Term 2 - Week 7 - ODD

Kua āta haere, muri tata kino. 

To start early is leisurely, but to race against time is desperate.

Week 7 12 Hūne - 16 Hūne (Even) Waitaki Winter Exchange - Mon 12 - Tues 13 Schools Chamber Music Competition - Wed 14 - Fri 16 Careers Trip: Maori and Pasifika - Wed 14 Year 13 Tourism Trip - Thurs 15 New course Proposals to BLS - Thurs 15 Secret Admirer's Week - Staff Cross Country - NZ Champs - Sat 17 - Sun 18	Week 8 19 Hūne - 23 Hūne (Even) Big Sing - Mon 19 - Tues 20 11DRA Major Production - Tues 20 - Thurs 22 Jane Austen Essay Competition - Wed 21 12MAT Assessment (Expt) from 12.20pm (p4) - 4pm - Thurs 22 PD - Late Start - Fri 23 (In Staffroom) Rockfest Finals - Fri 23 Chamber Music Comp - Regional Final Sat 24 Badminton - Sun 25
Assembly Nil	Assembly Tues 20: Year 13: Testimonials & Elections - form time in the Gymnasium
Meeting  Tues 13: Learning Area - Pedagogical	Meeting  Tues 20: Learning and Teaching

Information for Staff and Professional Learning Opportunities

1. The next late start is on Friday 23. This will be a whole staff meeting and Lucy Hone will coming to speak to staff around well-being and resilience.
Some of you may read her column in the Sunday Star Times magazine

2. PLD: Coaching and Mentoring for Change Leaders. this full day PD is run by Jan Robertson. Course is on Thurs 15th June.

3. Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman have this year published a series of books called Best of the Best and one of them is titled Progress. It features a collection of brief and accessible contributions from some of the most internationally eminent names in education. The authors' aim is to provide busy teachers with practical ideas and advice in a helpful (as opposed to overwhelming) way. 
One of the contributors is Sugata Mitra, he won the TED prize in 2013 (and 1 million dollars) for his TED talk in which he expressed his desire to design an online learning lab in India. If you are interested in viewing his talk, click here.

Sugata's piece in the Progress book is about schools in the internet age. His opinion is that schools all over the world seem to pretend the internet does not exist. He provides the fact that in almost all school examinations the internet is not allowed to be used as his evidence because during those examinations is possibly the only time in their life when a learner does not have access to the internet. 
He suggests that 2 things will ultimately happen: learners will increasingly question why they are being asked questions that can be answered in minutes using the internet and compares it to asking some one to tell the time without looking at their watch. Those who can answer questions without having to look them up on the internet will, according to Mitra, not necessarily do better in life than the ones who cannot. Many employers, he says will be unhappy with an employee who does not use the internet properly.
Secondly, that it will not be possible to keep the internet out of exams. Now, learners are asked to put away their tablets and phones, and even their watches. Next it will be jewellery, hearing aids, glasses and possibly clothes! Internet access will become so invisible that it will no longer be possible to tell if someone is using it or not. What will happen to teaching, learning and exams then?
He finishes with stating that governments and teachers need to prepare to include the internet more widely. Assessment systems will need to find out if a learner can provide balanced and sensible answers to difficult questions using the internet. An ability to search for, understand and comprehend is imperative where learning will happen at the point of need. This certainly provides food for thought and is something that is already be considered by NZQA and its Future State programme. 

The practical strategies Mitra offers are around equipping students with skills to thrive in the internet age and how they can learn to provide those balanced and sensible answers to difficult questions using the internet. He suggests not scaffolding tasks by providing a selection of specific internet sites to peruse that you have checked beforehand. Instead get them to start in groups of 4 around one device and tell students that they can walk around, talk and look at each others work and change groups if they like, looking out for information that might be misleading. Also getting learners to compare information from several sites considering the validity of each as well as providing students with questions which encourage this, so rather than 'research 2 dictators' consider 'which dictator was more tyrannical?'. If you would like to know more from Sugata Mitra, here is a list of his publications.