Term 4 Week 3 - how to keep up to date with e-learning tools & building on excellence in our school system

The post today shares some websites which help us keep up to date with new online tools for teaching and learning and also provides a link to a document about how to make our school system even better.

These two sites are ones which I know staff are already using but have absolutely up-to-date information about new web tools and how to use them:
edutecher
This site's most recent links include:
Docs Teach - an amazing Web Tool that aims to make History come to Life. Each of the several activity-creation tool helps students develop historical thinking skills and gets them thinking like historians. Teachers simply find and insert primary sources into a customizable and very slick template in order to customize the activity to fit their unique students.
YouTube Instant is a super quick way to search through videos on YouTube. Using the Google Instant idea and turning your search terms into instant playlists, this is a very easy way (and cleaner than YouTube) to find and create playlists to share with colleagues or students. Teachers can choose tags that are student-safe and get a slick looking playlist with a nice interface that is easy to share or embed.

free tech for teachers
This blog's most recent post introduces - Twiducate - Social Networking for Schools
Twiducate is a free platform for creating your own micro social network in a Twitter-like format. Twiducate allows you to create a private network for posting assignments and messages to your students or other people you invite into your network. As the creator of your network you create and administer the accounts of the students in your network. Students in your network can reply to your messages and to the messages of other students.

The following websites aim to quickly teach teachers how to use these online tools:
Learn it in 5 is a library of how-to videos, produced by technology teachers, for the purpose of helping teachers and students create classroom strategies for today's 21st century's digital classroom. These step-by-step how-to videos walk teachers through Web 2.0 technology, demonstrating how to use Web 2.0 applications like blogs, social networks, podcasts, interactive videos, wikis, slidesharing and much more.
How 2 do it - A wiki which has a similar focus.

Professional Reading
This paper "Building on excellence: How to make a great schooling system even better" was presented at the PPTA annual conference 2010.

Introduction: A favoured theme of successive governments has been the need to improve the achievement of New Zealand students, especially those in the lowest 20 per cent of achievement. Attention is often drawn to an apparent wide disparity between the highest and the lowest achievers in New Zealand, and it is common for politicians to blame schools and teachers for that disparity. It is rare to hear politicians affirm New Zealand teachers for the excellent achievement of the majority of our students.

This paper challenges the validity of government claims about low achievement and inequity, and suggests that the government goal that all students be able to experience success at Level 2 NCEA, while a laudable aspiration, is not achievable in a low-trust environment where teachers and schools are facing cuts across a whole range of support services, in tandem with a burgeoning workload.

The paper then tackles the vital question of what is needed, and what is not needed, if secondary schools are to make significant improvements to levels of student achievement in New Zealand.

Term 4 Week 1 - Revision Bites & Maori Achievement

Picture from http://www.cvcweb.net/course/view.php?id=826

Revision Bites for Form Time
These revision bites have been written for junior students but could also be worthwhile covering with your senior students as well.There are 8 revision bites in total which means that you will need to cover four a week with your form class over the next 2 weeks.
This is the link to the wiki page with all the revision bites, a study timetable template and other revision ideas (scroll to the bottom of the page):
http://smc-sct.wikispaces.com/Revision+bites

Maori Achievement
I have set up a page on the SMC-SCT wiki (http://smc-sct.wikispaces.com/Maori+Achievement) which I will update with readings, initiative documents and any other resources relevant to Maori Achievement. Please email me if you have any resources that would be appropriate to upload or link to.
New to this page is the ERO report (May 2010) on how schools are progressing towards raising achievement for Maori students.