Gifted Students
Gifted Students
Now available for students in the middle years of 5 to 8 is a tailored made program to extend gifted students and help them reach their full potential.
Justin Mahoney was hired in 2020 to teach gifted students in the ground-breaking Australian first Virtual Academy program in the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic diocese.
The Virtual Academy is an online program that encourages gifted students in stages 3 and 4 to learn with autonomy and to engage with intellectual peers and expert mentors. This position involved creating innovative and advanced curricula with global perspectives.
Justin will use these skills to design a personalised learning plan for identified gifted students that uses a strengths based approach. He will then design a specialised online learning program around concept based learning that can be used to extend your gifted students and meet the requirements of government policies for gifted students.
Justin holds a Masterclass Certificate in Gifted Education from the University of New South Wales.
Our Achievements with Gifted Students
- Created new global expert network through locating industry professionals and facilitating video conferences with students. Experts were sourced from institutions such as Harvard, Cambridge and MIT.
- Designed new online presentation system, allowing students to combine their webcam with advanced PowerPoint features to create one seamless video. This allowed all 25 of my students to submit excellent major projects and successfully overcome challenges of the COVID period.
- Introduced social learning program “Flipgrid” to the Virtual Academy, encouraging a feedback loop.
- Introduced math and science to the academy by writing a new 45-page program for a cross-curricula unit on the concept of “Time”. This involved working collaboratively with gifted education experts. The end result is a 16 week unit differentiated across three levels of giftedness.
- Created extension projects for Year 7 and 8 Geography students.
- Incorporated Hattie’s success criteria leading to quality student projects.
- Produced 20 online video tutorials using Pinnacle multimedia software.
- Integrated an ATSI perspective into Virtual Academy with the idea of Indigenous visual art workshops, meeting AITSL standards 1.4 and 2.4.
- Promoted Virtual Academy, leading to first front page story and first mention in Parliament about the Academy. Very much appreciated by diocesan staff, who uploaded to CSO Facebook page.
- Very positive feedback from former Gifted Education Officer Sally Brock, Principal‘s, teachers, students and parents about my ability to communicate with students in a caring and positive manner, whilst still challenging them to reach their full potential.