IWB Gold Coast | Educating the Dragon

October 11, 2007

Sitech- leading the way in school/company partnership?

Filed under: Dragon09, Education, Flaxmere, ICT, ICTPD, IWB Gold Coast, Interwrite, Professional Development, ULearn07, classroom management, communication, conferences, digitaldeco, learningatschool, school2.0 — Dragon09 @ 2:16 pm

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. Interwrite Board

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

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September 21, 2007

If not us, me, then who?

Filed under: Dragon09, Education, Friedman, General interest, IWB Gold Coast, Professional Development, Society2.0, Ted McCain, Uncategorized, VUW, Vicki A Davis, communication, jukes, school2.0, warlick — Dragon09 @ 2:39 pm

I may have quit my course but my brain is still working overtime. Over the next weeks you may have to read through my ramblings about the things I have learnt.

I want to talk about Explorers, I feel we are all explorers in new ICTs. We’re the ones experimenting in the classroom. The edublogosphere is filled with cases of people explaining and reflecting on their ever changing practises with ICT in their classrooms. We’re dealing with real experiences, real students, real observations. But what makes our observations valid? Are we engaging in critical thinking and and reflecting in the right way? Jane Nicholl’s work on Oral Language and podcasting is perhaps a good example. Many of Vicki Davies reflections are critical in nature. But much of our, mine most of all, observations and reflections are low level and classed by academia as ‘anecdotal’. My concern lies in the fact that we are all at the cutting edge, where today’s technologies meet today’s students. But the quality of our reflections, perhaps, needs to go up a notch as Falloon comments “ there has been little conclusive empirical research to prove” (Falloon, 2003, p. 23) that ICT enhances outcomes for students. If academia is dismissing our contribution as ‘anecdotal’ then that filters through to policy makers and curriculum designers. We have an opportunity to drag the educational perspective out of the industrial age and into the 21^st century, as noted by David Warlick , and others.

So do we need to be thinking about our practise in terms of Jonassen’s Mindtools, or Atkin’s papers? How relevant are these theoretical perspectives? Do we need to consider such things to draw our experiences out of the micro level and up to a macro level? Is that our job or is someone else going to pull all this anecdotal material together for us to present the 21^st century classroom perspective?

If not us, me, then who?

Falloon, G. (1999). Developing exemplary practice: Why are some teachers better at IT than others? Computers in New Zealand Schools, 15 (1), 19-23.

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September 18, 2007

I’m done with International travel for a while

Filed under: Dragon09, IWB Gold Coast, My Education — Dragon09 @ 10:25 pm

I’m free to blog now as it has all been sorted now…. but boy was it scary.

I went to the Australian IWBNet Conference 30 Aug- 1 Sept. I presented a couple of times as most of you are aware from my odd little posted, with random videos.

It was not until I began my return trip did it all begin to go wrong. I was picked up by a shuttle at 4.45 am to take me to Brisbane Airport- they dropped me off 6.00 ish. Which was fine. I went to check in and my ‘Permanent Residence Visa’ was not quite as permanent as I thought…. It had expired ONE WHOLE YEAR ago. With a title like ‘Permanent Residence Visa’ you’d of thought it was ….. well not so… 2 years you get and that was 3 years ago for me. So I have to sit, panic stricken about being picked up by customs at the other end. I had visions of being sent back to England. So did my wife when I called her. But equal to that fear was appearing on Border Patrol a few shifty looking fellas from Bangkok or somewhere weirder. So I sit for three and a half hours with all this rolling around in my head. Then I think, “Ok, its going to be okay. I’ll sit on my 747, find some episode of CSI or Will and Grace I haven’t seen, take my mind off it for a couple of hours, worry about it all when I land at Auckland.” That was my plan.

Air New Zealand had another plan, which involved a 737 with no TV screen in the back of the seat but one between 8 of us embedded in the overhead thingy, plus we had some Ben Stiller nonsense on, so really it was good that I also had a set of faulty headphones! So instead of having aimless comedy to distract me I’m left flicking through my passport, shaking my head and muttering to myself about the flexible use of the word ‘permanent’.

As I arrive at Auckland, I present myself to the customs, explain the situation and… I kid you not the guy presses a button and I hear…”Pick up on aisle 13″….. I thought I heard “Someone from produce, please, customer waiting” but perhaps not.

Anyway, a nice NZ customs official asks if I could collect my “luggage and wait over on those seats, please.” The first wave of relief washes over me as I see there is no TV crew anywhere in sight. But I’m still panicked. Desperately thinking of possible character references. Maybe now is not the best time to mention all my ‘virtual friends’ as my wife calls you all. (I used to have an imaginary friend when I was a kid, they were a real person, I just imagined they were my friend, I digress) Long and short of it is, by the time I got my luggage, the guy had stamped my passport with a months visitor permit and gave me a sheet which effectively read, “You a plonker, get yourself sorted out!”

Here ends my tale.

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