decommissioning of edna - the loss of a vision

On Tuesday this week we heard
edna is to be decommissioned commencing 30 June 2011 and be completed on 30 September 2011. This decision is the outcome of a recent review.

The seeds of the decommissioning go back quite a long way and will mark the end of an era. EdNA, Education Network Australia, renamed edna a few years back, has provided a range of quality and innovative services for nearly 12 years.

While perhaps it might be thought it had outgrown its usefulness, with the establishment of regional portals especially in the larger states, it is the loss of vision that we must mourn more than anything else, along with the loss of employment to a number of people, some of whom have worked on various parts of edna for a long time. For many of the smaller education systems edna "filled the gaps" with services they could not, and still do not, provide.

The extent of the outreach of edna services will only become apparent as targetted newsletters cease publication, RSS feeds that provided a range of ever updating Australian content into portals and education websites here and overseas die, and the edna calendar and edna database disappear. Other casualties are OzProjects and me.edu.au

Services like edna Groups (based on Moodle) and edna Lists (based on Lyris) will be rebadged under the ESA (Education Services Australia) with a greater DYI flavour.
See further

The vision of a cost saving service that connected with all Australian education portals (and promoted them) began diminishing some years ago as those who contributed to edna's funding knuckled under through new calls on their overcommitted budgets.

Make no bones about it, the loss of edna brings with it too the loss of an expertise in the implementation of ICTs in education, particularly in more technical aspects of service provision, that exists nowhere else. Members of the edna team provided workshops and shared expertise Australia wide.
edna provided a high quality flagship service and enhanced the international reputation of Australian education.

A sad day.

New version of My School released - Australia

New features in this release of My School include:

• an easy-to-use profile page with key facts and figures;
• financial information for each school;
• an indication of students' literacy and numeracy achievement as they progress through school; and
• students' NAPLAN performance over a number of years.

The My School website has two main purposes.

Firstly, it provides parents and students with information on each school – its view of itself and its mission, its staffing, its resources and its students’ characteristics and their performances.

Secondly, it provides schools and their communities with comparisons of their students’ performances in literacy and numeracy with those of students in other schools, most importantly those in schools that serve similar students. These comparisons provide information to support improvements in schools. Among schools with similar students, those achieving higher student performances can stimulate others to lift expectations of what they and their students can achieve. The schools with higher performing students can be a source of information for others on the policies and practices that produce those higher performances.

My School enables you to search the profiles of almost 10,000 Australian schools. My School is an Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) information service. ACARA is an independent authority with functions including the publishing of nationally comparable data on all Australian schools.

Key changes that have been made to the website in 2011 include:

• Providing an easy-to-use summary page with key facts and figures, including an expanded commentary on the school context, information about students from language backgrounds other than English, and more nationally comparable senior secondary outcomes information
• Reporting financial information for each school, including recurrent income and capital expenditure broken down by funding source
• Enhancing depictions of NAPLAN results, including a new depiction of students’ literacy and numeracy improvement as they progress through school.

Interestingly the search for specific schools is protected by a Captcha and "accept conditions" button. I can't help wondering why?
Is it a literacy test or an information literacy test?
I can't see any place where I can insert any spam (should I want to)

All sorts of interesting info available though, including lots of graphs, how many students it caters for, and financial information showing how much the school budget is, and recurrent income per student.

However one not so good sign - the site froze temporarily during my exploration. - heavy load?

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Australian National Professional Standards for Teachers

Australian Education Ministers announced the release of the National Professional Standards for Teachers on 9 February 2011.  The Standards were endorsed by Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA) in late December 2010.

The development of the Standards are seen as a crucial milestone in the national education reforms of Australia.

The Standards aim to promote excellence in teaching and provide a nationally consistent basis for recognising quality teaching. They make explicit what teachers should know, be able to do and what is expected of effective teachers across their career.

Find the standards here:

AITSL National Professional Standards for Teachers.pdf (515 Kb)

Frequently Asked Questions

AITSL National Professional Standards for Teachers - FAQ.pdf (372 Kb)

Media Releases

Tony Mackay, chairman of AITSL, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, writing in The Australian: Teachers Make a Difference

Justine Ferrari of The Australian: What happens next is critical

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The School Uniform debate

Every now and again the issue of school uniforms crops up.
This morning the Sydney Morning Herald claims that Australian students are "growing up in a society where the dominant and long-held view is that school uniforms instil discipline, a sense of self-worth and equality." It says that strict uniform codes have been cited as a contributing factor for a growing shift to private schools in recent years. It also implies Australia might be out of step with the rest of the world. (Although perhaps the journalist has not observed students overseas, particularly those on school excursions.)
Certainly in my experience many Australian parents support the wearing of uniforms, and neat and tidy ones at that, until it comes down to a confrontation with their own rebellious offspring. Then it becomes the school's problem.
Back in the dark ages when I was in secondary school we had a basic uniform, and, in my memory at least, most wore it with good grace. Then when I left my rural high school to go to a city one for my final year, I was horrified to find that the basic uniform had been augmented with hat, gloves, and stockings. (Year 12s at XXXX don't wear socks!)  And all I could think of was that those accoutrements effectively stopped me from playing tennis at lunchtime.
Within my city school the uniform was definitely seen as a status symbol and I was constantly in trouble for forgotten gloves and hat, conveniently languishing overnight in my locker. I was paraded before Year 8s as a recalcitrant who didn't have the good name of the school at heart, and tackled by former teachers in the street about where my hat was and what a disgrace to the school I looked!
Me, who was definitely amongst the most conservative of students!
Later, as a teacher, I was expected to enforce the wearing of the school uniform too, and monitor the length of hair, and the type of shoes (no sneakers permitted), and earrings - the list went on. Whether or not I could get my class to comply was seen as a reflection on my abilities to inspire.
So, a bit of a personal rant today - but this is what the SMH article brought to the surface.

