Julie Boyd Education

Has social media become totally out of hand? 2 Tag2 linkme 7Live7.com A1‑Webmarks Add.io Adifni aeroAll My Faves Amazon Amen Me! AOL Lifestream AOL Mail Arto Aviary Capture Baang Baidu Bebo Bentio BiggerPockets Bit.ly bizSugar Bleetbox Blinklist Blip Blogger Bloggy Blogmarks Blogtrottr Blurpalicious Boardlite Bobrdobr BonzoBox BookmarkedByUs BookmarkingNet Bookmarky.cz Bookmerken Bordom Box.net Brainify Bryderi.se BuddyMarks [...]

The importance of fathers to child development http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/fatherhood/

Join the One Day on Earth movement and participate on 10/10/2010. This is a global ‘multi-platform participatory media project’ event where everyday people, including students and teachers, are encouraged to document and record a story of shared human experience over a 24-hour period. The aim is to capture the diversity of life and culture on [...]

Results of the Standard Assessments Tests, or SATs, released this week in England, have stirred debate on their usefulness, as they are used by the government to rank schools. More than a quarter of the country’s primary schools boycotted the tests. Scores for 11-year-olds showed small gains in maths and writing and a dip in [...]

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has outlined a $484 million plan for schools that would give principals and parents more freedom in running their schools. The Empowering Local Schools Program will begin 2012 in 1,000 schools and will include training for principals and funding to hire teachers in special-needs areas. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/pm-gives-principals-control/story-fn59niix-1225900279704

Real life lessons for spoilt children Some Chinese parents are enrolling their children in summer military schools, where they learn survival skills and self-defence, among other life lessons. The camps have gained popularity as parents worry their children are spending too much time with the television and computer and are not playing and exercising enough. [...]

Pranav Mistry is a student of Pattie Maes (see post from July 2009). He is a genius and shows why India is challenging the rest of the world with technology.

Why are some leaders e.g. Apple Computers successful? (Because of Steve Jobs starting his career as a teacher I would have thought!). If you are interested in the success of innovative leadership this video is worth a look.

One school’s take on using a flash mob to encourage kids to read and exercise at the same time.

http://www.sapmea.asn.au/conventions/middleschool2008/downloads/presentations/Martin%20Westwell.pdf

There is a story about an encounter my dog and I had with Nick at our beach in the ‘Jorge Diaries’ on my story writing blogsite. Nick was rolling around in the shallows of the surf beach having a wonderful time. Both his, and my dog’s reaction were wonderful to watch.

This pps is based on a poem by the Dalai Lama

In 1971 an oil spill in San Francisco Bay jarred John Francis’ comfortable life. Even as he joined the volunteers who scrubbed the beaches and fought to save birds and sea creatures poisoned by petroleum, he felt the need to make a deeper, more personal commitment. As an affirmation of his responsibility to our planet, [...]

This is a very clever take on what we need to do to reverse the damage done to our society

What happens when teenagers are inspired to turn off their technology for a week. An American teacher tried this as an experiment with very interesting results http://au.tv.yahoo.com/video/-/watch/13518886/

ZNet and ABC- Big Ideas are forums for great dialogues such as this one on the deterioration of the english language. It’s All Gone To The Dogs -, 29 March 2010 11:00 Have we taken ‘managerial language’ too far, to the point where it makes no sense? Here at the Perth Writers’ Festival, author and [...]

The aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has left a fragile nation teetering on the brink of collapse. In the coming weeks and months, donor countries, aid agencies, and NGOs will continue their tireless efforts to bring help and hope to Haiti’s roughly 10 million survivors. And yet, while urgent needs lurk on every street [...]

Is this the direction for Australian schools in future. Teachers being forced to employ individual tutors for students in an effort to get them to increase their test scores. This has been a problem in America for years. When I was consulting there in the early 1990/s teachers reported that they would ‘teach how to [...]

An excellent article written by Jeremy Ludowyke, Principal of Melbourne High School, the so-called ‘best’ school in VIctoria http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/why-my-school-fails-the-test-20100207-nk9c.html Also an excellent article featuring Andrew Kenyon, Principal of Swan Reach Primary School the so-called ‘worst’ school in Victoria http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/my-school-numbers-not-what-they-seem/story-e6frg6nf-1225828950984

Gates Foundation has committed $19.5 million to the development and piloting of new instructional tools and assessments. The money is intended to help develop an array of teaching resources such as course outlines, diagnostic tools, and assessments. It also will be used to find ways to establish how well the standards reflect college-level expectations. Teachers [...]

