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A Gaggle of OzTeachers

At the IWB Conference on the Gold Coast today I met up with a bunch of teachers from the OzTeachers mailing list community, many of whom I have known for years but only met this weekend for the first time. What an interesting world we live in… we rounded up as many of them as we could to pose for a group photo in from of Bryn Jones’ infamous “iVan”.

Standing, left to right, it’s Margo Metcalf, Val Macauley, Bryn Jones, Mal Lee, Sue Green, Fiona Banjer and Kim English. In the front is myself and John Pearce. Kel Hathaway, Sue Burvill-Shaw, Adrian Greig and AnneMarie Loi were at the conference too, but we couldn’t find them for this photo unfortunately…

It was a great conference, and I’ll blog more about it later, but for now I just wanted to say G’day to all the OzTeach members I met today… it was great to put a face to the names!  Thanks also to all those nice people who came up to me and let me know that they either read this blog, or listen to The Virtual Staffroom. It’s really great to make real world connections.

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G'day from sunny Queensland

DSC00516.JPG I’m currently on the Gold Coast at the 4th Interactive Whiteboard Conference.  It’s a big event with  around 450 delegates, and about 120 different presentation sessions!   I had the pleasure this morning of presenting two of those sessions, and have spent most of the  rest of the day flitting around, checking out what else is on offer, looking at new products and generally enjoying the beautiful weather here on the Gold Coast.  Right now, I’m sitting here in a Web 2.0 workshop run by John Pearce.  John is teaching teachers how to set up their own blogs and wikis, so I figured this would be a good moment to add a quick blog entry myself.  There are a few photos in the Flickr sidebar, and I’ll add more over the weekend.

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Dude! Where's my Map?

The American education system, or at least the people who like to think they run it, seem rather obsessed with not leaving any child behind. However, it seems that some of them might already have been left behind if this video of Miss Teen USA South Carolina is anything to go by…

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OK, so I get it now… it’s obvious why one fifth on US Americans can’t locate the USA on a world map… They don’t have maps! Of course! Forget this idea of not leaving any child behind… US schools don’t need national standards-based, high-stakes testing. They just need to buy everyone maps! Then they can concentrate on getting all those people from South Africa and The Iraq and those other Asian countries properly educated. WTF?!

Seriously though, I have a lot of US American friends, many of them teachers… wonderful, fabulous, dedicated teachers… and I personally believe that when I see video of, like, such as, some people in our nation like that poor girl stumbling over, like, that question, and such as… it makes me realise just how much patience we teachers must have as we persevere with kids like this in our classes.

Reminds me of this clip of The Chaser’s Julian Morrow interviewing Americans in the streets, and asking them about world politics, history and geography. This is just television, right? Right?

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