What is school for?

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

The purpose of school is to:

1. Become an informed citizen
2. Be able to read for pleasure
3. Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
4. Do well on standardized tests
5. Homogenize society, at least a bit
6. Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
7. Give kids something to do while parents work
8. Teach future citizens how to conform
9. Teach future consumers how to desire
10.  Build a social fabric
11. Create leaders who help us compete on a world stage
12. Generate future scientists who will advance medicine and technology
13. Learn for the sake of learning
14. Help people become interesting and productive
15. Defang the proletariat
16. Establish a floor below which a typical person is unlikely to fall
17. Find and celebrate prodigies, geniuses and the gifted
18. Make sure kids learn to exercise, eat right and avoid common health problems
19. Teach future citizens to obey authority
20. Teach future employees to do the same
21. Increase appreciation for art and culture
22. Teach creativity and problem solving
23. Minimize public spelling mistakes
24. Increase emotional intelligence
25. Decrease crime by teaching civics and ethics
26. Increase understanding of a life well lived
27. Make sure the sports teams have enough players

A mixture of realities and harsh realities. Excellent read.

edumall2.0

A great revamp of MOE’s eduportal. Great platform to learn, share and collaborate with fellow teachers.

From About Us page:

edumall2.0 is a common Internet-based platform for hosting all MOE-HQ Teaching and Learning (T&L) digital content produced or procured by MOE HQ divisions. Teachers and students can access trusted curriculum-based education digital content and interact with one and other using a variety of Internet services.

Through edumall, teachers and students can easily access their preferred content collated from the different sources and engage personalised services from trusted industry partners. As such, edumall will enable the nurturing of a voluntary online learning community, the fostering of collaboration amongst teachers, amongst students, and between teachers and students. Through greater interactivity via digital content, the teaching and learning experiences of teachers and students respectively will be more stimulating and engaging.

Key Features

edumall provides:

• Communities: A publicly accessible space where users can access selected content and engage learning services. Materials are presented in lively multimedia format such as flash animation, video streaming or podcasting. There are a variety of interactive tools in various communities, these include wiki, discussion forum, opinion poll and Survey.
• Repository: An electronic library of digital content for teaching and learning from various MOE HQ divisions or trusted third-party providers.
• Search: A powerful search engine which enables users to search the entire edumall by simple keywords or advanced criteria.
• MyEdumall: A personalized space where teachers and students where can customize and present personalized content. Teachers can post articles in a special personal blog known as KnowBlog to stimulate and facilitate online learning. (This is a personalized space, login required)

Technology Integration in Teaching

I recently signed up as a member of ISTE and received an impressive amount of PD information and resources. Here’s one archived webinar.

Technology Integration in Teaching: The TPACK Framework (webinar archive)

I thought the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) Framework fits perfectly into MOE’s mp3. Highly recommended webinar.

“Strong Fundamentals for Future Learning” – Key Directions for the Future of Primary Education

From Ministry of Education Singapore Press Releases:

Retain the strong fundamentals of our education system but place greater emphasis on the development of lifeskills and values to ensure that pupils are well prepared for the future, recommends the Primary Education Review and Implementation (PERI) Committee which shared its preliminary recommendations today.

2 key highlights of this review:  A more holistic lower primary (Primary 1 and 2) assessment and moving all primary schools to single-session by 2016.

9-year-old writes iPhone app

From The Singapore iPhone Guide:

Meet the world’s youngest iPhone developer. Lim Ding Wen of Singapore, who recently turned 9 (not a typo), has written an iPhone app called Doodle Kids that allows you to paint on the iPhone using shapes like triangles, circles, squares made up of random colours and sizes.

Amazing Singapore kid!

History of the Internet

Very informative video.

Pupils’ video production: Cyber-Bullying

Amazing video produced by a group of pupils from my school. This video is also shortlisted as finalist in the School Digital Media Awards 2009.

Vote for it now!

Did You Know 3.0

Will be showing this video during my next ICT briefing

The iPhone Could Be The Ultimate Study Machine

From TechCrunch,

We’ve all heard about the incredible growth of the App Store, which has seen more than 500 million downloads across over 15,000 applications. Much of the innovation (or at least, money) has come from games and other entertaining apps like Smule’s Ocarina and Pandora Radio. But the iPhone is also poised to make huge strides in a somewhat less glamorous space: study guides.

The title alone is very intriguing. Anyway, I love my new iPhone 3G

Screentoaster – Now with jam and butter

Screentoaster with audio recording now! Toast with jam and butter