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Finigan School of Distance Education is located in Queanbeyan (20 minutes west of Canberra). This school has the current capacity to educate 1,000 students in distance education. These students are either travelling, living in remote NSW locations, attend a communal learning hub periodically, or have behavioural or medical conditions that prevent them from attending mainstream school.

Opening on Day 1, Term 2, 2019, Finigan School of Distance Education opened its doors to approximately 1,000 students from Kindergarten to Year 12. Under the leadership of Mr Daniel Rattigan, Finigan School of Distance Education offers a state of the art facility where teachers can provide personalised delivery of content to students individually and in small groups using collaborative technology such as Adobe Connect, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. This unique setting is most renowned for the innovative approach it has established to providing quality teaching and learning materials to its students.

To maximise the teaching and learning opportunities for its teachers and students, Finigan are working closely with the Foundations.T4L team to maximise the use of technology in flexible learning environments. This is being achieved through the delivery of Professional Learning opportunities and co-teaching with the schools teaching staff, creating alliances with 3rd party vendors and embedding technological practice into current teaching programs and more.

Finigan have a plethora of unique technologies that provide unique opportunities that are yet to be seen in distance education elsewhere. These permit students to engage and interact with their teachers in real time via video conferencing. Teachers use a range of tools, predominately Microsoft Teams to work with their students allowing continuous communication, immediate access to resources and feedback. Film studios with state of the art cameras, microphones, and green screens have been installed to allow students to create videos that explain content in a personalised context. All of these technologies are led by Microsoft’s 21st Century Learning Design Framework that underpins the pedagogy in both primary and secondary schools as well as in KLAs.

As part of its school strategic direction, Finigan School of Distance Education aims to provide each of its students with a device so that all students can be connected to a teacher and feel supported throughout the duration of their course. The school’s passion is to educate all students regardless of the obstacles they face in gaining an education.