Educating the Dragon

My school is part of the Sitech Champion Schools programme. As part of that programme the staff here have been involved with a professional development model that appears to be working. Hardware and software have been purchased for the school and the company has provided many hours of training and professional development in it’s use in the classroom environment.

Private provision is an interesting situation, company’s vary in there product and support available. I would be interested to know of any strategy or framework which guides this aspect of school provision. As the product and support varies from company to company the experience of both staff and students also varies along with the development of ICT within the school. Is this a good thing, or bad?

Perhaps the diversity of provision is advantageous in Early Childhood and Primary phases but I would surmise that as students’ progress through Secondary and onto Tertiary national parity would be more desirable to ensure an ICT literate workforce.

Sitech Learning Zone

Well gee, I can’t say I haven’t had an interesting week. Have spent much of the last couple of weeks researching Higher Order Thinking Skills, writing assignment one and putting together my power point presentation for the Digital Deco ICT conference. I finished it on the Tuesday night…… Smiled quietly to my self for 24 hours and then promptly dropped said laptop off the kitchen bench, trust me, they’re not really designed for that.

I then spent all of Thursday panicked that I’d lost my assignment and power point presentation, and that I’d spend all night Thursday redoing it. Fortunately for me a guy called Andy from East Coast Computers came over, took out the hard drive and managed to pull the two documents off. Yippee.

It is only then that the real fun begins. I arrive on the Friday all ready to go, memory stick in hand and the promise of a borrowed laptop.

PRS is a great system…. Classroom response unit. Unfortunately there were a couple of features involved in embedding in Power point that I over looked. There can only be ONE asked question per page NOT the 2 or 3 I had planned, also the Question when it comes up creates a ‘toolbar’ across the top. Couple these two together and you have a rather wonky presentation document with custom animation going off when it shouldn’t. Ahhh!

We were only given an hour so, yep you guessed it, I didn’t get finished. Not only that but we barely got started on applying Higher Order Thinking to a curriculum area. Doh!

Finally I have a deligate say quite openly “I am bored now,” – I mean how should one respond?

Just for the record I, for one, was not bored, Freaked, yes, disappointed, yes, embarrassed, certainly.

Twas a chapter of disasters from start to finish.

Chrissy, on the other hand preformed incredibly well. Her wonderfulworldofwikis presentation was an inspiration to all who attended. She even had someone who created her own wikispace for the presentation she was giving immediately after. Go Chrissy.

Btw I have to mention that she called Vicki the “Wiki Queen”- well in made me smile at the time- probably just one of those ‘had to be there things.

Presentation time coming up…. Skype Talk and Write with my friend Chrissy and then a ‘Using technology for Higher Order Thinking’ on my lonesome.

Have just finished the presentation, I’m really pleased! This means that I have also finished the first draft of Assignment one for VUW. Am hoping I’ll get some brainstorming ideas when I do my presentation to help me put the finishing touchs to the assignment. All this thinking about thinking, kinda makes your brain go in circles.

Slide share is a funny thing, I’ve put on too many overlapping things for it to be useful, will have to redo it, it’ll look alright on screen but not as a download. I’ll share it with you when I’m finished.

Sorry about the lack of links, I’m just toooooo tired.