Really like this video from Richard St John – Secrets to Success thanks for the tweet @tonnet

Would love to here high school students/ teachers comments on the content and how well we address it as “hidden curriculum” in our schools…

Had some negative opinions expressed today when I raised the possibility of going to a DER PL session. It is increasingly becoming obvious that the digital divide is causing a large amount of angst amongst some staff and this is exposing itself as anger against the provision of new technology that will upset the status quo.

How do I convince / cajole someone who believes that laptops will have absolutely no benefit for his class and does not want to even open his mind. Hmmmm…. a challenge. I don’t want to just give up on one of my best Mathematics teachers!

As the rollout to students at our school moves closer those with their heads in the sand are realising that it will actually happen soon! HELP!

As most of my staff are digital immigrants (not yet arrived!) they claim that it is useless to teach them a software program (e.g. GeoGeBra) when they won’t use it for several months – they will forget it. On a more positive note – one of the faculty who was issued with a T1 laptop used it today for the first time with a projector to show the Yr 12 class past examiner comments!

Any suggestions that are left of centre would be greatly appreciated

Well since I wrote my initial posts a lot has changed.

• Three members of my faculty (myself included) have had a laptop since the last week of Term 3 in the initial T1 rollout.
• WAP have been installed in parts of the school – but as yet are not working
• We have commenced working through using laptops training as provided by DET (DET Only – I think!)
• The Maths staff have started on the online GeoGeBra training course as provided by DET. (DET Only)

However some things also haven’t changed. There is still a large element of fear (in my faculty and generally) of the introduction of laptops and the impact that this will have in our classrooms.  More often than not this fear is expressed as denial – “I’m not going to use laptops – they won’t help my teaching at all”, or as an excuse “I can’t start teaching with laptops until the department provides all teachers with one”.

While I agree that it certainly would be better if ALL staff had laptops before the students so as to facilitate skills acquisition and good will, it simply is not going to happen.  In fact Dianne Marshall explained the financial reasons at the North Coast ICT conference the other day – it is linked to the financial year spending of DET as the teacher laptops are funded through the state and not the Commonwealth DER project. As educators we NEVER have the perfect environment in which to perform our duties. Sure we should always aim for the best, but have to have coping mechanisms to deal with the actual reality. Simply refusing affects our students far more than attempting in less than perfect circumstances. – End of rant

The wireless install has been fraught with glitches. Some of the information that has been passed on to our network administrator and the Head of the ICT committee by the contractors is just wrong.  Thank you to the DET online communities and Tweeps for passing me the correct information. We needed to locate our new box approximately 20 metres from the Campus Distributor – and put in the adjustment paperwork prior to install. Conduit was run to enable the two boxes to be connected.  When the IBM guys turned up 3 weeks ago to hook them up, they only had the short leads, then proceeded to spend 3 hours arguing with the network administrator that the new box and the Campus distributor would communicate with each other wirelessly! Needless to say eventually they realised that this was not the case and left….. 3 weeks ago.

On a more positive note, like many schools CHHS had only 2 of 4 building distributors with optic fibre cabling, with one BD (that serves Maths & TAS) a run of over 110m of Cat 5.  However as part of our 7.5 million Capital Works Project the Maths faculty has just taken possession of 2 new classrooms – and the Cat 5 cable that supplied the BD was replaced with Optic Fibre!   I will post some pictures of our new classrooms later!

A lack of available LAN connections in our staff rooms means that the majority of T1 rollout users have not connected at school (only at home) and subsequently the copies of Windows are now past the 30 day trial – annoying but still functional. It will take considerable time before the teachers at my school are taking responsibility for their own PL in non-school hours, there is still a common opinion that this should all occur 9 – 3 and the amount of upskilling that is required WILL NOT be possible during these hours. I have already dedicated 1 Maths Faculty Meeting to the GeoGeBra introductory course.

But I do agree with Stu Hasic – DER NSW is an awesome accomplishment thus far and it has only just begun.

Thanks to Darcy Moore for sharing

Can we really have so many touch services in just 10 years?