Let's talk about learning and leading
My young daughter keeps a WordPress blog. She calls it ‘My Pet Shop – A space to care for little ideas’ and it uses the ‘strange little town’ theme because it’s pink with strange little houses along the bottom. She adds photos, comments, recordings using Soundcloud and video. Her main focus at the moment is […]
Read More Does a blog matter if no-one replies?Highly recommended summary of four “big ideas” that underpin the development of the web, from the author of Growing Up Digital and Macrowikinomics. Need three reasons to watch? Tapscott’s fluent linking of stories to illustrate the exponential development of the web, and the shifts in the way we now think about collaboration, transparency, embracing the […]
Read More Tapscott at TED: Four principles for an open worldIt’s been a busy couple of weeks at a couple of conference days in Taranaki and Napier – and the highlight of Friday was a day spent with the Digital Daze cluster, in workshops and with a keynote, before their community celebration that was their DigiAwards. A key idea that I and colleague, Chrissie Butler, […]
Read More ICTs in education: What’s important?A simple but effective tip a friend shared the other day, based on advice from a cybersecurity event: Think of a line from your favourite song. For example, ‘love will tear us apart again’ (a particular favourite of mine from Joy Division – but not the one I chose;-) Add a punctuation mark e.g. ! […]
Read More How to create a great passwordInteresting how, once you see a reference to an idea, it pops up everywhere. And although this work from Michael Fullan came out last year, it’s slid across my radar twice this week. Fullan’s paper – Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform (April, 2011) – highlights that policy makers who select the wrong […]
Read More Pedagogy, not technologyIt’s certainly an interesting question – to what extent ICT raises student achievement – and I appreciate the accountability that schools have, especially after significant investment from the BoTs:-) While we do need to be asking questions about the impact of our teaching, I’m not sure that focusing on the impact on ICT alone is the right […]
Read More How to assess impact of ICTs on learning?One-off keynotes or professional learning events are always an exciting challenge – such a short period of time and an unknown range of learning needs, expertise and interest in the room. Last week, I had the pleasure of working with 130 teachers from three schools in Auckland, two primary and one intermediate. It was a […]
Read More How I personalised the PDThe question comes up frequently in discussions related to using technologies in education: Why do we still have the ‘e’ in ‘e-learning’? Shouldn’t it be just about the learning? And doesn’t the retention of the ‘e’ just perpetuate a short-sighted focus on the tech, not the teach? These questions, in my experience, often come from […]
Read More 2 reasons to keep the ‘e’ in e-learning[This is cross-posted to/from the Enabling e-Learning: Leadership group] A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to the PoriruaNet Cluster conference, to facilitate a couple of workshops on Enabling e-Learning and blended professional learning for schools. It was great to see four schools coming together to explore the way they were using technology for learning – […]
Read More Managing BYOD at Albany Senior High | Notes from PoriruaNet“What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology…No amount of technology will make a dent…. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a website in every school – none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something […]
Read More Teach carpentry, not hammer | Future-proofing NZ schools