Learning Contract Project
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Pascale Hyboud-Peron
Wayne created an OER portal page for the NZAFT (New Zealand Association of French Teachers) and my first project is going to populate it with information relevant for teachers of French in particular. With the initial training course nearing completion I am becoming more aware of the potential of WikiEducator altogether. I am thinking it would be a good place to develop a course to support the teaching of Languages in Intermediate schools. Learning Languages (LL) is one area of the NZC which Intermediate teachers find hard to implement. It is a daunting task for Intermediate teachers who are usually enthusiastic at the idea of introducing a language but often feel they lack the competence, the resources and the support. Both the French National Adviser and the NZAFT are keen to help them out yet it remains quite difficult to identify who teaches French, where, how often, in Intermediate schools and therefore support is patchy. Also the OUI resource made available to Intermediate teachers, despite having filled a gap for some time, is not aligning particularly well any more with the NZC Achievement Objectives. So why not create a course on WikiEducator for that purpose, available through the NZAFT portal?
What I could offer to do:
- seek and coordinate contributors and contributions to make up a Programme of Work (Open and editable Lesson plans, inc Hand outs and support resources)
- obtain pedagogical advice to put together a course meeting the values and principles of the NZC and the Learning Languages Curriculum Achievement Objectives
- facilitate the uploading of the course on WE once I familiarise myself further: use of templates, creating new pages etc
Things I would need to find out:
- Wayne mentioned to Faye that "The Ministry of Education has provided some funding support for the development of OER exemplars that can be mapped to the NZ curriculum" How do I go about finding out if such a project would qualify? Who do I contact?
- Wayne also mentioned in his reply to Faye cut off date of 30th June 2010. Is this to get a project underway or is it for its completion?
- What the guidelines are precisely for Intermediate Schools and LL (eg: how many hours tuition)
- How to present this to MoE and the people in charge of LL so that it could possily be considered as a pilot scheme ( and possibly attract some funding)?
Such a WE course could be trialled for French (my specialist area) and then adapted to other languages so that Intermediate teachers could have a choice.
I would be grateful for any input on that idea from WE specialists, OER advocates, Intermediate teachers, or anyone interested in promoting Learning Languages in New Zealand schools. --PascaleHP 03:09, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
Faye Booker
I am thinking of starting a portal page for my school - Alfriston College. I have had a good look at some other schools who have set one up and this seems the logical place to start. Aside from the setting up of the main page, the focus will be physics until I can get other staff on board (which shouldn't be too hard - we've got some very innovative staff at AC). We are running a self managed programme in year 12 and 13 physics - this allows learners to have some choice over when they learn, how they learn and when they assess. It is not quite my ideal of self directed learning due to the limitations of NCEA but it is a start. So probably some self guided tutorials would be good to support my physics learners and develop my skills.
We (my physics colleagues and I) have also been running some professional development relating to self managed learning at AC physics eg at Ulearn and Learning@Schools so maybe there some possibilities here of how we can enhance this through wikieducator. We have a brief wiki set up (done for Ulearn) at wikispaces but I don't think we have revisited it since then. It seems more logical to work through wikieducator.
Looking at all I have written above, clearly I have looked further than just this Learning Contract Project. Specifically for the project I would like to get our portal page done and something initiated for physics.
Question: I am still coming to grips with creative commons and open source software. Our school is bog standard in terms of microsoft and internet explorer although we are making some progress wih moodle. What can I do with any of my resources - primarily office documents - so they can be used in wikieducator? --Faye Booker 04:28, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
- Hi Faye, I think that starting with a portal page for your college is an excellent starting point. This will enable you to share your knowledge and invite others from your school to join up. I think that is quite appropriate for you to focus on your unique mix of physics & pedagogical interests as a link from the school portal page. The Ministry of Education has provided some funding support for the development of OER exemplars that can be mapped to the NZ curriculum -- so this is something you may want to consider. As long as the outputs are delivered before 30 June 2010 --- you may be able to earn a little extra funding for your school or compensation for your efforts.
- With specific reference to your question on open source software -- no need to worry here. The WikiEducator project respects freedom of choice and teachers are free to use the software of their choice when working on WikiEducator -- so teachers at your school can use any browser while editing on WikiEducator, eg Internet explorer, Firefox etc. WikiEducator uses the Mediawiki an open file format so you don't have to worry about software used at the school. As you know, we provide a conversion service to convert and upload Microsoft Word and Open Office documents into wiki syntax. --Wayne Mackintosh 06:48, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
