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On June 21 2012, the Government released a discussion paper which states its vision for the improvement of the teaching profession. The 'New Directions for School Leadership and the Teaching Profession,' aims to stimulate and inform discussion on the future of the teaching profession and school leadership.  As a collective of grass roots teachers, who are not currently being asked to participate in educational debates and discussion, we see this as an opportunity to enable teachers' voice.   Teachers: A great, yet untapped, source for policy makers.

Something to think about in regards to educational leadership.

Another interesting read in regards to whole school change and the 'ideals' of technology in education.

"This animation was produced on behalf of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and aims at encouraging education leaders to develop a framework for teachers learning."

"Proponents of "bring your own device" (BYOD) programs like them for a lot of reasons: budgets keep dwindling, students already bring devices to school, and technology isn't getting cheaper. "People are saying 'It's happening in the real world. Let's mirror that in our schools," says Lucy Gray, project director ofthe Leadership for Mobile Learning (LML) initiative at CoSN, the Consortium for School Networking. But this article isn't meant to convince readers to try BYOD. It's about how to make it work once you've decided it's the way to go. Here are the methods three districts took to make BYOD happen."

The Official iOS 5 Education Deployment Guide. This guide is designed for those responsible for the deployment of iOS devices, from IT leadership to implementors. It highlights best practices and considerations relevant to deploying and supporting iOS devices in education environments. Though US based it still has useful information. 

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

"This post is inspired by the Xmas end of year podcast by the EdTech Crew." Another great resource of thoughts and ideas to add to the discussion about eLearning leadership.

A year in…reflections on a my first year as an eLearning Coordinator .. So here a few things that I have learnt from my first year in the role…

ASAE and Center for Association Leadership annual meeting August 14 -18, 2009 in Toronto. Presentations and handouts. The site also illustrates a new hub tool for conference participants bringing together info streams to one location.

"Women continued to debate the question of whether formal quotas are needed for their rise to technology leadership roles at last week's Cisco Empowered Women's Network lunch in Melbourne. However, some believe it's the work teachers are doing in schools and universities that will have the greatest effect in growing the next generation of female leaders. "

"The most time-consuming part of evaluating web tools for educational use has got to be looking at the Terms of Service (also know as Terms of Use or Terms and Conditions). They can go on for pages, and are so often wrapped up in so much legalese that even if you manage to read to the end, there is no guarantee you will be any wiser. And yet we can't just ignore them; it is our duty as educators and as digital citizens to protect rights and understand responsibilities online."

"...we have identified six stages in the evolution of schooling thus far, and within each of the stages a set of indicators; benchmarks that provide schools - at least within the English - speaking world - an international measure that allows them to readily position themselves on the school evolutionary continuum"

Some interesting points to discuss here.

Discussion on social media for leaders of organizations. There are several questions listed for consideration while thinking about using social media as the leader of an organization. 

This is a very relevant and interesting article about some research that applies in Australia as much as the rest of the world.

Plenty of research and opinion articles about education to explore on this site. I enjoyed reading about neuroscience research impact on education in the Learning and Development.

Talks from the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London. At the time of posting there are only links from the 2011 conference but with a little luck there will be links from the 2012 very soon.

21st Century Learning Design Rubrics. Useful for assessing the collaborative nature of activities. Good for defining collaboration etc also.

"Sometimes you have to sit to take a stand. We sit to inspire women in computing and IT. We sit to recognize the value of women's technical contributions. We sit to embrace women's important perspectives and increase their participation. Imagine designing technology that is as broad and creative as the people it serves."

"Hughes engineer Harold Rosen's team overcame technical and political hurdles to send the Syncom communications satellite into orbit 50 years ago."