Again blogged on teh fly in the workshop. My thinking in Italix

Values is not a poster on the wall - it is the actual way the school and it’s culture ‘works’. planned and hidden curriculum stuff

John Holt - ‘What do I do Monday?’
*four worlds we live in … 1. Inner world/world within my skin; 2 world of direct experience; 3. the world you know about; 4 the world of your ignorance and that you don’t know about.
*learning that involves an emotional component is much more powerful ….engagement

“even though we go back [in terms of trends and things happening in education] overall we do go forward!”

Coming back to mental models and the ideas from the keynote yesterday. Have to confront and challenge the thinking in order to change them.

Nice link sinking in here …. spending time only getting to World 3 means that nothing changes. If people already know about the new ideas/practices/whatever and have not chosen to make any changes to practice how will spending time looking at them change anything? Finding out what you DON’T know is key to making transformative change. hmmmmm ….. I like this …. bit of a duh moment happening here Relates to learning at all levels (chn, adult…) too - immersion in Inquiry

transformative learning has to engage at all 4 levels - including the self! Value and paramount place of INTRINSIC motivation on all of this ….

[refer presenters section of conference website fro readings following on from these ideas]

Implications for Inquiry:
Honouring childrens questions - eg having Immersion stage and getting children to gather and sort the emerging questions rather than having teacher constructed focus/big questions from the outset. I like this … has power implications for the classroom adn some may struggle with this…. quite confronting idea …

concentric circles: Values and Beliefs — Principles — Practices.

“A value is an expression of something you believe” - defining the difference between the two. Values are reflected through the priorities we choose. Digging into values to the underlying belief ….
this is something we need to do at school …. to come back and re-examine our school values adn wht we really believe, and what these values are actually an expression of (beliefs that underpin them). This would also potentially enable us to have fewer and focus on them in a deeper way….. hmmmm …. something to ponder on. Julias model (and others!) would have values as the starting point for new curriculum implementation as well as school development in general. Good discussion to have!

Activities to find out Values:
eg: in groups of three. One person shares significant moment. other two people reflect back to them the values that this story illustrates. stories are such a valuable way to delve into what value are …after all it is the things in action that truly show what values are. not as an intellectual exercise but the ‘reality’.
eg: asking lots of WHY questions will get to the values and beliefs that underline practice/s.
eg: groups of three - one tells story (of some act that you admired or touched you in some way), one retells story, last person then retells story from perspective of the person who did the thing admired or that touched.

The focus is not on what the person is doing - it is the values that are important. The things that sit behind practice/s. remembering that it is values in the broadest sense …. not just the moral and ethical. It is also the values in terms of practice/pedagogy, relationships, etc

these are my notes from Marks presentation at L@S on 20th Feb 2008. Blogged on the fly so please excuse any spelling etc that is dodgey:
ref www.i-learnt.com/paradigm_competencies.html
schoolv2.net

1. “Some people make it a habit of adding everyone who mails them to their address book, something that happens automatically in services such as Gmail. In Mac OS X Mail this is possible through a simple keyboard shortcut.
When reading an email, press Command-Y to add the sender to your address book straight away. Mail will even add the persons name, it it appears in the From field. To add more details like a picture or address you will need to actually open up address book separately though.”

2. So you’ve discovered the joys of tabbed browsing. Now how do you quickly cycle through open tabs?
In Safari and Firefox this is a piece of cake. Pressing Command-Shift-Left Arrow (or Right Arrow) in Safari will cycle through all your open tabs.
In Firefox its Command-1 through to Command-9, for the first nine tabs at least. Confusingly these are the same shortcuts Safari uses for the first nine bookmarks. If you have more than nine tabs open, Control-Page Up and Control-Page Down Will let you scroll through them.

3. You can create line breaks in an iCal event by pressing Option-Return. Handy if you want to create a small list in an event.

from Mac OS X blog and all things I use …

I am trying to find out if I can tweak iCal viewing options to show the NEXT 7 days rather than simply the calendar week. Would make life much easier as the end of the week approaches.
has anyone done tis or know how to do it?
Thanks
Greg

thanks Jane for these …

‘The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that pupils take away
from school, but their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.’ Sir Richard
Livingstone, 1941

‘All skills will become obsolete except one, the skill of being able to make the right
response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We
need to produce people who know how to act when they are faced with situations for
which they were not specifically prepared.’ Seymour Papert, 1998

‘One of the core functions of twenty-first century education is learning to learn in
preparation for a lifetime of change.’ David Miliband, 2003

‘Pedagogy should at its best be about what teachers do that not only helps students to
learn but actively strengthens their capacity to learn.’ David Hargreaves, Learning for
Life, 2004

Life has been very busy and it has been a couple of months since an entry has appeared on this blog. It has been nice to be away from it if the truth be known ….
It is a couple of years since I have had such a break in my ability to get online. Christmas break with only access to dial-up has made a difference and it has been days between even checking email.

So instead? Camping, swimming at the beach, fishing, catching up with friends, etc, etc, etc. Lots of fun and just what I needed to come back relaxed for the new school year.

So … we have ERO in a month, and a fair few loose ends to get sorted before then (as there always are!). Learning@School in a few days and a great opportunity to reconnect with the people from CORE and the ICT PD programme I worked with in 2006.

I have a pile of things to put up here saved in my Bloglines. The focus for school is infrastructure upgrading, a new classroom, revamping two new rooms, as well as ICT PD as a Project Director and an exciting PE development planned.

Lots to do and less time hooked to a laptop to have space to get it all done.
I am also the proud husband of a very clever Speech Language Therapist who is just beginning her PhD. So between kids and their sport etc, school and other home things, life is just busy enough.

See you at L@S if you are going to be there …. Bloggers Cafe is the place to be!