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Why aren't schools learning from their ICT mistakes?
Issue 44 | Published: 21/11/2012
  During a recent visit to New Zealand, INTERFACE caught up with HP’s Education Strategist Elliott Levine. Here he shares with us the worldwide trends he observes in education and ICT, and how schools can learn from them. Schools need to stop making the same mistakes and start learning there’s a better way to embrace ICT, says Levin Elliott. It’s a blunt assessment and one you may not like. But coming from someone with his experience and background, it’s an observation that should not be taken lightly. “When I look at technology initiatives, whether in my backyard or across the globe, there are common trends that always keep coming up. What drives me crazy is that a) that they’re there and b) that I sit and watch school systems replicate...

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Issue 44 | Published: 21/11/2012
At the start Term 2, Year 5 and 6 students in Room 3 at Lakeview School were given an iPod Touch to use in class. Here Tim Nelson explains the thinking behind the initiative and the outcomes so far. The whole process started as an appraisal discussion between me, the school principal, Ed Hodgkinson, and my appraiser, Tim White. We were looking for a project I could really get my teeth into that was exciting and would have a significant input into teaching and learning at Lakeview School. Literacy has been a focus here for some time and a goal was set to use mobile devices to improve reading outcomes for students. The next step was to choose a teacher who would like to take on the responsibility of leading the initiative on a day-to-day basis. After discussing the idea with the other...   more
Issue 44 | Published: 21/11/2012
  Husband and wife Glen and Monique Storey are teachers at Te Akau ki Papamoa School. In their spare time they’ve been working on iOS apps for kids they work with and have just released their first one, StoryBot. The idea for StoryBot came from working with one of my students who has Down’s Syndrome. I needed a way that he could engage with sentence structure, essential words and reading. The aim of the app is to help learners build sentences and ‘experience’ shared stories by interacting with them. It’s a way for them to engage in text and co-construct written experiences. We’ve seen it work really powerfully with Year 0-4 students and learners who have special needs. However, as it turns out, StoryBot’s proving to be a really...   more
Issue 44 | Published: 21/11/2012
  The red carpet was out and the TVNZ reporter was was live on air with newly-published young authors at Waiau Pa School. The launch of the collaborative fan fiction novel Fuel To The Fire was a fitting finale to a special project, writes David Kinane. For several years now I have been encouraging teachers to use FanFiction.Net as a resource for a collaborative reading and writing project. It has thousands of stories written by students who want to continue the books they love – there are more than 600,000 Harry Potter-related stories and 200,000 based on Twilight! The site not only provides a real audience of passionate critics but also gives teachers a rich resource to draw from to provide examples of writing for their students to use to hone their own literacy...   more
 
 
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