learning

Free Documentaries

free-documentaries

One of the good things about doing break time duty is that you get to talk to staff that you would normally not get to know.  You also find out things that you didn’t know and some of them turn out to be useful.  Top Documentary Films is a site which catalogues a bunch of free documentaries found on various video sites on the web.  I scanned a few and some were English with foreign subtitles, others vice-versa and regular English no subs.  Using the VideoDownloadHelper plugin for Firefox I can transfer these videos to our internal PHP Motion server so that students can watch them without cranking through the bandwidth.  Another great resource.

NEN

Ultra Fast Broadband and NZ Education

ultra-fast-broadband-and-nz-education

After attending the Learning without Limits roadshow hosted by Marg McLeod (Change Manager, Broadband In Schools, Ministry of Education)  and Douglas Harre (Senior ICT Consultant, Ministry of Education) a few points struck me…….

Why strive to provide Ultra Fast Broadband in NZ Schools? While I totally agree with the following points made at the meeting:

•Online world now integral to students’ lives
•Increasing evidence that learning in online environments can significantly enhance engagement + lift achievement.
•Particularly effective for students who don’t respond to traditional teaching methods.
•Students can collaborate and learn anytime, anywhere and from anyone.
•In other words – learning without limits

I do believe we need to carefully identify how we are intending to use this resource and, just as importantly, how we are going to pay for it!!
The issue is that since ‘Tomorrows schools’ was introduced in the 1980′s we have all become ‘self managing’ and while that has allowed each community and school to make its own decision on how they do their “Core business”, I am increasingly concerned on how that is impacting ICT costs and ICT for Learning in schools.

While all schools understand their own community best, often there is nobody in the school that understands ICT infrastructures and how they relate to the successful implementation of learning in the school. Consequently, this job is left to the IT Technician or some classroom teacher with an interest or some ‘spare’ time. This often results in schools spending large amounts of $$$ to the vendor with the flashiest solution rather than the one that is best fit for both the school and the staff who will need to use it. Talking to schools, they are continually pelted with sales promotions for IWB’s, Software solutions, LMs’s, E-Portfolio solution, Phone solutions, wireless access etc etc etc ….and now its all the companies trying to sign schools up to fibre as fast as possible before the overall fibre Tender is announced in October.

I believe the most important aspect of the meeting last week was the Ministry basically asking for a mandate from schools to look at tendering for the ongoing cost of Fibre access to the school PLUS the data used. While this would come out of our bulk grants, the pricing they would be able to get for 2300+ schools would have to be better than we can get individually!! Our meeting unanimously ‘passed’ for this to happen so if we are willing to do this then perhaps the climate is right to put back into place some Educational IT specialists with geographic ‘regions of responsibility’ who are not advisors but individuals employed by the Ministry (maybe from ‘tagged staffing’) with the responsibility for liaising between the schools and vendors and who have the responsibility of ‘ticking off’ major IT purchases for ALL schools in the area. This would allow them to organise regional tenders for all the items that schools are presently trying to buy ….and due to ‘economy  of scale’ the deals the schools would get would be a major financial win.

Then the next trick would be to set up the same sort of regional positions to provide ongoing IT professional development leadership ……but that’s a whole other post in the making!!

Just for those of you who were wondering what’s available presently via the National Education Network  …if you are lucky enough to be on it :

Time for some inspiration.

time-for-some-inspiration

There are times when I start to feel a little stale cocooned in my world and I have forgotten to look outside.  Thanks to my new iPad I found this as I browsed video podcasts on iTunes.

Academic: On a pedestal it doesn’t deserve?

As jobs get more scarce young people are opting to stay in education and some universities are starting to put caps on their intake, they just don’t have enough seats.  The result of more people in tertiary education is bound to result in more people coming out with the same qualification, often a degree without an obvious career route, therefore creating even greater competition for the few jobs available.

I was recently involved in a discussion about the Technology achievement standards vs ITO (Industry Trade Organisation) unit standards in which it was suggested that one (unit standard) was lower in value to the other. Compared to what?  There is no comparison, they are very different routes.  In fact I would argue that the ITO has more long term value because it can lead to paid apprenticeship and clear pathway to employment, whereas tertiary education leads to a now common qualification and a lifetime of debt.

It is nearly 2010 and we still think that we get the most value from academia, even though both founders of Google and the founder of Microsoft dropped out of college to pursue their businesses.

It is time we stop looking from the top down to looking from the bottom up and asking ourselves, as teachers, what is the value to the individual student?  What is the point in driving them hard up a road which doesn’t suit them just because of a perception of prestige?

I happen to have a degree which I earned later in life (27) and my childhood friends who left school at age 16 now run successful businesses.  I feel that we expect so much of our young people at school that we forget that they a just kids and maybe we should allow them to enjoy it a bit more.  In the words of Jeff Jarvis author of “What Would Google Do?” – Youth is something we only get once, education is something we can do at anytime in our lives.  He is not saying we should not educate our young people rather have less emphasis on the type of academic achievement we expect.

For me the things I learned at school make up a tiny amount of the useful knowledge in my head, most of my knowledge has probably been learned in the previous 4 or 5 years of my life.  I’m not really sure what that means but I guess it has something to do with trying to stay relevant, which will no doubt get harder as I get older.

Everlong

I downmarkdaviesloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now.  It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”.  It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.

I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying  to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped.  Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour.  Even my wife said it sounded good.

I picked up a couple of key points from the video.  Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier.  Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets.  Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.

I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this.  Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.