Change, underestimated?

Well after the two weeks of the school holidays I have switched on my computer. While during the holidays I used the desktop for skype, email and chat my laptop has sat redundant. Largely this has been due to us moving house but also because you need a break. So with 835 blog articles to read at some point I guess there is a bit of catching up to do on what’s been going on.

It has been good to have this break I feel and not add anything to my Del.icio.us or find anything new and rather give some thought to the things that we can be trying this next term.

I did however still use the computer which I guess shows how much a part of our life it has become. We now have some people we only talk to through skype/ichat and whenever I don’t know the answer to something wikipedia is never far away.

I did do some reading however and this article from the independent generated a bit of discussion in our house about school closures in Knowsley.

The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.
Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects.

They will be given their day’s assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out.

The 21,000 youngsters of secondary education age in Knowsley will also be able to access their learning programmes from home.

There was also some discussion on Derek’s blog which is always worth a look at. But I couldn’t help thinking why do they keep trying these things in schools where there is more chance of it failing than succeeding, I know they have nothing to lose but surely someone needs to take an opportunity with a succeeding school. I know “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” but what if school could actually be memorable for most kids rather that just another gateway.

On less of a high horse note check out visuwords it’s an online graphical dictionary and pretty amazing in how it works.

Technorati Tags:
education, dictionary, newschools

Over the past few months I have been trailing various offline blog writers. On Windows I’ve tried Zoundry which I found very easy to use and Microsoft Livewriter which while in Beta (still in development) is pretty good and I guess my pick for xp. On the Mac I’ve tried Ecto and Marsedit and have decided to go with Marsedit. My reasoning is it was the easiest to use while trailing so many different ones. I would like to hear any others using anything better and of course there is online which is what I use anyway since it is seldom I don’t have a connection. Mind you Edublogs has been down for a week for an upgrade and it was handy to have somewhere to get things down to upload later. Thus when I’ve finished editing a bunch of posts they will be there.

Technorati Tags:
blogging

KoolWire is a new and wonderful email based file conversion service to help you convert your Microsoft Word (.doc), Powerpoint (.ppt), Excel Spreadsheets (.xls) or even pictures into Adobe PDF documents. 
Just compose a new email message, attach document(s) that have to be converted into PDF and send the email to pdf@koolwire.com. The PDF file(s) should arrive in your inbox the next moment.

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for this.

Here’s something that I assume will eventually come to NZ, Google street view as viewed on google maps. Some cities in the US are completed, the following image comes from Castro street in San Francisco.

This from businessweek

Maybe you’ve seen one cruising the streets in your city: A platinum gray Volkswagen Beetle with a camera that looks like a small disco ball fixed to the roof. They’ve been driving the streets in major cities across the country, snapping some 125 million images to be digitally woven into 360-degree views of everything from New York’s South Street Seaport to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

For a laugh check out some of the random images snapped at mashable.

Technorati Tags:
streetview, google, geography

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” - G. K. Chesterton, 1908

I heard this on a podcast today and it reminded me of a statement made in this address where David Tuck, National President of the Head teachers in the UK stated that:

“We have: an overabundance, a glut, a surfeit, an excess, an embarrassment of initiatives. I don’t know what the collective noun for initiatives is, but in this instance I would like to suggest it might be a “lunacy of initiatives”.

In reading through his whole address there are a number of issues he brings up that certainly apply to New Zealand schools, especially with the constantly increasing political pressures for schools to deal with everything from obesity, “P” to road safety. I recall when teaching in the UK my school was in the process of being replaced by a privatised business academy, from visiting their website I see that they have still been having problems with ofsted (UK ERO) and although the buildings look impressive I don’t believe privatisation is the answer, rather I hope we can try and manage the changes better. So before testing reaches levels like in the US (I see there is serious testing for pre school) let us have these discussions as a education community.

Technorati Tags:
vision, education, davidtuck

Thanks to Mark for putting together this how to video for downloading pictures on winxp.

This is also another example of some of the uses of youtube and google video etc for education.

tags technorati : photos howto youtube

Having used the flv player and then the anyflv player I am now converted to democracy player. It is Mac and PC and seems to play pretty much anything in full screen mode.

Stumbling upon the Paris in Prison photos on a wiki site made me realise the scope of wiki’s for a wider purpose, not that I’m encouraging you to create a fan site for the socialite but it was funny all the same.

While I find writing a blog entry a chore at times, contributing to wikipedia or a wikispace is fairly easy. All you have to do is click on the edit tab and while having rubbish written on a wiki does happen it is easy enough with PBWiki or any of the other free options such as Ben Nolan’s and  Foopad really it is a matter of personal preference. For some examples of ones being used by teachers check out this wiki or this one on pbwiki. Some of the quotes from the page express its simplicity

The results have been great. Simple to use (no reading of instructions), bugs
that we had with uploads were fixed without having to report them, and the
service is fast.
- Doug Chang, private tutor

technorati tags:wiki, education

This from the Guardian UK

Want to start a blog in Iran? Then you’ll have to register it with the government - which has recently begun to require that all bloggers register at samandehi.ir, a site established by the ministry of culture of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. All you need do is give your personal information, including your blog’s
username and password - otherwise it will be filtered and blocked so that nobody in Iran, and perhaps outside too, will be able to access it. This has led to an outcry among many Iranian bloggers who consider the net an independent and free forum for expression.

And then I followed the links to the President’s personal blog wow in english and farsi. The comments alone are enough to help with a social studies class.

technorati tags:blogs, world, iran, censorship

Also of note is the experimental Google timeline which can be found here and Keith’s Blog Mataenglish.