So why would you choose your local school now? Simply because all the evidence suggests that the edge in education parents seek is not gained with fancy technological gadgets, nor in this idea of effective or good teachers.
The key is in the quality of the relationship that children have with their classroom teacher. And we simply have in New Zealand amongst the very best teachers in the world and you can pretty much trust that the ones in your local school are as good as the ones in that expensive private school down the road.
if more of our kids go to their local school, we have a chance to rebuild a sense of community,
And we refuse to be marketed to, to be sold the lie that our community and our school is not as good as that one down the road where the richer kids go to
the core role of schools. That role is not literacy and numeracy but about creating a community of happy kids learning about the world and their place in it.
Using the free website builder WIX lots of web 2.0 tools for teachers and guides for working on the web. Includes creative commons and digital citizenship, as well as history sites, world religions, mapping tools, etc.
You may be interested in the attached drawing together of web 2.0 tools -- all websites created using the free website builder WIX. Sorry if already been mentioned before. It does need some navigating around but I have found some real treasures here.
I am always looking for new graphic novel ideas for my students - apart from Capstone Press, I know little other US graphic novels, so his is great to extend my knowledge and collection.
Inspire Students to Read and Travel With The Global Bookshelf
The Global Bookshelf is a book search and recommendation engine that was started by my friend Gillian Duffy. The purpose of The Global Bookshelf is to help people find travel stories. The books you'll find aren't travel guides, they're travel stories that could inspire you to visit a new place and experience a new culture. You can browse The Global Bookshelf by region, genre, and book format (Kindle, PDF, physical book).
Applications for Education
Gillian is very keen to have others add their book reviews to The Global Bookshelf. If you have high school students who have read some travel narratives, consider having them write a review to share on The Global Bookshelf. This is a great way to provide an authentic audience for your students' work.
Librarians are uniquely qualified to curate. School librarians are perhaps most ripe for this function, because they understand the curriculum and the specific needs and interests of their own communities of teachers, administrators, learners, and parents.
We school librarians are used to critically evaluating, selecting, and sharing content and tools for learning. We are used to taming information flow to facilitate discovery and knowledge building.
As school librarians we can think of digital collection curation as the selection and assembly of a focused group of resources into a Web-based presentation that meets an identified purpose or need and has meaning and context for a targeted audience.
Unlike other Web curators, librarians are not simple one-interest enthusiasts.
Educators will also value help in gathering the tools they need for daily classroom activities. School librarians can gather lesson and rubric portals, nonfiction and documentary films, booktrailers, tools for regular classroom routines—online stop watches, classroom clipart, poster tools, game and quiz generators, etc.
School librarians might also curate for parents by gathering resources to support learning at home, explanations of new technologies, and instruction in transliteracy.
These learning artifacts can function as lasting tools for instruction as well as models for future learners.
Curation tools present an exciting new genre of search tool. Searchers can now exploit the curated efforts or the bibliographies of experts and others who take the lead in a particular subject area—those who volunteer to scan the real-time environment as scouts. They also present the opportunity to guide learners in new evaluation strategies. Who is the curator? Which curators can you trust? Is a curator attached to a team, publication, institution, organization? How can the quality of their insights, selections, sources, and feeds be judged? Do their efforts have many followers? Is their curation active and current?