Professor Barry McGaw
Head of the National Curriculum Board and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute

Valerie Hannon
Director of Strategy for the UK Innovation Unit

Chris Wardlaw
Former Deputy Secretary of Education in Hong Kong

Michael Stevenson
Vice President of Global Education at Cisco Systems

Here is a direct link to the audio file of around 55 minutes duration.  I urge educators to have a listen as the comments are quite considered and telling.

I was glad to be given a link to a Cisco paper by Michael Stevenson, who by the way, makes some great

statements. In this paper, entitled “Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century” it gives a telling chart on page 13 “Exhibit 4″. This chart shows the average Dutch Student’s Media Consumption over a 24 hour period. Guess what parts of the day, other than sleeping, are where it drops lowest? Yep! Good old traditional School time!

There appear to be some other good resources on the Cisco 21st Century Learning site.

I will look forward to checking them out in due course but for now, time to listen to the rest of the podcast.

Oh! If you are Aussie Expat and you like catching up with Education Issues from “back home” make sure you subscibe to ABC radio’s EdPod. Definitely worth listening to and always great questions from Aedy, a former English teacher and now well-researched journalist.

It is titled “10 years on, high-school social skills predict better earnings than test scores” and for me, it says a lot about what we need to consider as important as we try to make decisions about the sort of things we need to be exposing children to as a part of their educational experience. Once again, I am the first to admit that kids need to be able to read, write, be numerate and knowledgeable. What I think we all too often neglect is that kids also need to be taught the tools and skills of today. What I think this means is that we need to teach or support them in developing skills to connect, communicate, create and emphathise.

What would also be good would be to support them in the best use of tools that allow this to take place. I happen to think that this is the computer at the moment but I am open to the idea that it might be the mobile, the ipod or the gaming console.

I really think that we need some more articles like this one to hammer home the point to teachers and leaders that doing the best for kids is not just assisting them to maximize marks on standard test scores.

Photo: Athletic meet of Yukichi by kanonn

I decided to turn this into a few powerpoint slides as I often talk about teacher take up of technology and limit myself to showing the diffusion of innovation curve below.

or even the Gartner Hype Cycle:

I am not sure that I really want to draw reference to this article that I was recently pointed to about K-12 teachers being part of the most “Technology lagging sector”. This is a PDF where you will see on slide 21 that “The lowest IT-Intensive industry sector was Education…well below coal mining and every other sector!”. The accompanying data from the report are on pages 57 and 58 of this report. There you will see Educational Service proudly sitting at the bottom of the Bottom-Half Less IT-intensive Industries table, ranking below such worthy competitors as “Amusement and recreation services”, “Rubber and miscellaneous plastics products”, Water transportation” and of course “Stone, clay, and glass products” (”coal mining” is at the bottom of the Top-Half table, way out of our league…).

Anyway, back to the ACOT study, which is much more positive and i think I would like to use some of the ideas from the table to show what is possible to get teachers to move through more quickly with support from someone like myself. Here is my attempt at putting these stages into a Powerpoint.

•  What do teachers and students see as the value of using interactive electronic whiteboards in lesson designs and what beliefs do they hold about this technology and its relationship to learning and teaching?

•  What is the role of the school in promoting innovative use of the technology? What other contextual factors constrain or enhance the use of this technology in teaching and learning?

•  What learning outcomes are supported by the use of interactive electronic whiteboards in various Key Learning Areas? What learning tasks are associated with these outcomes?

•  What pedagogical approaches are being used with this technology?

•  What does reflection about good practice and insights provided by the cases suggest about principles of good practice using interactive   electronic whiteboards?

The methodology also looks really quite sound and I was interested to read some of the teacher comments and some of the findings.

Well worth a read.

These slides summarise some of the ideas and should form a good start to a workshops on what teachers think that they may get from the use of the boards.

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