Excellence in Mathematics teaching

The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM)
was first advocated in the Smith Report (2003), and much has been discussed about its potential impact to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics through improved CPD (continuing professional development), especially by Advisory Committee for Mathematics Education (ACME).
We are pleased to announce that the National Centre is now a reality, and will be formally launched in June 2006.  Visit the website

Educational goals

Here in Australia, outcomes-based assessment has taken a hold and is infiltrating quite successfully.  We have yet to combine it with the competitiveness and rewards-based compensation system that seems to be in place already in America.  Though I suspect those are on their way.  I wish they weren’t, and this blog and its added comments simply reinforce that fear.   Outcomes do not take into account inherent capabilities or societal influences, nor do they seem to me to rely on a holistic educational scheme.

“a healthy reminder that man is not primarily made to chase after his own creations. It’s not all about getting ahead, staying competitive, etc., etc. I’m not saying those are not worthwhile goals; just that they’re not the only ones, and perhaps not even the most important”

Students exchanging cultures

"Creative Connections" helps students reach out across the world

More than 1,500 classes from around the globe reportedly have participated in this online virtual exchange program that connects students and teachers around the world in efforts to promote a free-flowing cultural exchange of art, history, and modern-day communication.

Starting a book group

Talk it Up!
Starting a bookgroup for kids? This is a great place to start.

Talk it Up! provides information about how to start and run a bookgroup and over 150 discussion guides to use with specific books.
Need more ideas?We've prepared many booklists for kids to help you make your reading selections.

Students teaching teachers

The concept of a teacher standing in front of a class and imparting knowledge had been modified severely, but never entirely lost.  The idea that maybe students can teach peers, particularly in technology subjects, has been around, but it is still challenging.  Students teaching teachers?  More challenging still, but the possibilities are huge, particularly in all sorts of side alleys of student maturity.
Students teach PowerPoint
By Jill R. Goodman, Independent Newspapers
“Ohh, cool” resounded in a school computer lab — but not from students — as four teachers at Highland Lakes School, 19000 N. 63rd Ave., learned from students how to create a PowerPoint presentation. Article continues

Tying driver's licence to educational outcomes?

From CNW
McGuinty government to give legislative backing to student success


Bill to include mandatory programs for students, new enforcement measures

    - New legislation is expected to be introduced
today that would ensure students keep learning to 18 or graduation through creative incentives that realize students' individual potential and unique enforcements to prevent them from dropping out, Education Minister Gerard Kennedy announced today.
    "It has been 50 years since Ontario updated the school-leaving age
requirement," said Kennedy. "It's time that our 21st century high schools provide the kind of programs that are relevant to students today and support parents' ambitions for their children."
    "There is more at stake than ever before for students to get a high
school education that is high quality, meaningful and prepares them for a variety of postsecondary destinations."

    The legislation, if passed, would:

    -  mandate the government's comprehensive student success programs be made available by all school boards
    -  increase the school leaving age to 18 or until graduation by keeping students learning either in classrooms or at other approved learning programs
    -  improve enforcement policies with more effective and practical
measures tied to students' driver's licences
    -  create hard links between high schools and postsecondary destinations to allow external learning to be recognized for high school credits

Communication between devices

CoCo helps diverse devices talk to each other
School pilot aims to improve emergency preparedness
“A Virginia school system has received a grant from the U.S. Justice Department to pilot-test a new communication technology that reportedly enables cross-platform communication across a variety of devices. Federal officials hope the pilot, if successful, will serve as a model for enhancing emergency preparedness on school campuses nationwide.”  Read more

After-school programs accountability

Ed-tech makes after-school programs more accountable
Student ID cards track attendance, tie it to school achievement data
“ Jefferson County, Ky., school officials are using ID cards to bring accountability to their before- and after-school programs. The ID cards link student participation in after-school programs to school achievement data to help administrators see if there's a correlation.”  Article continues

Life in space

Life's Building Blocks Are Common In Space
“After A team of NASA exobiology researchers revealed today organic chemicals that play a crucial role in the chemistry of life are common in space.
"Our work shows a class of compounds that is critical to biochemistry is prevalent throughout the universe," said Douglas Hudgins, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. He is principal author of a study detailing the team's findings that appears in the Oct. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.”  Article continues

The Digital Divide and School success

Study: 'Digital divide' affects school success Kids with home computers more likely to graduate Access to a home computer increases the likelihood that children will graduate from high school, but blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have a computer at home than are whites, according to a new study. The study also found that the so-called "digital divide" is even more pronounced among children than adults.

What's the Return on education?

