National College for School Leadership

Today we arrived at the National College for School Leadership in Notttingham, UK.

This is a purpose built facility to provide professional learning pathways for English school leaders & Principals. We are here for three days of pre-conference activities and school visits before we move onto “Seizing Success” conference in Birmingham. This centre not only provides residential professional development, but has a research programme & develops resources to support school leaders. I guess the closest we might have come to something similar in NZ would have been the PDPC which was closed at the end of last year. Leadership development has been identified by the NZ MOE to be an important area with recent developments in the change from LeadSpace to educational leaders website, Kiwi Principals …..what else here? Links.

Mount SPA on the Road

Mountain to Surf Taranaki Principals ready to leave Auckland.

Gypsy eLearners

From the newsreader this morning:

Not so much disruption for our students who are moving from one elearning school to another. One of our student’s family has just moved farms and schools but she will be able to continue two of her current online classes and maintain contact with her classmates from her old school. This is another positive about flexible, online learning – you can take it with you!

Google Books

Check out Google Books. I knew it existed but I had never taken the time to explore it until the day i really needed it. I have been fixing up an article that i have written for the DEANZ Journal of Distance Learning when i came across a reference with no page number ….. and i don’t have the book anymore. A Google search brought me directly to the book – most of which i could read online – complete with page numbers – phew! I have now started my library in Google Books.

 

Learning Languages

Today I had the privilege of watching Jarred teach French with his Year 7 & 8 students online. Jarred usually has two other schools (though only one today) linking in through audio conference and Adobe Connect. This is the beginnings of a pilot trialling this technology & collaboration between Primary schools. Learning Languages now has an increased focus in schools with the development of it’s own area in the new Curriculum and this type of opportunity has the potential to support schools (especially smaller rural schools) to deliver a wider choice of languages to our students. Jarred’s is the first class to work in this way and though Jarred is not a French expert he was confident to try out teaching in this environment so has been a great role model for others involved in this project. If your school would like to be involved and has a language expert (or any teacher with basic competency in a language) to contribute to this project, in return for their own student’s involvement in classes then contact Matapu School to find out more.

TaraNet Student Survey Online

Our online student survey went live today. Every year about this time i survey our students to gain feedback about how they are doing and areas we need to improve on. In the past our surveys have been very heavily focussed on them evaluating their VC lessons and the interactions and support around that. This time I followed closely CoroNet’s student survey which has more of a focus on problems they may encounter in their whole elearning experience and specific questions about their use of online learning environments (Moodle, KnowledgeNet). Every time i hear from our students i gain valuable insights into their ‘invisible world’ of elearning. I am really looking forward to reading their comments.

Our students are also involved with NZCER research with a focus group session taking place this week with five our students from across our schools and covering a range of levels in the school, subjects studied & prior experience as elearners.

We use survey monkey for our online surveys.

Boards of Trustees – their role in eLearning

 

Tonight I spoke to the Inglewood High School Board about their schools involvement in TaraNet and what it means for opportunities available for their students. I went through my standard promotional presentation about TaraNet and the VLN and outlined the educational landscape of elearning in New Zealand of which they are a part of.  Boards of Trustees are vested with a lot of power and decision making in the strategic directions of their schools and the allocation of resources. For this reason i think it is important for all our school’s BOTs to have an insight into elearning activities our students are participating in because they contribute to this with the purchase of equipment, allocation of staffing and resources. So often these students are invisible in their own schools, tucked away in the VC room, library or study room working in cyberspace that others can’t see so easily. Inglewood are the first of our schools to confront the need to replace their costly VC equipment (they are currently using borrowed equipment) so some support from the BOT will be needed to keep them going. We are currently looking at options for this which may include the trialling of desktop VC as opposed to a dedicated unit and upskilling our teachers in a variety of other technologies (such as Moodle & Adobe) to supplement more fully their VC classes.

eTeacher ToolBox

The ever growing & varied range of collaborative Web 2.0 tools freely available never ceases to amaze me. What a great tool box our eTeachers have to choose from.