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Limewire is a  P2P file sharing service that has been around for a long time.  Limewire is alpha testing their newest version… Limewire 5. And one of the features that is being included in this newest update is the ability to set up private  torrent networks. Which means that only your friends and others that you invite will beable to access this network and download the torrents that are being offered there. This feature allows you to very quickly share files - large and small - with team members, friends, and family without having to worry about strangers getting their hands on your data, home movies, etc.

http://limewire.com/

This is a reprint of a Listener article by Joanne Black, which I think sums up perfectly how we feel at the start of a New Year. I cannot think of anything to add, except Happy New Year to all, and as my friend Jilly says I wish you enough.

“New Year, like a perfect hotel room, is filled with promise. It contains everything you have not yet mucked up and every good intention that has not yet been ignored, broken or forgotten. Everything worthwhile is still possible because real life with all its disappointments, failures and tomato-sauce stains has not yet got in the way, as it inevitably will. December 31 is also a time to reflect on the year just passed (or about to). When I compare the reality of 2008 against the goals I had for it a year ago, the successes are not overwhelming. I vowed to lose weight but it didn’t happen – in fact, I added some. I also vowed to reduce household debt but added some of that, too.”. The whole article will be available on The Listener website from January 24th and is well worth a read.

We celebrated the new year with SingStar at friends Juanita and Philip’s house. We tried Singstar Abba, 80s and Rock Legends, but to no avail we were pretty useless at all of them.. not helped by the fact that the Reddish famaily can all sing! Although I think it would be safe to say that the Hughes family will never be winning any talent competiton for our singing. Nevertheless a good time was had by all and a great way to celebrate the New Year. We even tried to sign Auld Lang Syne, but all forgot the words, so lots of umming- must relearn them as I used to know them.

… and Phil- that video needs to be destroyed!

We started New Year’s Eve with a lovely Chinese meal and then went to a circus. I am not a fan of the circus, and been rather spoilt as the last circus Howard and I saw was the Moscow State Circus in Russia in the 1980s. However it was not too bad, although I did not like the use of the animals (miniture horses and an old and sorry looking elephant). The main focus of the show was on the Royal Kenyan Acrobatic dancers who were excellent, and who kept the audinec spellbound with their athletism (although I think I was more worried about one of them landing in the front row with us as they tumbled around a small show ring). I would not rush to see another circus, but on the whole it was better than I thought it might be, the children enjoyed it and we were with nice company, so all in all not a bad way to spend an evening.

The English education system has had a major review interum report published last month. It says such things as:

Techno-savvy youngsters are developing their computer skills faster today, providing untapped potential to boost learning in primary schools.
Schools need to move with the times and teach much secondary school Information Communication Technology (ICT) knowledge earlier at primary

and

“The primary curriculum needs to be forward-looking. Advances in technology and the internet revolution are driving a pace of change which we could not have imagined when the National Curriculum was introduced twenty years ago.

and even:

1.21. Although not in its remit, many respondents urged the Review to note what
they perceived are serious constraints imposed by the Key Stage 2 tests. There was
wide acceptance that schools, like all public services, must be publicly accountable
for the quality of their provision and the standards pupils achieve. The picture
is a familiar one in that few heads and teachers rejected the principles of good
assessment, including an element of testing, at particular staging points. Rather
their concerns centred on the way in which the outcomes of tests are reported and
the time many felt must be spent preparing children for the conditions of testing thus
narrowing the curriculum.

It also makes the point that children need to have an oral language basis to their learning. Children who begin school with an oral language deficit take a long time (if ever) to catch up. The report is available from here.

The proposed curriculum design sounds very much like our revised curriculum. So we are following England 5years ago with our National Testing? And a strategy that has the effect of ‘narrowing the curriculum’ Is it just me or does this seem odd? Anyway the report is interesting reading. Thanks Jane for the heads-up.

“Pew has released a study showing that for the first time more Americans get their news from the internet than from traditional newspapers…. 59% of people under 30 said they get most of their news online while an equal percentage said TV was a primary source of news. The kids these days are not as keen on newspapers, which got a response of 28%…”

from downloadsquad

I have been spending this evening searching for information and opinions on national testing and league tables.

