A great site to learn Te Reo Maori

I have just completed series 2 of the Toku Reo Te Reo Maori programme and fully endorse the resource as a great way of learning one of New Zealand's three official languages.  To access to progamme for your own learning, click here.

Back blogging - Blogger v Twitter

I am re-starting this blog. I had moved to Twitter, but for the purpose of sharing ideas of my own, and commenting on the ideas of others, I believe that blogging is a more effective format.

Now on Twitter @SchPrincipal

This blog has now been replaced with my new Twitter feed, @SchPrincipal.

Inspire children to read

This feature article from today's New Zealand Herald on children and reading is very interesting.  It starts:

'The most influential person in my life was my sixth-form history teacher. He repeatedly emphasised that absolutely everything is interesting. As there were only six pupils - our fellow "students" mostly gone at 15 into the labour-short Hutt factories - we had virtually personal tutorage and quickly bolted through the syllabus'.

I've taught in schools for the last 17 years and I strongly believe that kids love reading.  Visit any class during a library visit and you'll see children engaged in and excited about books.  As teachers and parents we simply need to make sure that we provide children the opportunity to be immersed in books.

To read the article in full, click here.

Ridiculous research!

I came across this in today's New Zealand Herald. It basically states that students of higher ability will do better in lower performing schools. The problem here is that this depends on schools having under performing students for the limited few of high performers to benefit.

The articles starts:

Parents are being warned against sending their children to the best-performing school in the neighbourhood if they want their children to do well.  

Research from the London School of Economics shows they could be more confident and therefore successful if they came top of the class in a worse school which does not do so well in tests or exams.

To read the article in full, click here.

iWork, iPhoto and iMovie for free - a game changer in education!

While most people were excited about the announcement of the two new iPhones in the Apple event last week, the news that I found most exciting was the announcement of iWork, iMovie and iPhoto being free. This really does make the iPad an even more obvious choice for schools.

The iPad has always been a great tool for accessing content, now it is a truly great (and affordable) tool for students to create and share content too!

The value of content knowledge

This is a really interesting article from today's New Zealand Herald. The article discusses the lack of focus on content knowledge in The New Zealand education system. The article starts:

'New Zealand's school curriculum has been hollowed out of knowledge as academic learning is increasingly abandoned for a misguided focus on skills and the process of learning, an academic claims.'  

I agree with a lot of what Professor Rata has to say. The human brain is not like a computer hard drive with limited capacity, rather, the more it contains, the more it can contain. From a computer analogy perspective, we want our students to be more like MacBook Pros, as opposed to a Chromebooks.

To read the article in full, click here.