The Educated Kiwi
Posts tagged australia
Arthur Philip High School
Nov 23rd
Last Monday was the first of our school visits in Australia where we were hosted by APHS. I took the photo below from the second story balcony.
We went back after visiting here in 2006 and to be honest we stole their great idea of school owned laptops. It is nice to see the contrast between the Australia and NZ education systems and Lynne, the principal at APHS certainly gave us the grand tour, in fact we went back on the Tuesday to have a look at their new literacy programme as this is something we will be looking at Implementing in 2008 but more on that in the next post. We even got to show off the wiimote boards which was to be the only time in Australia that anyone was interested. I guess that when all your students have laptops the need for teacher directed learning is somewhat lessened.
Australia Streaking Ahead?
Jun 24th
On reading that NSW is going to abandon Microsoft Office in favor of Open Office I was impressed. The path of least resistance was to simply keep on with Office but no, in typical Aussie fashion they are going to thumb their noses and go with change. What does this mean for us? I guess we won’t be far behind especially after Douglas Harre’s statements at the recent edtech meetings. I do find myself agreeing that in 2001 the Microsoft agreement was a good idea as word processing etc was different just like I feel sorry for those clusters that came before us when there was so much less opportunity with ICT. I would like to make the transition sooner rather than later especially as staff are switching to Office 2007 anyway and have been giving OO.org out to staff to use at home or on family members computers. Many of course struggle to believe how can something be good if it is free.
Also in the article was the governments laptop for every student, well it would seem they meant computer access for every student but I digress I enjoyed reading the comments on many of the blogs surrounding this governmental decision and the overwhelming negativity within them. I worry that people don’t get the point.
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