From ACT in Australia:

Public comparison of school results does not deliver better information for parents or better
public accountability to the taxpayer. It produces misleading and inaccurate information. It
does not lead to better schools for all. It produces social segregation. It favours privilege and
compounds the effects of disadvantage.
League tables of school literacy and numeracy outcomes give misleading and inaccurate
information about the quality of education because they do not measure the ‘value added’ by
the school. School test results are influenced by a variety of factors, not all of which are within
the control of schools or teachers. League tables do not distinguish the school contribution to
the test results from that of other factors such as family background and resources.
Socio-economic background is a major influence on education outcomes. High league table
results may reflect more the privileged family background and resources of the community
served by the school than the quality of teaching and the education program. As a result, league
tables can camouflage underachievement among mediocre schools with favoured intakes. On
the other hand, a school could perform badly in comparison with other schools despite high
quality teaching and resources because it serves a less-privileged community.
Comparisons of school results also lead to inaccurate assessments of school quality because the
tests are narrowly based. They do not assess the full range of schooling objectives. For
example, they ignore the social and personal development dimensions of schooling which are
just as important as the formal academic. Even in academic terms, the subject range and the
year cohorts assessed is limited. In other words, league tables do not give a complete picture of
the work of schools.

From an English ‘expert’:

“In England, a market approach to schools has created a bewildering hierarchy of institutions, from the elite private schools for the most powerful and advantaged families to the ‘bog standard’ comprehensive for the most disadvantaged and least powerful,” Professor Mortimore said in Sydney yesterday. “Is this what Australia needs?”

Peter Mortimore.

What the media do with the information:

If you are planning to live in Manchester and have children, the standard of schools in the area is important.
To that end, we have studied the most recent league tables (published in December 2006) to make a shortlist of the ten best and worst primary and secondary schools in Manchester.

Or from NY City:

Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) outcome in 2005-2006 for All Students: NO
AYP outcome for Black or African American: YES
AYP outcome for White: NO
AYP outcome for Economically Disadvantaged: NO
AYP outcome for Hispanic or Latino: NO

As the first quote says … it is all a test of community and has precious little to do with value added or quality of education in the broadest sense. Helpful - no more than saying schools with blue gates or principals who wear ties do better than those who don’t.

Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

The weather has been glorious since Christmas with 28C+ degrees every day. We have spent a lot of time down on the beach- especially easy when it is only 5 minutes away so we can nip down in the evenings as well when Howard finishes work.

Am forcing myself to stay at home today to get some jobs done, but might have to sneak down for a little while before we head out tonight as it is so hot again already.

Down to the beach

Down to the beach
On a sunny day we go

Beach bags packed with sun screen lotions
Hands rubbing people’s backs in slow motion
Glistening oily bodies radiating with sensation

Down to the beach
Down to the beach
Where a chilly sea breeze blows

Let’s have some fun

In the red-hot sun

Down to the beach
Only there the ladies reveal saucy behinds
Whenever the raging sun is still kind

Down to the beach
As never-ceasing waves play across the shores
People happily play dreading any rainy downpour

Down to the beach
Where young lovers closely nestle
As sand creatures cause the sand to bristle
Seagulls gliding in the air with screams and whistles
Kids picking up shells and building stormy sand castles

Down to the beach

Where mostly good vibes flow
Down to the beach
We go whilst there is still sun without snow

Copyright 2006 - Sylvia Chidi

Chris Leahman has a great discussion of this today:

Perhaps that’s the answer — assessment is not an interruption of learning if and when it can positively and directly influence the current or future learning and work of the student. If it does not, then it was an interruption of learning.

I agree completely - if the assessment does nothing to inform future learning and teaching programmes for that particular child then what was the point??!!

read the whole post here …

One of the things I am trying to do with our school is cut down the amount of assessment we do for summative purposes. And to establish ways of using one assessment for multiple purposes.
My vision is to have one piece of paper that records:
1. Maths - graph of strategy stage and basic facts knowledge as separate items, with respect to expectations.
2. Reading - graph of reading age with respect to chronological age.
3. Writing - surface, deep features and attitudes to writing. Focusing on the genre-irrelevant writing skills
4. Inquiry - ability to find, manage information and share information and learning

The rest of assessment information will focus on key competencies. We are mostly there with the first two, and working on #3. Our teachers only day next year will begin looking at the Key Competencies. I am happy to share what we have done to this point if you email me.

