1 to 1 Promo

During some research I have found copies of the withdrawal forms for each state.  It is your right as a parent to take your kid out of these tests and send a message to our government and schools that this is not the type of educational reform we will tolerate!!

Exemption forms can be found on the following site, along with more information.  If you truly love your kids you will not allow our Government misinform and mislead you.  There is more to come on this disaster and we need more parents, teachers and school leaders confronting our Government and questioning their motives!!  Does our government love our future generation or do they want nothing more than cheap vote grabbing!?

Gillard has been quoted declaring the Myschool ranking site and the NAPLAN test a great success based on the 2.7million hits to the site.  Ummm….  since when did hits = support!?!?  Gillard’s policy has been informed by those who created similar disasters overseas such as the United States.  We have warnings coming our way from all over the world that standardised testing has failed miserably the world over and causes more harm than good.

The facts remain that our fear of league tables is nothing compared to the damage this does to our education system.  Schools are forced to see these tests as the be all and end all and therefore make poor decisions in their programs.  Such decisions as teaching to the test and replacing extra curricula activities with test taking “practice” are common place in schools.  It demonstrates the great dumbing down of our education system – ultimately ripping of our kids.  These tests have never demonstrated real improvement as a result of the data from tests.  Gillard and the clowns driving our apparent education “reform” need to forget about what maybe popular with misinformed parents and begin to take advice from experts who have the best interest of our kids at heart?  May we continue to drive enough media attention so our parents can be informed and take steps to vote against this stupidity!!

Let me know what you think…

So first blog of the year….  Not sure if you have heard, but here in Australia we have recently had our elected representation (Federal government) launch their brand new fancy education website www.myschool.edu.au It was the brain child of our deputy Prime Minister and Education minister Ms Julia Gillard.  This site is worth a look – it basically gives everybody access to the standardised testing scores of each school in the country, allowing anyone to compare schools.  Our Government believes this will help parents make the right choice of school for their children and will help schools compare themselves to similar schools and learn from them.

So to start the year I thought I would post a letter I would like to send to our Deputy leader and receive some feedback before sending it.  I would like to thank some twitter friends for their thoughts on this topic.  Please read my draft letter and comment.  I will send this off in the coming weeks.

Dear Ms Gillard,

I would like to thank you and your Government for the recent launch of the MySchool website.  This resource has helped me as an educator and a parent realise that I live in a nation that thankfully has access to important statistics that can help me make educated decisions about where I work and where my child should go to school.  Your efforts to provide us with information of this nature will surely help citizens of our nation make one of the most important decisions parents everywhere will face.

The genius that has been displayed with this concept must NOT stop here Ms Gillard.  I would like to suggest that the Government continue moving forward with this concept while they are on such a great run.  Please consider my proposal for the MyMP.gov.au website.  Think about it Ms Gillard, you could provide a resource that helps me as a concerned citizen and voter understand my local member of parliament and so many other politicians in our nation.  I would like to have access to you and your colleagues academic transcripts, your attendance in parliament, your average number of bad hair days, fashion disasters and most importantly the number of babies kissed in shopping malls during the most recent campaign.

I believe this level of in depth analysis of our members of parliament will provide as valuable criteria for making a decision of representation as the myschool site does for choice of school.  Just like the myschool site, the myMP site would help citizens make decisions by looking for the schools that had more green than pink in the key.  You see I don’t want to be represented in the parliament by just anybody.  Voting is quite a tough decision and it would make life so much easier if we just had a resource that was so nicely colour coded to help make this decision.

Your commitment to providing such an in depth analysis should continue.  All of life’s decisions should be able to be made by simply looking at a colour coded chart of such in-depth statistics.  In fact why don’t we select two days every year where every citizen sits a test that measures their understanding of what their local MP is doing to improve our society.  Furthermore, just like the suggestion from the creators of MySchool, if any MP’s are shown to be performing poorly through these tests they could “learn” from other MP’s that are doing better even if they were opposite sides of politics.  Just because you are seen as opposition doesn’t mean you won’t help each other learn?!?!

Ms Gillard you must continue providing information like this to our nation.  I look forward to hearing you and your colleagues thoughts on this proposal.

Regards,

Concerned Citizen

So why not give me a few thoughts to add to the letter after taking some time to look over the myschool.edu.au website.  Oh and for those who don’t know our genius of a deputy and education minister….  Why not have a look at this clip I found of her.

]]> http://blog.brettmoller.com/2010/01/30/a-letter-to-our-education-minister/feed/ 5 http://blog.brettmoller.com/2008/04/04/a-call-for-mentors/ http://blog.brettmoller.com/2008/04/04/a-call-for-mentors/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:56:05 +0000 Brett http://blog.brettmoller.com/?p=248 Continue reading →]]> I am a bit nervous making this call after reading and following Al Upton’s drama over at his blog. However, I am going to live by the old adage “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

Like Al a colleague and I are calling for mentors for our year 12 students who are about to launch a podcasting and blogging project. They are about to start a unit on Corporate Ethics in their Study of Religion unit. This is NOT a unit looking at these issues purely from one particular religious or philosophical view. We are after experts (which includes folk with life experience) to come and join the learning journey with our students. They will be blogging and podcasting their research. Anyone keen to encourage their learning and help them with their work will be warmly welcomed. The students are really excited about this activity and can’t wait to have their voice heard.