What's the Return on Education? "Schools' costs are easy to gauge. Their economic value is not."
Read the whole article

The Interfaith calendar

The interfaith calendar

10 years from 2005-2015 organised by year and by belief system.  Includes explanations of the celebrations

New Childhood Advocacy Website

•National peak advocacy organisation, Early
Childhood Australia, has its new website which
promises to be the most extensive online resource
for the early childhood field.
•National President, Judy Radich, believes that the
website will be a valuable tool in supporting the early
childhood field to provide the best experiences for
young children and their families.
•Early Childhood Australia has developed the new
website to extend its capacity to advocate for young
children.
Check it out at www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au.

Bloggers' FAQ - Student Blogging

The Bloggers' FAQ on Student Blogging addresses legal issues arising from student blogging. It focuses on blogging by high school (and middle school) students, but also contains information for college students.

The Poetry archive

The Poetry archive – for educators and teachers

Bring poetry to life in your school!
These pages are specially designed to help you and your students to get the most out of the Poetry Archive. There are lesson plans and activities for all key stages and for the inclusive classroom. Poetry can enrich other areas of the curriculum too; there are ideas here for History teachers, and we will be adding material for other subject areas in the coming months.
This is a growing, developing resource, so come back and visit regularly to see what's new. Our plans include a forum for teachers to discuss their experiences, as well as a space where you will be able to create your own teaching materials and share them with colleagues.

Databases in curriculum

Digging into Databases--Using Databases to Inspire Novel Approaches to Creating Curriculum

During the past year, I spent dozens of hours looking at more than 50 subscription databases as part of research for a school's new library. These online publications are a dream for middle and high school English and history teachers in the variety of primary and secondary sources they offer. Databases can inspire novel approaches to creating curriculum. As teachers become familiar with them, their thinking about lesson planning and student research often moves in innovative directions. Below are five projects where librarians can take the lead in helping history and English teachers see the potential of this new world of sources.

Australian Geography Teachers' conference

Australian Geography Teachers’ Association Conference

(incorporating the 2006 Australasian Conference
for ESRI Education Users)

Geography       making the connections    – creating futures

English/Literacy national conference

“Voices, Vibes, Visions:   Hearing the Voices, Feeling the Vibes, Capturing the Visions”

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association (ALEA) are pleased to host the next joint national conference to be held at Darwin High School, Northern Territory Australia from Saturday 8th July to Tuesday 11th July, 2006. Voices, Vibes, Visions is the 2006 ALEA/AATE National Conference theme.

Extra outside school hours care places

Almost 17,000 extra Outside School Hours Care places
Almost 17,000 extra Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) places will be delivered across 900 before school, after school and vacation care services as part of the Howard Government's ongoing commitment to further help families access quality child care. Article continues

World population at a glance

PopulationMondiale.com will give you the world's current population at a glance. Or you can click on the map and receive the data for a particular area.

Online conversion

Online conversionUnits conversion / metric conversion onlineWelcome to Convert Plus! Here you can convert just about anything to anything else. You can easily perform online conversions (e.g. metric conversions) for many measurement systems both commonly used like metric and U.S. Avoirdupois and quite exotic like Ancient Greek and Roman. And the popularity of the Convert Plus has grown such that there now over 30,000 people every week using it.

Top English teaching

Top English teaching.com

“Your source for English teaching resources: games, activities, worksheets, songs, lesson plans, readings, listening and much more.”

New Math Models where computers fail

New Math Models To Pick Up Where Computers Fail
For all the advances in computer power of recent years, many real-world processes are still so complex that they defy the capability of even the most advanced supercomputers to describe them - and to address such problems, mathematicians are being called for help.
As part of that effort, Oregon State University recently received a $647,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. It's one project in a national, $20-million initiative to have advanced mathematics pick up where sheer computing power is inadequate.  Article continues

Getting students to exercise

School fitness center targets tech-savvy students
Minnesota State University officials have hit upon a creative way to get students to exercise: They've outfitted the exercise equipment on their Mankato campus with computers and internet access. Now, students can check their eMail, surf the web, watch TV, or even do their homework while they work out.

Article continues

Gravity tractor

Gravity Tractor as Asteroid Mover
A huge spacecraft could use its gravity to keep an asteroid from hitting Earth. Read more

Mirror of the world

Mirror of the world
From the Read alert blog …
This Friday, the State Library of Victoria opens Mirror of the World, a new permanent exhibition tracing the history of the written word.
“Most Victorians have no inkling of the treasures their library contains because few, apart from the whitegloved scholars who consult the rarebooks collection during their research, have seen any of them”, Ray Cassin of The Age wrote in descibing the Mirror of the World.
A series of writing workshops and tours are available for school students during 2006. Writers Carole Wilkinson, Kirsty Murray, Trudy White and Gabrielle Wang will help students explore this extraordinary collection, and write imaginative pieces in response. Contact us for details of dates. There are sessions in all four terms of the school year.

