EQ Australia

BITS & BYTES

Status of the profession
Connecting Classrooms
Interested in Online Learning?

Status of the profession

Lessons of the new economy
http://www.acde.edu.au
In New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education, the Australian Council of Deans of Education 2001 argues that Australian education institutions need to foster new learning, and in many cases require radical reconceptualisation. Covering every sector from preschool to adult education, and supported by over 60 graphs and tables, the Education Charter provides a comprehensive vision of how learning will occur in future. Visit this website for the summary or the complete text of the Charter.

Australian teachers bring home a good report
http://www.acer.edu.au/publications/newsletters/enews/01_enews3/documents/PISA_in_brief.pdf
The results from PISA 2000 are available here and are summarised in the pamphlet PISA in brief: From Australia’s Perspective. This pamphlet reports on student performance and describes wider findings about what lies behind their results.
Visit also www.pisa.oecd.org for further information about the PISA survey reported on page 41.

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Connecting Classrooms

Online workshops
http://www.fno.org/index.html
‘From Now On’ is an educational technology journal run by Jamie McKenzie, author of How Teachers Learn Technology Best, Beyond Technology and Planning Good Change.
It includes an online workshop on ‘Power Learning-Creating Student-Centred Problem-Based Classrooms’. This detailed, hands-on online workshop is designed to give teachers experience in conducting investigations with new information technologies.

Mindmatters
http://cms.curriculum.edu.au/mindmatters
The MindMatters website has published a dynamic search engine which maps activities and sessions from the MindMatters resources to key learning areas in all states and territories. Visit this website for practical support in linking Mindmatters to the curriculum.

Bridging the digital divide
http://www.web-and-flow.com/help/formats.htm
‘Web and Flow’ activity formats support students and teachers in ‘Working the Web for Education’
Whenever teachers develop new curriculum, they have to do some research, brainstorm, locate resources, create handouts, duplicate handouts, stand in line to duplicate handouts, etc. All this could be done using Web-and-Flow to work up an activity. Explore how to put the whole activity on the Web, not just the links to be used. Tom March presents compre-hensive strategies for integrating the incredible power of the Internet with student learning. These strategies offers easy entry points for newcomers to the Net as well as more sophistic-ated activities for advanced users.

Discovering Democracy Website
www.curriculum.edu.au/democracy
The updated website was launched at the Discovering Democracy Forum in Canberra on 10 May 2002. It features Discovering Democracy Units online, information on the project, case studies, classroom activities and Parliament@Work.

Discovering Democracy Units
www.curriculum.edu.au/ddunits/index.htm
The Discovering Democracy Units distributed to schools in 1998 are now available to all in an online version. Teachers will also be interested in the additional resources that have been included to enhance the teaching of civics and citizenship such as Discovering Democracy: A Guide to Government and Law in Australia by John Hirst, ESL activities, key terms, activity sheets and more.

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Interested in Online Learning?

Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)-Content Development Course
www.scorm.tamucc.edu/
SCORM is a set of specifications for developing, packaging and delivering high-quality education and training materials. The course uses two-dimensional grid navigation, with some adaptivity based upon a learner’s history in the course. Lesson-to-lesson navigation is done using a learning grid, which is displayed when you click on the ‘lessons’ area of the main menu for the first time.

LEARN Information Literacy Initiative (LILI)
www.tafe.sa.edu.au/lili/
Produced by the LEARN Network of South Australian TAFE Libraries, LILI aims to provide an online learning opportunity for TAFE students to gain useful skills in locating and using information. The site provides tutorials to assist students in their use of TAFE library catalogues, the internet and electronic databases.

‘What’s New’ from EdNA?
www.edna.edu.au/
The ‘What’s New at EdNA’ Online newsletter provides users with a selection of Australian and international resources which have recently been added to the EdNA Online database. Users can now access these evaluated resources, and more than 15,000 others, through the search facility, or by browsing through the subject categories at www.edna.edu.au/go/browse/
Subscribe to any of EdNA’s newsletters via the subscription page at http://www.edna.edu.au/ system/tools/email.html Use the ‘What’s New’ events calendar at www.edna.edu.au/ whatsnew/calendar.html to plan your teaching resources in advance.
Use the EdNA noticeboards at www.edna.edu.au/noticeboards/noticeboard.html to plan conference attendances for the year in Australia or internationally or add a notice about forthcoming events.

Australian Library and Information Association-School Libraries Section
http://archive.alia.org.au/sections/school/home.html
The School Libraries section of ALIA provides teacher-librarians with seminars, workshops and other activities; publications on topics such as computers and school libraries, children’s literature, information skills, cooperative planning and teaching; news of current activities through the ALIA news magazine, inCite; and a network which supports and provides links between teacher-librarians and lobbies on issues of concern to teacher-librarians.

Libraries and the E-Learning Agenda-a Role to Play? www.moreton.tafe.net/alia/GardnerFisherSullivan.doc (link no longer available)
Written by Maureen Sullivan, Steve Fisher and Kay Gardner of North Point Institute of TAFE, this paper describes the role of librarians as part of the institute’s online learning program. The document focuses specifically on the partnership developed between the institute’s Pathfinder online learning unit and the library.

Library Studies Subject Springboards
www.tafe.sa.edu.au/lsrsc/learn/springboards/library/libstud.html
A guide to online information sources on the library profession for students, teachers and professionals compiled by LEARN - the network of South Australian TAFE Learning Resource Centres and libraries. Includes brief abstracts of linked pages.

Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.
http://www.shodor.org/
The Shodor Foundation is a non-profit research and education organisation dedicated to the advancement of science and math education, specifically through the use of modelling and simulation technologies. Included on this site are instructional resources and software ready to be used in the classroom.

Sociability of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_1_2002/kreijns.html
This article by Karel Kreijns, Paul A. Kirschner and Wim Jochems of the Open University of the Netherlands, discusses the pitfalls that impede achieving the desired social interaction in collaborative learning environments. The authors propose an intelligent CSCL environment which is based upon a framework that advocates an ecological approach to social interaction.

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