NAPLAN’d Out

It’s been a big week, chock-full of NAPLAN testing, among other things. Three mornings of more paper-shuffling than you can poke a 2B pencil at. And is it worth the effort? Mine, my team or the students? I doubt it. I’ve blogged about NAPLAN before: about teaching to the test, the new lows of league [...]

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The Key is Good Teachers

A little while ago I was involved in a forum convened by the Grattan Institute which was looking at teacher performance and evaluation, and how that all fits together. So, I was interested to see a report coming out of that institute by Ben Jensen called ‘Investing in Our Teachers: Investing in Our Economy’. All [...]

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Blackbird Pie

Blackbird Pie saves you the hassle of taking a screenshot of a Tweet you want to blog about, by coding up any tweet for you. Like this: Had my first close-up look at the ipad today … meh … only joking, it’s gorgeous!less than a minute ago via webWarrick warrick_w

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That’s all I have to say about that…

Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured [...]

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Expanding Learning Horizons (Day 2)

So, Day 2 begin with Travis Smith: Scaling Innovative Practice Travis talked about the Hattie research, and how that 22 of the top 26 things that make a difference to student achievement, are things that teachers can do. He talked mostly about how we skill up teachers to empower them around innovative practice and the importance [...]

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Wikimania at ELH

I’ve spent a bit of time this week working on a presentation for next week’s Expanding Learning Horizons Conference in Lorne.  I’m co-presenting with a colleague on using wikis in k-12 learning and really looking forward to it. We’ve been building a Wetpaint wiki for the presentation and want to feature some other tools like [...]

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Brian Caldwell’s New Enterprise Logic

One of the things I like about keeping a semi-regular blog is that it makes me reflect on sessions I’ve attended as I revisit them to blog here. This week I saw Brian Caldwell present on ‘Globalisation and the Business of Schools, a long, occasionally disjointed but always sincere meditation on change and culture and [...]

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Reading Newspapers Online

A little while ago I was in a meeting of Year 12 English teachers, discussing how the course is going, and planning for next year. One thing that got agreement from everyone was that we needed to improve the way we distributed newspaper articles to students for the language analysis task. In essence, what we [...]

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The gender of the brain

Lots of talk in education circles recently about the fairly recent discoveries going on in brain research, how the brain works being translated into how people learn and unlearn, and some scientists (though not many yet) looking to what this might mean for how we teach. One article this week, looks at the ‘gender’ of [...]

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Avatar Me!

The new Avatar feature of the edublogs posed some confronting problems. What picture should I post of me? Something casual; strolling along a beach contemplating the universe, or at work posing at a whiteboard or hovering around the edge of a group of students? Or what about a comic look: a unicorn, or a martian [...]

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