New test identifies hearing problems

New test identifies classroom hearing problems in children
It is estimated that 2 to 3 per cent of all school-aged children suffer from a hearing deficit called an Auditory Processing Disorder (APD). In spite of having passed standard hearing tests, those affected by an APD have difficulty understanding speech, particularly in noisy environments. Now a test to diagnose the disorder has been developed by recently-graduated Macquarie University PhD Sharon Cameron.
Dr Cameron, whose undergraduate degree was in speech and hearing sciences, is now working as a research scientist for the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL). But her research into APD first began in 2002 as part of her undergraduate honours project.

UN unveils windup laptop

UN unveils wind-up laptop

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,17274463%5e16123%5e%5enbv%5e,00.htm

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and a leading US IT expert Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the bright green and yellow working prototype of a US$100 ($140) laptop aimed at millions of schoolchildren in poor countries.The robust wind-up laptop with low power consumption is meant to be the backbone of an educational project to distribute the Internet-connected computers at no cost to their future owners.

Online Education community

Learning Times.org
Join the fastest growing online community of education and training professionals!
LearningTimes.org is an open community for education and training professionals. Members have free access to a wide range of opportunities to interact and network with peers from across the globe. Member activities include live webcasts and interviews with industry leaders, online debates and discussions, live coverage of industry conferences, and international working groups.
The LearningTimes.org community also features free group collaboration tools, such as virtual meeting rooms, a site-wide instant messenger, and virtual office suites, making it a vital place on the web for thousands of education professionals to meet and interact at any time.

Evaluating websites

Evaluating Websites

The Internet contains an immense range of information that is posted by individuals and organisations from around the world. There is no single body or organisation that ensures the quality of this information. Students and teachers need to acquire critical evaluation skills which will enable them to identify and extract quality information that meets their needs.

The ICT Literacy

The ICT Literacy Assessment is a comprehensive test of Information and Communication Technology proficiency that uses scenario-based tasks to measure both cognitive and technical skills. The assessment provides support for institutional ICT literacy initiatives, guides curricula innovations, informs articulation and progress standings, and assesses individual student proficiency.

Online phys ed catches on in schools

Online phys ed catches on in schools
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports A seemingly incongruous concept that began in Minneapolis public schools is starting to catch on in other school systems, too: taking gym class online.
Minneapolis school officials said they're hearing from school districts around the country that are interested in the program. In Minneapolis, student waiting lists are filling up fast.
"It's like we started the ball rolling, and it started rolling so fast, and now we're trying to catch up," said Jan Braaten, content specialist in physical education for Minneapolis schools. Braaten is making a presentation on the program in January to a national conference of phys-ed teachers.  Article continues

Video gaming in education

Educators take serious look at video gaming Learning to leverage the enormous popularity of video games to help students excel was the core purpose of two events held recently in Washington, D.C.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Summit on Video Gaming and McKinley High School's "Be the Game" video-gaming summit were meant to demonstrate the pedagogical value of gaming technology, often viewed with skepticism by generations of educators who did not grow up in the digital age. The FAS event focused on the theory behind using video games in the school curriculum, and the McKinley High School summit looked at how to use gaming curricula to engage students and improve their performance.  Article continues

Bridge the Gap and Keep children safe

Bridge the Gap and Keep Children Safe 
In this high tech society you may get the feeling you are being left behind by your children?
They seem to be speaking a different language, doing things online that you have never heard about and living in their own online world. 
Is this normal?  Are they in any danger? Am I really doing all I can for my children's safety? Will I ever be able to keep up with what they know?
These are common questions asked by parents.  You're not alone.

The value of a bookless classroom?

Teacher gleans federal kudos for bookless classroom

TAYLORSVILLE — Jerry Mangus' textbook-less teaching has dazzled the U.S. Department of Education.

Laura Seitz, Deseret Morning News
Jerry Mangus, a 5th and 6th-grade math teacher at Plymouth Elementary School in Taylorsville, received the No Child Left Behind Act Maerican Star of Teaching Award on November 2, 2005.
      Mangus, who teaches fifth- and sixth-grade math at Plymouth Elementary, uses only computers to teach fractions and other numerical concepts to kids. He's built computer labs in his school, each of his students has his or her own machine, and their test scores have leaped.  Article continues

Microsoft Seminar presentations available

Thank you for attending the complimentary Microsoft Education Seminar 2005. We hope you were able to discover new ways to use technology in the classroom to inspire and engage your students, and more importantly learn and share innovative ideas from your peers to improve learning outcomes for students.Download PresentationsAll presentations and resources are now available for download on the Microsoft Education website. Click here to DOWNLOAD.