I’ve just been sent a link to a recently re-developed educational website, www.PestWorldForKids.org, a children’s web site developed by the US-based National Pest Management Association (NPMA), designed to educate children/students about a topic that all kids love— bugs!

I’ve had a look through the site dimensions and can imagine this being a real winner with kids, and a very useful resource in the classroom.

Originally launched in 2005, the site has recently undergone major transformations, both in design with funky and fresh new colors, and content adding new lesson plans and fun project to the mix. In fact, the site now offers even more educational content for teachers to use in the classroom and for parents to utilize as part of home-schooling programs as well as for fun, yet educational computer time with their children.

The report writing center includes a downloadable writing manual, giving children a 10-step tutorial on researching and developing written reports. The science fair section helps students to build and test hypotheses using the scientific method and provides several projects to test these newfound skills. The lessons aim to bring creativity into the classroom with such assignments as creating Pest PSAs and writing new cases for the interactive game, Pest Detective.

Other enhancements include a pest glossary, a comprehensive pest guide, downloadable fact sheets and project PDFs, taking materials from computer desktop to backpack in just a few quick clicks.

Some great resources are being made available to support learning about space which I think will be of real value in the classroom.

NASA has produced a great set of freely available video resources. The NASA eClips are short relevant educational video segments designed to inspire and engage students and help them see real world connections. New video segments are produced weekly exploring current applications of science, technology, engineering and mathematics topics. The clips are organised to cater for primary, intermediate and secondary students, and a section for the general public.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment developed by Microsoft Research. The WWT enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe. Imagine Google Earth - but with the cameras pointing out into space!

Unfortunately the WWT is only designed to run on Windows-based machines, so I miss out on my Mac, but Roy Gould’s  public demo of the World Wide Telescope captured on Ted Talks provides a good insight:

Of course, if you’re like me and don’t have a Windows machine, or the memory required to run WWT, there’s always Google Sky or Celestia, the free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Whatever suits you best, the options available for really engaging with the “final frontier” are certainly much more advanced that the days when I sat browsing books in the library, or waiting for days before images of the moon landing appeared on the black and white TV we had back in 1969!

Seems that the whole idea of user-generated content is maturing both in terms of the quality of the content itself and the professional communities that are committing to developing and sharing it. Here’s a good example from the scientific research community, called Scivee.

Scivee is an online science community where scientists can make their research known to their fellow peers as well as the general public. Scientists can create “pubcasts” which are online presentations that allow a scientist to combine their publication with media such as video, audio, images, and text to allow visitors to quickly grasp the key concepts of their publications, as well as an increased chance for citation. Scientists can also form communities around their research/projects/interests and can start discussions or plan events with their group.

This is more that simply a YouTube for science - the topics covered are serious indeed, and there’s a wealth of extras available for each video or pubcast - including copies of tables/figures/diagrams referred to, supplementary materials and comprehensive reference lists. In addition, there are a number of communities emerging around the various specialist scientific fields of interest that you can join and search.

Thanks to Jane for this tip

Well - yesterday was the big day, the release of the new NZ Curriculum, so with bated breath I watched the news last evening, and ran to get a paper this morning, to see what sort of coverage was given to this significant event in the NZ education system.

To my dismay I found very little. The TV news ran an item on “Teaching Values”, with interviews with a few parents lamenting that there are so many parents who don’t instill values in their children that schools might as well do it, while in the Christchurch Press (my local paper) I found a re-hash of the MoE press release inserted at the top of page two (the part of the paper most rarely looked at) that bears the headline “Children Must Study Treaty” - as if that’s the most significant thing about the release of this new curriculum? I even went onto the Press website, but that article doesn’t deserve a mention - not even when I used the search facility.

And why is the Ministry of Education so quiet about this - their website has a rather uninspiring news item with links to the Curriculum Online website (the Ministry of Education official website for the New Zealand Curriculum) and
a link for parents to the TeamUp website for advice on how parents can support their child’s learning. Where is the celebration of the fact that this has been such a collaborative and participatory effort? Where is the news about what support, PD and ongoing participatory opportunities that are to be offered?

Seems to me that the media have been so busy looking for a “spin” to put onto this event, that they’ve missed the real story here - the story about a two and a half year process involving many thousands of teachers (reportedly around 15,000) in the process of conceptualising and co-constructing the new curriculum, based around the key competencies identified by the OECD as being essential for preparing citizens for the 21st century. The document released yesterday is the result of thousands of hours of thinking, discussion, collaboration, research and writing on the part of these hundreds of educators.

Not that the story stops there - the curriculum must now be interpreted and managed within the context of the 2500+ schools in NZ, and this will take a considerable amount of effort, support and trialing etc - a point raised by Irene Cooper, President of the NZEI in the Press release. She says, “Putting in place a review of their whole school curriculum is a major piece of work and it cannot be done by osmosis.”

A part of the process for moving forward is the Share and Discuss forum that has been created for teachers and educators to participate in an ongoing discussion and sharing of ideas around the implementation of the new curriculum. The Curriculum Online site is another place for valuable background information and material to support with implementation. On this site the Ministry curriculum facilitators have set up groups nationally to help develop support materials for the implementation process in each of the learning areas - these can be found as links from the Learning Areas page.

Unfortunately, none of the releases I’ve seen so far make any mention of this. Even more concerning - when I did a Google search for the NZ Curriculum this morning, the top links took me to the old curriculum information on both TKI and the MoE website (last updated 7 June 2007).

Surely this event deserves better coverage - must we always be looking for the “dark side” of things? My hope is that we’ll see lots of feedback and activity in the online forums, and in the general blogosphere over the next few months. If you do know of things that are happening, or have some good news stories to tell about the curriculum implementation, make sure you share them in these forums!