Posted in blogging on Aug 22nd, 2007 No Comments »
Looking forward next week to breaking my own cyber-safe advice and meeting two people I’ve only ever connected up with online.
Graham Wegner, from South Australia, writer of Teaching Generation Z blog, and Jo McLeay of The Open Classroom blog from good ol’ Melbourne are both presenting at the VITTA session below called Live to Learn, [...]
Posted in education-news, politics, teaching on Aug 16th, 2007 No Comments »
A colleague pointed out this page on the Australian Government Education website, with the full 151 page report providing an overview of the the current pay arrangements for teachers in Australian schools, particularly in relation to performance based bay. The report was commissioned by DEST and completed by Lawrence Ingvarson and others. The page [...]
Posted in learning on Aug 15th, 2007 4 Comments »
Interesting burst of sanity in an AGE feature this week by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen who argues for a return to the joy of reading and rejects the polarising polemics of those like Kevin Donnelly who ague that students are being taught text-messaging when they should be learning Shakespeare.
Although slightly off the point, it came in the [...]
Posted in education-news, politics on Aug 13th, 2007 No Comments »
A while ago I remember former Education Minister (now ‘defence man walking’) Brendan Nelson telling a group of assembled teachers that parents were demanding plain language reports because they’d emailed and phoned his office to tell him. No evidence whatsoever to support that wildly anecdotal claim.
Now, we have the current minister doubting the results of [...]
Posted in education-news on Aug 13th, 2007 1 Comment »
It’s been 21 years since the Challenger disaster but it was great to see another teacher return to space in the NASA space shuttle mission launched this week. The recognition that, along with scientists, engineers and mathematicians, that a teacher might be ‘worthy’ is good to see, and a good message from the program.
NASA’s [...]
Posted in learning environments on Aug 7th, 2007 2 Comments »
We were lucky enough recently to have novelist Angela Savage working as a ‘writer in residence’ at our school for a week or so, giving some writing classes as well as working with individual students.
Angela Savage was terrific in the way she was able to work with groups of students and individuals and some [...]
