Hi All,

Does anyone know of somewhere I can get a licence for Ulead PhotoImpact (latest version) for 30 computers? I tried Studentdiscounts.com.au, but they only have sell licences for 120 computers. Too much for my small school at the moment.. I need this within the next few months.

Kind regards

Michael Hilkemeijer

Immanuel Lutheran College is a K-12 co-educational school located in Buderim, Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1979, Immanuel is the longest established independent school on the Sunshine Coast. Lee Bond, (ILC eLearning Curriculum Coordinator/QSITE Board), spoke to David Bliss, (College Principal), who outlined a long history of accomplishments and exciting developments at ILC.

Immanuel Lutheran College has a history of successful technological innovation which has resulted in a legacy of infrastructure and passionate, skilled staff. We have several staff who are technological innovators, each highly experienced in the implementation of major projects. This has been acknowledged by the receipt of two national awards by ILC staff (Microsoft Innovative Teacher Award, 2005 and the Texas Instruments Professional Development Scholarship, 2004). Several staff have presented papers at state, national and international conferences. These include - ConSTAQ, 2003, 2004, 2005; Australian Computers in Education Conferences, 2006, 2008; Australian Association of Researchers in Education International Conference, 2008; Microsoft Middle East Conference (Dubai) 2006.  

Amidst the celebrations of proudly serving the Sunshine Coast for 30 years, the College has again set a focus on capital renewal of facilities to complement the design and delivery of advanced, technology-rich curriculum.  Immanuel’s commitment to incorporate superior technologies into learning programs for the advancement of student outcomes is widely regarded.  Recently, in recognition of its extensive and innovative programs, particularly in the areas of Mathematics and Science, the College was delighted to be informed that it is one of only three schools in Australia, and the only one in Queensland, to receive a Hewlett-Packard Innovations in Education Program Grant, open to schools across the world, valued at $178 000.

The award includes a class set of HP EliteBook 2730p Tablet Notebooks, supporting hardware and HP training. The grant will be used to strategically roll-out Tablet computers in targeted areas of all Science disciplines, Mathematics, Information Technology and Engineering Technology.  The project is called Tablets – The Smart Medicine for Teaching and Learning, with the grant covering expenditure on HP technology, professional and leadership development.  The Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering subjects mandate an emphasis on extended experimental work, project work and research tasks.  Students are expected to use a variety of technologies to complete these tasks and ILC has been an early adopter of new technologies to facilitate this (for example - electronic data loggers, Logger Pro-motion analysis software and virtual experimentation).  It is difficult to ascertain whether the students or their teachers are more excited.  “This is a wonderful affirmation of the aptitudes of our students and the professional determination of their teachers”. 

Immanuel College serves students of all abilities.  Within this philosophy, it has a proud history of producing students who undertake tertiary study in medicine and engineering, as evidenced by the fact that 27 graduates from the past two years have entered into degrees centred on applied science and engineering, including five into medicine.  Several have been awarded tertiary scholarships and as graduates earned university medals and accelerated workplace entry into careers such as a coronial work, podiatry and aeronautical engineering.  Destination surveys indicate that many of these Old Scholars attribute a large part of their academic and vocational success to their Immanuel education.

Thursday keynote- Keith Kreuger from the US is CEO of the Consortium for Schools Networking (CoSN). By this stage of the conference it is very difficult to remain focused. In the auditorium I can see many people doing their email- attention has lapsed.

Keith looked world wide at ICT integration and states currently ICT is at a marginal point of use. US gov has been recommending zero money to support ICT use in schools. US call it Educational Technology. Presidential candidates talk on ICT:- $500mill McCain on virtual tutoring and home schooling/ Obama talks about innovation and changing schools-$500mil 21st Century Skills- talking creativity, HOT etc.

Keith focused on developing leaders. These leaders ‘raise the bar’, talk and demonstrate good teaching and changing learning environments, support communities of practice for professional development and renewal, redefine assessment.
A lot of this is not new and I feel that what Keith presented was reinforcing what we are doing well here.

CoSN.org video titles ‘Learning to change’ really good to show parents and teachers. 

Margaret Cox was a keynote speaker on Wednesday, Day 2 of the ACEC conference. She spoke about her research on students’ formal and informal uses of digital technologies,.
She is from King’s College London, University of London.

