Executive Summary:
Faced with an aging AV setup that hindered student-centered learning and teacher mobility, Australian International School Hong Kong turned to Vivi. By seamlessly integrating with existing equipment, Vivi empowers dynamic teaching, enabling educators to move freely, share content easily, and foster a more collaborative and student-centered learning environment.
Background
Australian International School Hong Kong (AISHK) is an educational institution offering a dual curriculum that combines Australian and international frameworks. Catering to more than 1,100 students representing over 25 nationalities from Reception (age 4) to Year 12, AISHK places a strong emphasis on balancing academics and student well-being.
The school operates on a single campus built across ten floors that includes a swimming pool on the ninth floor. With one tall building and traditional classroom set-ups serving a range of ages, AISHK was interested in upgrading the classroom experience. The successful adoption of Vivi is credited to the leadership of Brendan Kean (Head of Primary), Steven Heath (Director of Technology and Innovation), and Nicholas Petersen (Digital Learning Specialist).
Challenge
AISHK’s aging AV setup hindered their efforts to empower students with more control over their learning. Teachers used their own laptops to connect to projectors via HDMI cables, limiting their mobility and the flexibility of classroom interactions. The traditional classroom layout, combined with the outdated technology, restricted teachers to the front of the room, inhibiting the dynamic, student-centered learning environment they wanted to create. Additionally, the diverse technology infrastructure, including a mix of “bring-your-own” Windows-based devices and iPads, created compatibility issues, particularly with consumer-oriented solutions like Apple TV that did not function well across all platforms.
To balance academics and student well-being, Kean, Heath, and Petersen sought a versatile, cost-effective solution. Their aim was to free teachers from the front of the classroom and engage students actively in daily lessons.
Solution
Following market research and a strong recommendation from a teacher who had used Vivi at a previous school, the AISHK team decided to install Vivi on their existing panels to modernize the learning environment across their classrooms.
Freed from their tethers, this solution allowed teachers to place their desks anywhere in the room and move freely about the classroom. The ease of sharing content through Vivi enabled both teachers and students to project their work onto the screens effortlessly, creating a more interactive and collaborative classroom atmosphere.
Heath says their new Vivi solution provides “a good balance between having all of those functions that a school requires to be able to allow teachers to access technology, access projection, and for the school to provide, install and implement it in a very easy way compared to some other setups which just aren’t as straightforward. Vivi offered the correct price point for the features that we’re looking for.”
Beyond the classroom implementations, Vivi enhances the efficiency of staff meetings, enabling a seamless sharing of documents and ideas, making collaborative planning more efficient and fluid.
Outcome
Implementing Vivi across classrooms has positively impacted how teachers engage with students, allowing for more dynamic teaching methods and creating a more student-centered learning environment. In freeing teachers from the front of the classroom, they have also freed teachers to be more creative.
Transforming the physical classroom
With training and guidance on their new Vivi solution from Petersen, teachers began to reimagine their classroom layouts, taking advantage of the flexibility offered by Vivi to move around and engage with students more dynamically. According to Petersen, “if you walk across our floors, you see teachers at all different spots in the classroom. Some of them are right at the front, some of them are in the center of the room like a home base style and some of them might be in the back corner. As teachers come into a new space, maybe at the beginning of the year and they know that they have this technology, it does allow them to shift their approach and to drive that classroom a little bit differently.” While this shift required some initial coaching, it resulted in teachers being more mobile and interactive than ever before.
Enabling an active learning environment
For students: Students also benefited from the increased ability to share and discuss their work, leading to a more student-centered learning environment. The ability to compare work side-by-side on the screens created deeper discussions. Petersen refers to these as authentic teaching moments, saying, “It’s a really nice thing when you can put some student work up during the middle of a lesson and have a student discuss, putting it more into a student-centered focus.” Kean agrees, saying “[Vivi] really does make them an active learner in the classroom.”
For teachers: When asked what they love most about Vivi, AISHK teachers say they have found freedom. Vivi allows them to innovate and to create. To paraphrase Kean, Vivi enhances the learning experience rather than replacing it. Whether they are proximity teaching, sitting with students in small groups, or facilitating a student-led discussion as students project and share their work, teachers are free to move about and share lessons quickly and easily in a more engaging environment.
Device agnostic and cost effective
Heath appreciates the overall value that Vivi brings to address their key challenges and meet their mission of balancing academics and student well-being. “I think the biggest value that we get from this technology is the fact that it’s device agnostic, very cost efficient in terms of the use allows us to repurpose and reuse existing hardware that we have and it’s relatively simple for teachers to log in and to use it,” making a substantial improvement in the school’s pedagogical approach.
Extending solutions throughout the school
The team has also brought Vivi into their meetings with the Deputy Head of Primary’s office, which operates as their central hub for team planning. Petersen shares that Vivi simplifies and enhances sharing from any device in the meeting room, “if someone wants to share something quickly, they can easily hop on Vivi to share with the room, then go back to the planning document, or agenda. We all have this simple software that we can just open up quickly and jump on to share with the group.”
