Jul 08
18
As term 3 lines up ready to roll, here are some ideas around some resources etc which you may find interesting. It’s a bit of a grab bag and many of them will be already familiar to you.
First off, here’s a paper which contains 2 points of view from Scotland. This was posted to the Grapevine list and may be a way of encouraging some debate and discussion a teacher level about the need to think miore about the future of our young people than our view of what we may be bleeding from the past. Click here to read.
If you want to look at some Australian ideas and data in this regard, check out the Education au site for seminar presentations etc from 2008. As well as access to presentations from recent forums, you can check out the links to the ACER research which is based on national ICT Literacy assessment. Some of the stats related to the differentials between home use of ICT and school use of ICT are fairly pointed and see NSW faring not especially well…at the level of change between Yr 6 and Yr 10 in particular.
How many of your colleagues have accessed the Connected Learning Advisory Service (CLAS), provided via the Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI) ? This service provides an opportunity for teachers to respond to items which enable them to self assess their phase relative to a number of domains. The service then suggests some useful development activities. I wonder how many staff teams might look at using this service and comparing ideas about development activities etc?
The CLAS can be accessed via the DET Portal, on the ‘My Applications’ tab. How can you promote this use at your school level?
Other great resources.
I found this while looking around and it was fascinating. Have a look at Gapminder World and especiually at the interactive graphs which present trend data across a number of areas. I’m sure that this would be very useful in generating generalisations based on data at a number of levels.
Interestingly enough, you’ll notice that the Gapminder site is using Joomla as a Content Management System. Just another great open source app which, like Moodle, began life here in Australia.
If you want to do some more work with data, there are links from the ABS site to some Learning Federation games which enable students to create data sets or interact with existing data sets. In a world where so much policy decision making is now linked almost inextricably to polling and data trends, student awareness of the ways in which data analysis can lead to prediction and decision making is a key future focused skill.
If you have ideas or resources which you’d like to share, think about sending them, or, if you’d like to, ask Roger about access rights to this blog so that you can post your own.