She tooks us on a historic journey of IT developments over the last 3 decades. Some of the points I took away include-
1.    It is unrealistic to talk about ICT as a term in the sense that it too general. It is more important to talk to teachers about specific applications such as web browsing or podcasting. Asking teachers if they are competent with ICT, may get teachers responding with a ‘highly competent’ by their definition of ICT as using the internet for research.
2.    Time can limit ICT integration. Margaret makes the point that teachers value ICT but only have ‘limited’ time due to other curriculum constraints/requirement.
3.    With the huge amount of things you can do with ICT you cant expect every teacher to be competent in everything. Teachers must be limited to become competent in one application and then build on that.
4.    For teachers to be using ICT the school needs to develop long term plans
5.    She found large disparity between home and school use which is predictable, however it was interesting in the detail of pinpointing which ways through clear questioning- eg when asking children what they do in school and outside school questions would be directed such as blogging- posting a response, responding to other person’s response etc,

Margaret seems to be getting down to the nitty gritty with exactly what children are using ICT for. She has just finished a book which can be googled- “inside the black box”. One thing I took away that I think is valuable for all of us, is that Margaret has given us some well defined ways students and teachers are using ICT which can be used to create baseline data in our schools. We can use this data then to redefine learning practices. Just google her name and go to Becta website.

The first keynote speaker at the ACEC2008 was Mitch Resnick from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT- Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The focus of his dialogue was on enabling "creativity" quite timely as this is the focus for Education 2009.

He began by discussing the move from an ‘Information Society’ to a ‘Knowledge Society’ which he suggests requires an innovative economy dependent on creative thinking. He went as far as to say that being creative will be a basic need, a need that makes us happy.

He continued the rhetoric around moving away from the transmission model of teaching into different models for teaching and learning that were based on creativity. He suggested that the models we use in Kindy/prep/preschool are more able to develop creativity- when children are choosing their pathways to investigate and create using concrete resources such as building blocks, finger-paints. This idea then was drawn into later learning contexts- why are we moving away from this model as children progress through the school?

We don’t have the resources- building blocks and finger-paint are tools for this stage of development. However, when children get into primary and onto secondary school we don’t have the resources that support deep conceptual engagement. Or do we?

Mitch suggests then that ICT tools can become our conceptual facilitators. He puts forward a model for inquiry that would resinate throughout schooling and life- imagine-create-play-share-reflect-imagine.  Using ICT in this recurring sequence is in line with Piaget and Seymour’s active process of knowledge construction.

Early exemplars of this process were 20 years ago= teaching the turtle, lego TC logo, lego mindstorms.

He showed us examples of children working with these ICT construction tools. Children were inventing wearable digital devices, making household inventions, engaging in the process of design/make/appraise. His latest development has been a free program called scratch- http://scratch.mit.edu/

His intention for this program was for children to use this tool to express themselves in an online world, wanting children to be the designers of the games, programs because that is where deeper learning can occur rather then when just ‘interacting’ with game/software. Children are using the software to write programs. I experimented with the ‘turtle’ logo years ago but like everything it seems to have gotten easier now to program. What was presented to me in this keynote was a way to enter into programming easily and in a hands on ‘click and drop” fashion-like building blocks.

Mitch told us of the many ways (that he had not imagined) that Scratch has been used by children. One of the powerful things I took away was that children were sharing, collaborating and being critical of each others work and co-constructing programs through the scratch website. Scratch enables children to ‘share’ what they make.  Children are ‘remixing’ each others work, supporting each others learning with developing tutorials on how to do specific things, teams working together on projects, creating a Scratch community even with a TV series for weekly news updates on what is happening in their community. Check it out.
Would be great to hear your learning adventures with Scratch.

National Technology Leadership Summit: Connecting TPACK and NETS via Research, Policy, and Practice

The TPACK Framework

To help us understand how technology fits within good teaching.

Relating TPACK to the NETS*T

and NET*S - these are what can be the desrciption in the centre.

http://punya.edu.msu.edu/research/tpck

Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for educators 

Putting the theory into practice 

At a summit, which brought together representated different professional associations, they looked at linking digital video with pedagogical goalds in different content areas.  

The example shared in the NECC session was with the egg in the bottle experiment - using digital video and graphing as the technology. 

TPACK and Legislation

This framework implies that the regime of testing and structured teaching of content is not an effective provision of learning. Policy needs to expand the notion of what it is important to measure. Associations have different perspectives on issues and it is difficult to get a concise voice to government in order to influence and create policy - they will respond to educational groups unless we have the same vision (and consistent jargon). It is also important to understand how we differ.

I wonder how much of this is true also in an Australian context? I think we are a bit luckier in terms of the connections that we already have between professional associations (eg. through JCQTA) but we could always do more. Also the fact that our government is not as reliatant on national testing as the main measurement of learning (well not YET).

Professional Associations and TPACK

There was an interesting discussion about how to embed the idea of TPACK across different content areas through publications and conferences of content (aka discpline) professional associations. Perhaps there is something that QSITE can take from this with regards to how we collaborate with other professional associations to challenge practice and inspire meaningful ICT infused learning.

Some Reflections

Comparing this session with the last one - I think that while a useful way of thinking about the interactions of pedagogy, technology and content knowledge it's perhaps not as useful as the UBD (Understanding by Design) processes from a planning point of view. The differeniating between the elements of technology, pedagogy and content may mean it is more likely for these areas to be thought of in a separate rather than an embedded way. Although... maybe these element are part of what is considered after already building the goals, understandings and essential questions. 

test