Research into BLUE ZONES looks at What is the optimal lifestyle of longevity. These researchers to identify pockets around the world where people are living MEASURABLY better. In these Blue Zones we found people who reach age 100 at rates 10 times greater than in the United States, where people suffer a fraction of the [...]

How to cure obesity? Make it fun

One of the main criticisms of technology is that it is often used to replace human relationships. While connectivity is so much easier, communication is not- and messages often get lost in translation. The flipside is of course that increased connectivity can help improve relatonships. Check this out!

Architects can provide some fascinating and contemporary methods of presentation. One method that has become popular is known as Pecha-kucha (pronounced peck-chak-cha) from the Japanese term for chit chat (or ‘talking a lot’ as my Japanese daughter-in-law describes it. http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ http://www.nextexit.com/ Kanso(Simplicity) To amplify try to simplify Shizen (Naturalness) Shibumi (Elegance)

Saul Griffith, Australian inventor provides classic examples of how science and maths can come together in a manner which engages students in issues of contemporary concern to them. From recalculating his personal carbon footprint- with astonishing results, to inventing kites to mobilise energy from stratospheric winds to power human socirty’s needs, this man provides both [...]

Founded in 1981 at Chabot Community College in Hayward, California, the Puente program expanded to include 33 high schools throughout California in 1992. Puente (the Spanish word for ”bridge”) has improved the college-going and college-retention rate of tens of thousands of California’s educationally underrepresented students. Compared with white students, Latinos are four times more likely [...]

Jero is a young Japanese American who looks like a rapper, but sings Enka which is a traditional Japanese form of music. Once, almost a lost art Enka has now become incredibly popular once again in contemporary Japan. You can’t always judge a book by its cover.

Valley High School in Las Vegas was, on Thursday, designated as a “high-achieving turnaround” school under the USA federal No Child Left Behind Act, a distinction reserved for schools that had failed to meet the law’s academic requirements for three years before demonstrating high achievement. Reasons for the change are attribited to: * The enthusiasm [...]

Australian society has become so fast-moving and so egocentric over the past decade that many have lost, or failed to develop, the ability to ‘walk in another person’s shoes’. The ability to see the world through the eyes of the person you are teaching, or conversing with is a crucial aspect of communication that seems [...]

How many ways do we need to say ‘we told you so’? For Australia to follow the US and UK example of testing regimes was always suicidal. For years, US teachers have admitted they are ‘teaching to the test 3 days a week, and teaching kids 2 days a week’. Now Ken Boston has come [...]

Human behaviour is made up of a range of things including thinking, feeling, and responding physiologically and verbally. Michael Jackson’s recent death reminds me of a quote of his when he was asked about dancing. His response was . Thinking is the biggest mistake a dancer can make. They need to feel- become an embodiment [...]

Canadians are doing it, Americans are doing it too! What about Australians? Nearly half of the Canadians polled in a recent Harris-Decima survey said they feel Canada’s educational system does not adequately prepare young people for work in the modern economy. Albertans are most pessimistic about the system – 52 per cent say they find [...]

The influence of technology, particularly computer based technology is both exciting and terrifying. Exciting because of the potential it opens up for individuals and cooperation. Terrifying because of its capacity to impact developing brains, limit abilities to communicate face to face and dehumanise society. The current penchant for many aspects of education, from the provision [...]

Pattie Maes- the future of technology= or is it?

Sir Ken Robinson, quite rightfully, questions whether these three concepts are interlinked as they need to be.

Lee Iacocca was born in 1924. He knows a thing or two about leadership and at the end of the Bush presidency wrote a book thundering Where are the New Leaders . In the book he defines what he refers to as the 9C’s of Leadership Curiosity Creativity Communication Character Conviction Charisma Competence Common The [...]

Einstein once said ‘not everything that can be counted, counts; and not everything that counts, can be counted. What on earth has happened?

Back in the early 1990’s Peter Ellyard as Commissioner for the Future raised the notion of PREFERRED FUTURES as opposed to Possible or Probable Futures. Peter’s catch phrase was always We cannot work to create a future we cannot imagine. Peter can be found at www.preferredfutures.org

What a difference one letter can make! If we are at ‘Peak Civilisation’ what needs to change, and how? While the policy makers argue over how much carbon we can keep pumping into the atmosphere, any rational human capable to simple arithmetic can see that we’ve already exceeded our great grandchildren’s quota- not just our [...]

In schools, as in the broader community, when the word ‘environment’ is used people often jump immediately to the physical- ie the structure, location, aesthetics etc. This is a very limited view as all aspects of the environment need to be taken into account. If we are to have an impact on people’s ability to [...]