Educating the Dragon

How appropriate.

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According to a Newsweek article dated Nov 5 Google may have some competition. Making money off the Internet in this R/W age always causes my head to spin. Google’s global dominance of the Search Engine world allows it the luxury of adding Ads to their searches, to the tune of $12 billion dollars according to the article.

But they are NOT the only search engine out there, not by a long chalk. Here are some others, but be prepared to sit and wait a while, certainly compared to Google’s 450,000 server blink.

Healthline

Globalspecs

Like.com

Spock

Yahoo

Acoona

Ask.com

Clusty

Sproose

Nosyjoe

Wikia

KartOO

KooltTorch

Quintura

Squidoo

Hakia

Lexxe

Powerset

The irony of it is that in order to find these unfamiliar search engines I Googled them.

I wonder if any of them would suit student search better than GoogleKids.

What a disappointing start to such a collaborative effort which offers such focused guidance for 21^st Century education.

The new New Zealand Curriculum landed in my cubby hole yesterday. I have been a diligent student of the National Curriculum (a geek if you ask my colleagues in school). But it is good to see that the language in the ‘Vision’ part of the document remains.

It sets high expectations of the future. It acknowledges the global community and the abilities that the next generation of New Zealanders are going to require if they are to thrive in this inter-connected world.

It will be interesting to see how schools around the nation interpret this revised focus:

What does confident really mean in the classroom/school? How do we ‘teach’ that? (infuse that?)

What does connected mean, outside the blogosphere? Should mean the same and what will the impact of that be on the schools and their operating budgets?

How are we going to contextualise our students learning in any meaningful, sustainable way? Social, cultural, economic and environmental are all great words which potentially have huge impacts on the way we ‘do’ school.

Life Long learning is something that many of us have been grappling with for sometime now and at the heart of the matter, I believe, is the emotional development of intrinsic motivation, how are schools moving towards this golden key to education in the 21^st century?

So are our students CCALLed into the bright shining 21^st century?

Confident

Connected

Actively involved

Lifelong…

Learners ….?

and if they are not yet what are we going to do about it? As I typed this question I realised that it is not a tick box answer, are they connected? Yes could they be more so? Yes. Are they Confident?Yes. Could they be…. and so it goes on.

It’s been one of those days all month and the next few weeks don’t look any different.

Have you had times in your life like you wish it could be hyperlinked so you can do several things at once?

 Here’s my example, please just hover over the links (they are not real)

 Today, prepare for reliever, finish off NUMP snapshots for ‘non targeted kids’, prepare presentation on Higher Order Thinking (For real link click here),  review material for presentation at meeting for Interactive Whiteboard training, This afternoon teach my kids something, probably writing, final classroom preparations for ERO visit.

Tomorrow: teach my kids, welcome a visitor into my classroom and demonstrate PRS in use, Final preparation for Flaxmere ICT conference presentation, listen to Karen Boyes speak, DO my presentation, out tonight with my wife and friends.

Yep, I wish reality could be hyperlinked sometimes….

Hey have you seen there are two kiwi finalists in the Interwrite competition.

Ilminster Intermediate School

Pt England School

Check them out at the links provided and vote as you see fit…. I think they’re pretty special!