Most parents and families simply what to know how their child is doing with respect to both expectations and their previous ability. Sometimes I think we provide so much information it actually clouds the picture rather than providing clarity.

This book was written by fellow New Jerseyite and long-term Springsteen friend Robert Santelli and was written with the full co-operation of the band. The result is this fully illustrated informal biography combines rare photographs with 30 removable facsimiles of E Street memorabilia, including Bruce Springsteen’s first business card and hand-written set list, and even two great posters. Santelli follows the highs and lows of the band from the early days in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to the critical acclaim of Born to Run, the mania of Born in the U.S.A.(when the rest of the world discovered Springsteen), the international touring, and each member’s unique projects.

There were lots of memories for me of concerts attended over the years, many with good friend Di who was with me when we attended his best concert yet in Cardiff this year. We are heading up to stay with her next week and I will have to take this book so we can reminisce some more!

According to this article from the NY Times we are, seriously!

The lucrative nature of that revenue increase cannot be appreciated without doing something that T-Mobile chose not to do, which is to talk about whether its costs rose as the industry’s messaging volume grew tenfold. Mr. Kohl’s letter of inquiry noted that “text messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit.”

A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.”

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

So the texts we pay up to 20c for are sent at virtually no cost to Telecom or Vodafone. How many users are paying extra for limited numbers of texts on Vodafone or $10-$15 with Telecom, again for limited numbers of texts.  The telcos are raking it in!!
What happened to the numbers of texts causing carriers issues which is the reason we were told a couple of years ago caps had to be put on text plans. I smell a very large rat (again)?

A Tele-con?

More holiday snaps at flickr/jedd

The Dumesnil-Vickers Family - Originally uploaded by courage.campaign

Through a random series of web page clicks, I ended up on the Flickr set from the Courage Campaign group that are protesting the decision in California to outlaw gay marriages:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/couragecampaign/sets/72157611501972510/

This is an issue that I feel very strongly about as a long time advocate for gay rights with a large number of gay friends (one of whom was a bridesman at my wedding!). I think that all couples, same sex and hetrosexual, should have the same rights in the law and in our society. If gay couples want to get married, then I believe they should be able to. I think that loving, healthy relationships should be what we aim for in our society rather than sticking to some antiquated ideal of the family unit.

This set of photos on Flickr is a great way for people to show the world their support and solidarity for gay couples in California! I’m going to take a photo showing my support and invite you to as well.

After our Swedish Christmas Eve we spent Christmas Day with Howard’s family for a Kiwi Christmas. For the first time forever (no-one can remember the last time) the whole family were together on Christmas Day, Nan & Pop, Howard and his 2 brothers, wives, nephews and nieces. Both Nan & Pop also had a widowed sister each to stay so there were 13 of us for lunch and 18 for tea. Having family around for Thomas is one of the reasons we stay in New Zealand, and it was great that we could all be together for the day… but it does not stop me getting homesick for the UK, or from missing my family.

If you are in Christchurch (New Zealand) next Christmas try to make it to the great Christmas Grotto based at Spreydon Baptist Church.Lots of people have talked about it, and thanks to friend Juanita for organising it, we finally got round to seeing it this year. The Grotto has been running since 2001, and volunteers from the church expand and change it each year. This year they were expecting over 20,000 visitors, and although we did have a wait for a wee while it was very well organised and there was plenty to amuse the younger ones whilst we queued. We will definitely go again.

OK - so I am obviously a bit slow out of the starting blocks given that the following blog post on the Wikispaces blog is dated the 10th of December! Still, this is very good news. I have always liked the speed and clean lines of Safari but have steered clear because of how heavily I use sites like Wikispaces that have previously not given you ‘WYSIWYG’ editing in Safari. This has now changed! The following is from the Wikispaces blog:

For
all those Mac users out there, we now offer Visual Editor support for
Safari 3. So if your school’s computer lab is full of Macs, or
you just love the speed of Safari, you can now enjoy the ease of
Wikispaces with it.

