Comments on: Musings over discussions with colleagues

By: Stephen Eames

Stephen Eames — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:18:30 +0000

Thanks Suzie, interesting read. thought provoking and very relevant to current conversations and issues.

By: Lynne Crowe

Lynne Crowe — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:59:04 +0000

As an Intermediate teacher I don’t moderate my students blog postings or comments but I do RSS both and usually read any comments left before they do. After 3 years I have had no problems. A couple of times I ahve had students who haven’t followed my instructions about how to set up their blogs and what a hassle it has been to have to deal with the constant moderation emails.
As to the league tables, we are a decile 4 school so we will lose out in any school comparisons! In the end it will end up in ‘teach to the test’ testing; out the door thinking and creativity!

By: Allanahk

Allanahk — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:25:14 +0000

You put the whole thing with more intelligence than I cold muster- it seems that I am not to have the last say after all.

I still believe that moderating the comments on student blogs is the way to go. We need to bring the parent community along with us on our journey- the kids will understand that the blogs get moderated and as a lot of my kids comment after school I tend to have my email notification pop up immediately and I moderate smartly- maybe that solution is not for all teachers but it works for me. I can model and lead by example- now my class has got the hang of commenting we will work on modelling constructive feedback in the feedback.

Re National Testing- I can’t see that it can possibly be a good thing. They already publish NZCEA results in our local paper and people do make judgements about the school from them. Some time ago I submitted my whole class to Cambridge testing. We didn’t do as well as a nearby school who only let their top kids sit the test- then they had the paper publish their results. I had let my whole class have a go. People questioned my class results.

A decile 10 school is by its very nature likely to provide higher results than a decile 2 because the children have had access to more out of school opportunities- totally beyond the school’s influence.

It all seems to be a bit of a nightmare.

By: Dave Winter

Dave Winter — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:16:56 +0000

Starting the new term with afrenzy of online activity. My pln seems in good heart. Have made some ref to assessment in post on my blog. My concern is that at the moment we are somewhat prone to try to increase the length of a piece of string by measuring it. We just need to be sure that the data is somehow helping students and that we are focussing on the learning that will make the most difference for them. I am a scared of teaching to the wrong test as I am of schools seperating themselves of as the achievers and not. We can do better but need the assessment to prove it lol.

By: michael/@teachernz

michael/@teachernz — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:56:23 +0000

A considerable post and a lot to mull over, but I’ll keep it brief.
School league tables have led to “right flight” the UK, with low performing schools becoming sink holes and higher performing schools picking their students by academic ability. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen here. Don’t most school already collect the data that will be covered by National Standards? I know we do. We use data to inform classroom programmes, report to the BoT and to let parents know their child’s progress and what their expected levels of achievement are. I can’t see that student’s will be sitting any more standardised tests than they already do. The issue is what happens to that information once it is collated and disseminated to the press as it undoubtedly will be.

I saw @dorothyburt’s comment last week on twitter about moderated comments. I know our class blog is fully moderated, by request, without it I doubt if I’d be allowed to continue. My personal blog is moderated, but only for people commenting for the first time. Maybe I could change the class blog to be the same.

Old blogs and wiki. Now that you mention it…. I’ve cleared out last year’s wiki ready for new work this term, but our blog posts go back to 2005! Do you think I should introduce a cut off point, perhaps when the students leave our school?

By: Dorothy

Dorothy — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:40:10 +0000

Hey Suzie! I agree it was a wonderful opportunituy to attend a very well organised conference AND catch up with mates and have some very robust (heated at times!) discussions. Especially since the things we debated are so difficult to do justice to in 140 character tweets I am really hoping the May 9th unconference in Auckand will include this level of interaction and not just geek stuff, much as I love that too.
Thank you for the summary of various things I said – you have done such a good job I think I will quote you next time I talk about these issues. I can see the testing stuff having the potential to be quite divisive in NZ Education and will leave it to people like you to advocate about the broader issues. For those of us in Schooling Improvement Schools (mostly Decile1) it has been part of our landscape for almost a decade and we have learned to live with it in it’s current form and use it to our students’ advantage. As you say, potentially it could be quite different on a national scale.