The Northern Territory Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) today began the rollout of Macquarie University's open-source Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) software to all NT public schools.

It will be used to improve learning through greater student collaboration and engagement, together with interactive whiteboards.

DEET's manager of online services, Jenny Buckworth, said LAMS is expected to greatly assist student learning through collaborative activities.

"We're also excited about the ability for teachers to share their LAMS lesson plans with other teachers to foster a community of sharing good practice," she said.

LAMS is an e-learning system for creating, running and monitoring 'digital lesson plans'. LAMS is used by thousands of educators in over 80 countries and is translated into 25 languages.

While LAMS has been widely used by individual schools and universities in Australia and overseas, this announcement is the first state or territory wide rollout.

LAMS development is led by Professor James Dalziel at Macquarie University in Sydney. LAMS is freely available as open source software from Macquarie's non-profit LAMS Foundation.

Professor Dalziel said it is a step forward to see LAMS adoption moving beyond individual schools to an entire education system.

He said a unique feature of LAMS is the ability for teachers to share digital lesson plans with each other.

"So when a whole school system adopts LAMS, this benefit is magnified by having a large community of teachers sharing and improving each other's great teaching ideas. This sharing ultimately fosters better educational outcomes," Dalziel said.

Macquarie University is hosting the 2nd International LAMS Conference in late November, with educators from around Australia and the world coming together to share their experiences. Conference details are available at http://www.lamsfoundation.org/