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IFLA WORLD REPORT 2010

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the library and information profession.

The World Report series is a biennial report series that reports on the state of the world in terms of freedom of access to information, freedom of expresion and related issues. The reports are available online at http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/iflafaife-world-report-series and can be downloaded free of charge. The 2010 Report has been designed as a customizable interactive electronic publication and can be accessed in different formats through maps.

a country-oriented map interface allows users to produce a full or partial country report or comparative country reports, depending on choices.

A question-oriented interface allows users to get information on a single question for all countries that have participated in the 2010 Report.

There is a single report for Australia with selected facts supplied by ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association)

Population: 21,262,641 (July 2009 est.)
Internet users: 17033826
Internet penetration: 80.10% 
Estimated number of public libraries in the country: 1515
University research libraries: 39
Estimated School libraries: 9000
Government funded research libraries: 200+
Check the report itself for further information

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Australia's biggest generation heads for retirement

The Baby Boomers are categorised as those born between 1946  and 1964 - that means the first of them basically turn 65 next year. Many of them, like me, are on the cusp of retirement. Currently they constitute 36% of the workforce, and, from my own experience, may actually constitute a bigger percentage of the teaching workforce.

We have already noted the impact on schools, where some baby boomers who have been in the school for a decade or even more, have retired and left a giant hole.

An article headed Retiring baby boomers spur rapid change in workforce points out that Gen Y, the next generation, has very different expectations of their working life. It has often taken Gen Y longer to get qualifications and begin paid work, and they are often beginning their adult life already in debt.

86% of Gen Y expect a promotion within 2 years - as Baby Boomer teachers will know, promotion avenues have been absent for much of their working life, and it has often been a case of early promotion, and then nowhere higher to climb.

With the torch set to pass to Gen Y, employers are being encouraged to revise their workplace culture and initiatives in order to attract and retain the new work force powerhouse.

According to McCrindle research the top 5 attraction and retention factors for Gen Y are: 

• Work-life balance
• Workplace community
• Management style
• Broad job description
• Training & development       my source

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National Science Week in Australia 14-22 August 2010

August 14-22 will be National Science Week.
Each year a National Science Week theme for schools is chosen to assist teachers focus and plan ways to engage students in National Science Week celebrations.

The schools’ theme for 2010 is Australian Biodiversity.

The Australian Science Teachers Association has produced a teacher resource book which is available for download.

The online OzProject Be Aware of Biodiversity  aims to engage students in a celebration of biodiversity and increase their understanding of this global issue in 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. It includes activities and resources for students from lower primary to lower secondary.

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Students need education in media literacy

This is probably not news to educators, but a new study of American college students has found that students will often choose a website simply because it tops a Google search result. In addition they seem to lack the ability to determine the credibility or the authoritativeness of what they've found.

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others. source

The Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills has identifed the following as one of the important elements intwenty-first century student outcomes.

Information, Media and Technology Skills

    * Information Literacy
    * Media Literacy
    * ICT Literacy

Critical Thinking is listed under Learning and Innovation Skills.

Critical Literacy is defined in a Wikipedia article as

an instructional approach that advocates the adoption of critical perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and it offers strategies for uncovering underlying messages. There are several different theoretical perspectives on critical literacy that have produced different pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. All of these approaches share the basic premise that literacy requires the literate consumers of text to adopt a critical and questioning approach.

The new Australian curriculum gives explicit attention to ten general capabilities (literacy, numeracy, information and communication technology (ICT), thinking skills, creativity, self-management, teamwork, intercultural understanding, ethical behaviour and social competence), and the development of critical literacy is recognised in more than one syllabus.

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Are you part of the cyclone?

Just recently I read a novel where one of the characters is a 10 year old with Asperger syndrome. On Monday mornings he inevitably has a tummy ache and has to be persuaded with end-of-the week rewards to embark on yet another week in the local school. One night his uncle is waiting for him in a car outside the school gate and eventually the boy dawdles out, well behind the others, a picture of abject misery. The uncle reflects that for those who don't like being there, school is worse than prison.

Perhaps that reading experience might explain for you why an article I came across this morning, which I've just noted is quite dated, struck such a chord with me. In Innovation in education Geoffrey Maslen observed

Higher education is just one industry among the myriads of businesses and professions whose practises have been dramatically altered by the no-longer new technology and its awesome power to transform. Yet many schools across the nation have still to feel the earthquake that has rocked the world beyond their front gate..... Yet change is occurring in the way many schools are run and the way students are taught. In the far-sighted places, the upheaval began years ago and this will become a system-wide cyclone as the full impact of the reshaping of the world outside, driven by the electronic revolution, hits every classroom.

I think there are a couple of questions I'd like to know the answers to:

•  In the first 3 case studies in Maslen's article, the children he talked to responded that they hated school.
  I wonder if schools ever really ask that question. What do kids really think about school? Is there any research?
• My second question relates to whether the cyclone has yet hit, and whether it has swept you up with it. What changes would you describe as cyclonic? [I note here that Maslen wrote his article in December 2005, and so you might like to think about what has happened where you are in the last 5 years] Have we seen "cyclonic change" in pedagogy?

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