in our place as a huge outdoor classroom and will continue to connect people safely to our programs and resources however we can. If you want to partner in this or simply talk through the technical aspects of the approach please contact mike.bartlett@sopa.nsw.gov.au or danielle.leggo@sopa.nsw.gov.au.