Elsewhere

National literacy and numeracy tests ‘not reliable’

Date Stamp:

13 October 2009

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Melbourne University associate professor Margaret Wu argues that the test results are too imprecise to be used as proposed by the federal government – to compare schools and identify those struggling to improve student performance.
“These are numbers. We can’t allege any school or teacher is not working based on these numbers. We don’t have the confidence these numbers show that these teachers haven’t worked hard enough because of student performance.”

The Australian

Wealthy schools win cash bonanza from grants

Date Stamp:

20 June 2009

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Of course they do. The school I teach at will receive $200,000 which is being spent to reduce the size of our maintenance list. So, the spending will include carpet, painting, fixing blinds, and my favourite, fixing vinyl tiles in corridors.

A response to the DER

Date Stamp:

16 June 2009

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The DER as it is unfortunately named, is about to hit NSW schools. This letter provides a convincing statement of what I’ve been thinking. In my school, equipping every teacher with a computer, projector and IWB (or even just the projector) – and a couple of days of professional development (formal or informal) would have been a better investment.

NSW DET culls netbook list

Date Stamp:

24 February 2009

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Vendor for the 220,000 $500 DET Learning Devices (netbooks, sort of) will be chosen from:

ASUSTek, Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and local technology supplier Anabelle Bits Pty Ltd, a division of ASI solutions

Specs for NSW DET Learning Device

Date Stamp:

3 December 2008

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An Expression of Interest has been released for supply of a “DET Learning Device”, in other words, a laptop for students. The SMH provides a summary or you can read the full EOI.

The Mandatory Requirements of this new machine make for interesting reading. At a first glance, I don’t think there’s a netbook on the market that will meet the entire spec. For example, the specification says “must have inbuilt stereo speakers”. The Dell Inspiron Mini machines only have one speaker (hence, not stereo). The Intel Classmate PC has a maximum of 8Gb of Flash storage, the Mandatory Requirement specifies at least 16Gb. This minor issues, obviously, can be easily overcome.