thinking

A week or so back we had Rob Swartz from National Centre for Teaching Thinking in our school for a couple of days.

Rob has done a lot of work on how to get thinking 'infused' into the teaching in schools. Infused so it can be transferred between curriculum areas, contexts, and year levels. To often we teach a thinking strategy in isolation and it does not get embedded into our learners. I really like his books around infusing critical and creative thinking. They are teacher friendly and usable.

So we are developing our Whangaparaoa College thinking strategy to get thinking implemented across the school in a timely and active way. This will be the first of the key competencies of the new curriculum that we will have an implementation plan in place.

I have been concerned around some of the implementation as being to slow and considered. It may be impulsive to jump in but impulsive action is not always bad. It just needs to be managed.

As well we need digital versions of the curriculum or does everyone need to retype it!!!!

Presentation

I am planning a presentation to interested staff on the whole Web 2.0 thing and how it can work with staff.

So thinking about what is the real essence of Web 2.0 and what this means. The really most useful to me is the blog and the use of RSS feeds. This has essentially changed my relation with information and has impacted hugely on how I utilise the media.

Instead of the media controlling what information I access I can now adapt and alter through RSS feeds. No more rubbish and so much more environmentally ok.

Flickr I think is wonderful and the social activity sites of myspace and bebo are interesting. Twitter leaves me dead, but wikis seem to have huge educational possibilities.

Digg I'm only starting to look at and second life while I'm there seems too huge at present.

Delicious is great both for me to store stuff but also to look at others.

ots to think about and lots to develop. What I do know is it is all about moving forward and developing ides.

More reading

I find I am reading more and more as I get ideas sorted out around the impact on teaching and learning that technology is forming. I have started reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Like David Weinberger's work we have to rethink our idea of what is knowledge and its impact on schooling.

This seems to be at the crux of 21st century learning in schools.

Just also finished reading a couple of blogs. Bruce Hammond's blog on why we need some urgency. Why are things so slow?

Also David Warlick's blog on First Year teachers and the wonderful comment trail that follows. This does really make you think! Is this Web 2.0 stuff important or are we just playing around?

An interesting news report (from one of my teachers) states that New Zealand youth are the highest use of mobile phones in the world but our social networking is not as good.

lots happening and lots of thinking

Knowledge

Finished David Weinberger's new book Everything is Miscellaneous while doing the ten hour journey home from Kuala Lumpur. This is a great read about how we need to rethink knowledge now that technology allows us to access it differently. The sequential way of viewing knowledge previously no longer fits with the way knowledge can be viewed via the internet especially through latest Web 2.0 technologies.

If our view of knowledge needs to change then it fits in with my thoughts about how we need to change the teaching of knowledge away from the standard sequential learning processes relevant for the industrial age. These views have great importance to schools and have been talked about for decades but still have had little traction. The miscellaneous nature of knowledge which technology now demands may be the driver to push schooling forward.

Now reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. this again challenges our thoughts about the predictability and causality of knowledge and our intrpretation of events.

If we were to be doing our job as educators we would be teaching about 'Black Swans' and Miscellaneous knowledge as these ides seem to really where it is at.

This is the first listing of mine on a blog. My role is principal of Whangaparaoa College a large secondary school in Auckland, New Zealand.

The school is new only been open two years and has had a number of difficulties getting underway due to hassles with project managers architects and planners and not least the Ministry of Education in New Zealand. But we do have many wonderful buldings which I will post pictures of in a few days time.

The school has been built with learning at the fore front and this is the continued challenge as we move on. The challenge of keeping learning the key while surrounded by the so many other demands. Even more the challenge is about what does learning mean in our Web 2.0 world and as a school leader what does this mean? While the excitement of working in a web enabled way the management of that around risks of internet safety are huge and I would be interested in how that works.

If Web 2.0 is the future what does that mean about our schools and the way learning occurs?