This new release also brings support for other WebKit-based
browsers, such as Google’s new Chrome browser.

I also note from the blog that Wikispaces have also made it easier for teachers to bulk create student logins. Again from the blog:

For
the past 3 years, Wikispaces has offered a service to educators where
we would create all the accounts for their students in bulk. We are
excited to announce that we have made this process even easier.

Now, for any of our K-12 wikis, you can create accounts for your
students without having to send us an e-mail. Simply go to
“Manage Wiki,” and then “User Creator.” All you
need to begin are the usernames and passwords you want for your
students. With the new user creator, you can:

• create accounts with or without e-mail addresses
• have passwords generated for you
• add a suffix or prefix to all the usernames to ease creation
• and make them members of multiple wikis straight away

All of these features help keep Wikispaces as my wiki of choice.

In saying that, PB Wiki has really added a lot of functionality in recent times including document management tools and an increase in the amount of storage space for free accounts (now up to 2Gb and if you pay $9 US, you can have unlimited!). You can put all of your uploaded files into folders to make it a breeze to locate them again.

I also like the way you can set a variety of access levels for members: administrator, editor, writer, reader, or page level only. If you want to move into using wikis for digital portfolios, the page level access option is exactly what is needed (eg if you want to make only certain pages available to parents and children).

It has also had the bulk student account creation tools for quite a long time.

So the race for the best wiki tool continues with both Wikispaces and PB Wiki having excellent features. People are always asking me to tell them which one I recommend and it is becoming harder to be as definitive in with my opinion. It will be interesting to see how each of these continues to develop! One thing I am going to investigate is backing up all of the work I have on my wikis. After losing the collections of feeds I had (see previous post), I am particularly aware at the moment of how fragile all of my work is sitting on servers on the other side of the world!

Anyways - I hope you had a wonderful Xmas (we had a really nice chilled out day at my parents) and that you do something fun for New Year’s Eve!

Warning - This is one of my strongly held personal beliefs that doesn’t necessarily reflect my school or blog-host policy

One of my real concerns, as we look towards the new year is the National Party policy and now legislation mandating National Testing.  Bruce Hammonds says:

The National Government has rushed through its National Testing Legislation.According to the Prime Minister ‘ all students will face testing against national standards in literacy and numeracy from next year’.

And it is not to say that primary schools do not currently test their students. Far from it. As Kelvin Smythe says ,’ schools are already assessed up to the gunwales…the last thing they need is more pressure from the Review Office for even more assessment’. National Party policy statements say that new tests won’t be required as teachers already use AsTTle and PAT etc but they will be establishing benchmarks setting out minimum skills. This might not be such a concern as many school already do this and, if it were simplified, it might cut out the need for so many tests. Some of the tests schools are ‘encouraged’ to use , according to Kelvin Smythe, are overblown providing lots of data and little information, and I agree with him.

… and I must say I agree with him too … and more. Testing is NOT teaching!

Who would want to work in - or heaven forbid lead - a school identified by national testing as a ‘failing school’? We already have a dirth of those willing to step forward and take on principalship. (I understand) The average age of NZ principals is 56 and the average retirement age is 58; also aproximately 1/3 of principals have been through the First Time Principals programme - therefore at the beginning of their careers in principalship. So we already have a crisis for principalship looming in the next few years as we loose the majority of our experienced colleagues and have few to replace them with similar track records. Schools facing challenges need experienced and skilled leadership …. is this what they are going to get?

League tables tend to be a test of community rather than any perceived teacher competence or leadership expertise. Sure both groups can make a REAL difference but overall Hattie and others have shown time and time again that by far the largest influences on student achievement are outside the sphere of influence of the school. So how will national testing influence or impact positively on these things?

I believe this policy has the potential to be significantly divisive for our education system and sincerely hope our teacher and principal groups make a strong stand resisting it. This is all about populist politics and precious little about promoting educational achievement.

What do you think?
Do you work in a system with national testing - how do you find it? Am I overreacting?

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