My Mum -- Dorothy Winter -- Was a teacher She Motivated me to be a life long learner. The pics in this header show her as a young school girl - to teacher. I will be educhecking in her honour here at educheck.blogspot.com
Who Wants to manage servers?
What's the purpose of managing these?
If they can't be accessed in anywhere anytime are they still of value?
The bubble share shows one medium sized schools infrastructure and we have invested many hours keeping this going.
Educational fibre loops and external providers should reduce this need.
We have moved 1 server from the rack which is the big hole at the bottom.
How do we escape? Step 1 google docs
I have always been interested the idea of developing the gifted and wondered why we aren't all inventing creating and displaying understanding at a high level. I was optimistic that we were becoming smarter and smarter as inhabitants of the blue planet. A visit to the Waikato Museum made me reflect on this. The Da Vinci exhibition here in Hamilton showed this man who lived over 500 years ago and did so much for us, so much thinking and doing in one lifetime. While this man was an exception it would be good to think that we could all be capable of more. In a conversation with Mark Treadwell I remember him saying "the world is running out of smart people." We certainly have some challenges ahead of us and will need to maximise our smart people. Is this just a case of genetics? Royce Helm the headmaster of my school talks of "Intelligence is like a balloon which can be increased". Can we provide the conditions for increasing intelligence and still keep the benchmarkers happy? I think the answer is yes. The assessment process for basic literacy numeracy skills needs to provide information naturally so that we can take care of the basics with out spending huge effort to work out what these are. I share Suzie's dislike for league tables found in the linked post. If we are to increase our intelligence balloons education has to step up to the plate and take responsible risks some of these of the top of my head are
any webspiration user who want to collaborate in this diagram can email me and I will add them as authors.
On a final note in my mind we are definitely going to need help foster creativity to help us. Here is a reflection from a team of teachers at school as to what may effect the fostering of creativity
We are always looking for technologies that enable learning and engage learners. We have this year initiated a 1 to 1 netbook programme for year seven students. I have never been happier in my beliefs that connected students will learn better. A bold statement I know but the students learning is evident both in the classroom and out. We have had to extend access to our social networking site elgg with over 100 concurrent connections to the database. This is becoming the hub of literacy development (see Below) as the community kicks in. Here I see Metcalfe's law showing true in education only with a few subtle differences. Metcalfe's law states that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system" Well the same can be said for learning value as more people connect the more we can learn from each other. The students are also empowered by knowing the other people they see on their network. I will ask some of them questions about this next week but first need to get a list of network beliefs off my Chest. Please add to this via comments.
Network value and function depends on:
Ownership and personalisation
The personalisation of the device comes from its size, connectivity and obviously belonging to the user. The photos I have taken around the school as I came across students and netbooks. All after class out of school.
Here We can see weekend engagement of students in the social network at Southwell School.
