A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district’s superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.

[From Texas school OKs gun-toting teachers - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)]

Has anyone ever heard of anything more preposterous? If you browse the article the reasoning is “it’s a matter of safety.” In the case of a lockdown “…what if someone gets in? It’s common sense.”

Whoa there cowboy. No. It’s not. That’s some technology that I would not like to see in the classroom.

Apple – Education – iLife and iWork K-12 School Site License

To celebrate our 30-year commitment to education, Apple is introducing K-12 site licenses for both iLife and iWork. At just $319* for either suite, your students gain access to the best tools to prepare them for life and work using critical 21st century skills.

We already have Office 2008 for Mac so iWork may not be necessary but we’ll definitely upgrade our iLife suite. That said, I have been trialling Office 2008 on my machine and it has not been as responsive as I would have liked. I seriously have to have Excel so I will put up with some grief there but MSWord is unresponsive for the first 5 minutes of use which annoys the pants off me (metaphorically) somewhat.

We had machines delivered at the beginning of the year with iLife ‘08 standard so it would be super nice to bring the 10.4.11 machines in line. GarageBand 4 is sweet!

What a mouthful. Might just call it the DERS for short. Well we (AH, HK and myself) “did” the symposium that I was prepping for in the last post. Mark Pesce was keynote. He has interesting things to say (forward thinking, bit on the edge?) and is worth checking out in my opinion.
Listened to him on previous Education.au podcasts. He participated in the forums with dana boyd when she visited last year.

Information from DEEWR was interesting, timeline of things, how money is being rolled out, deadlines for applications etc. I did find it curious that the mood in the room still contained a little negativity. Comments raised such as “when are we going to get training” and “this is all well and good but we need a cultural change.” Heck! Do these people want their slice of $1.2 billion or not?! Do they expect all the work to be done for them?

Silverton Primary School presented in the same session as us. They have lots of cool stuff going on and seems like a fun place to be if you’re a kid. The principal and one of the teachers showed off some of the kit that they use (mp3 recorders and players, Flip cameras, datalogging devices etc) and generated a bit of excitement. The inevitable question arose, “Where did you get the funding?” to which the answer was (I loved it) “We didn’t. The stuff isn’t that expensive if you shop around.”
Hello! Invest some time web browsing, take a (slight) risk and you get stuff for a great price. The Principal went on to say that he just likes gadgets and keeps “throwing” them at teachers and students to see what they come up with. Moral of the story? Take a risk. Crappy first draft. Nothing works unless you do.

We were also brilliant (of course!) although Mark Pesce thought we were a primary school (he twittered some complimentary things about our talk and Silverton’s). Should have given a bit of a preamble I guess. Roll on next week. Shorter presentation this time but a big one with big boss of CEO. No pressure.

“Paul Thomson is an inspirational educator. He has fought many a fight with the Queensland Education Department, which is why he ended up setting up his own school, with the support of parents and other teachers.”

(Via ABC EdPod.)

That’s how the blurb read on my iTunes playlist. The original interview was from the Conversation Hour with Richard Fidler January 30, 2008 and proved to be quite interesting. Paul Thomson expressed opinions on a number of issues (the whole point of the interview I would think) some of which I disagreed with (the internet is useless for instance) but others I found quite provoking.

• On bullying… “If you bully that child again, you’re going”
• On homework… “Thirty kids do three hours homework – that’s ninety hours of work you correct next day. What a joke! Who can correct ninety hours of work?”
• Be a Waffo

But most interesting of all not accepting the paradigm that all children develop at the same rate by having mixed age classes across the school. Students form and reform groups depending on their competence in a particular topic. Paul doesn’t go into the model in depth but it struck me as making a lot of sense. Lets do it I say.