I will be launching the website with group blogs over our holiday break. If you think you would be interested please leave a comment here. I will be updating this blog with our progress. We welcome mentors from all parts of the globe. If you know someone who is particularly interested in the area of ethics please invite them along.

More coming soon – For now it is time to rest up!!

Yesterday we had to come up with our plan to shoot a short film.  I have added our plan overview to youtube….  More to come on the whole process…..  Some wonderful ideas coming from these sessions – Very inspiring…..

Blogged with Flock

Tags: itsc07

Podcasting Session Wiki

Podcasting Activity

Podcasting Activity 1 Photos Page

Podcasting Activity 1 Script

e-Portfolio Session

e-Portfolio Session Wiki

Blogged with Flock

This time has allowed me to catch up on some reading…  An interesting article today in eSchool Online about a major study on the effectiveness of software applications on student test scores.  The article looks into the study results as well as presenting a fine argument about the appropriateness of the study conditions.  The lack of appropriate PD is used as the main argument for the negative results produced in the study. 

“Brief training at the beginning of the year is not sufficient. Ongoing and sustainable professional development that provides support and mentoring or coaching for teachers ensures that technology tools and resources are used in ways that lead to increased student achievement,”

The above quote from the article, I believe, sums up a greater need than simply making sure staff have the opportunity to attend PD sessions.  There is a need to have staff in the institution that are willing to learn and see change as well as staff that are passionate about the opportunities for change who are willing to mentor and coach.  Having software companies train our teachers is not exactly presenting a case for effective pedagogies and educational relevance.  These people are not qualified to meet the needs of students. 

There is also the point of how we decide what is quality educational software and not.  There is a sad case that I witnessed over and over again as a classroom teacher, when parents would spend huge amounts of money on software programs for their children who were struggling with a subject area.  Quite often this didn’t help and the students who were struggling simply needed more one on one attention from a tutor or even their parents.  Software applications promising to deliver results in such a short period of time are like weight loss fads that promise to have us all trim and terrific in 10 weeks of doing nothing more than popping a pill!

technorati tags:moller

Blogged with Flock

The first issue that I would like to share some thoughts on is the argument of having 1 national curriculum.  In this day and age there is a need to have a nation wide curriculum that is designed and created by a national representation of educators.  While I am a fan of having a national curriculum I certainly can’t see our politicians getting it right.  In fact it bugs me that decisions on education and what/how students will be learning are made by politicians who have little to no experience in the field.  If I hear or read another article quoting a politician saying that “In my day we did….. and it worked well.”  That just rings alarm bells with me.  Sure maybe there are particular things from the past that we should look at in education reform, however, students today and the learning environment (just to name a few) are completely different.  You are not going to make an impact by changing the school system to something that resembles a system of the 1950′s.  The chart below tells us so much on what effect school is having on our students.  I grabbed this off the US Apple Education site….  I don’t think students here in Australia would be too different to this….

Better still, why don’t these national political committees that are setup actually ask students what they want and look at how the students are best learning.  However, I guess that wouldn’t be popular because the students can’t vote!!  How about addressing the problems of the increased number of young enthusiastic teachers (the ones that connect with students) who are leaving the profession in droves.  Perhaps that may answer a few questions around educational reform? 

Some weeks ago I was angered to read an article in our paper that suggested that we needed to bring back streaming of classes based on academic performance.  Our state education minister believed this was a great idea and was going to extend the bright minds of our state and help the students who are struggling.  What annoyed me more than the fact that the research done in this area actually proves this is a failed method of teaching, was that the only other opinion sorted by the paper was that of the chairman of the Parents and Citizens group!!  Oh my we are going to let parents and politicians tell us how to run schools.  Imagine for a moment what that would look like?!!?!?!? 

When I hear the thoughts of national standarised testing coming into this country I also cringe.  All we have to do is look over to our friends in the US and realise that these systems only create students who become good (or not so good) at recalling facts.  Once again, an idea from our politicians.  When will our decision makers realise that a complex system such as the educational process will not fit neatly into a little box.  The workers of the future need to have skills that are much more demanding than being able to recall facts. 

I am going to expand on this further in the near future….  Thoughts????

On another note…  Still looking for a new job….  On the bright side, I have more time for study and my blog!! 

Blogged with Flock

I am looking forward to meeting as many people as possible and getting an opportunity to see what others are doing in the wonderful world of EDtech.  Trust everyone has safe travels up to cairns.  Those who can’t make it, I trust you will be following the blogging going on through hitchhikr.

technorati tags:acec06

Blogged with Flock