It appears that everything is not at all as it seems.  From what I read, schools and clusters can continue to use ICT PD funds to support their attendance at national conferences in 2010.

This is indeed good news and recognition of the value of these events.

So what about 2011?

I have been extraordinarily busy over the last wee while and blogging has taken the backseat.  A bit sad really, because the last post has probably been the forefront of my rants for too long and I don’t want to be known as a ‘one trick pony’.  I stand by the comments, but have more to offer than just political raving.  Check out this space over the next few weeks for some real developments with learning and professional learning.  I am getting very excited about our evolving ideas and the emerging leadership of quality teachers in these ‘innovations’.

Even though I promised I would not do it, I will also have some more on National Standards (Yes, these have been released and not without some growing controversy over the ‘mandate‘) and some ways to implement and integrate these where our kids and their learning is at the fore, and not unwieldy compliance and narrowing of curriculum.

So much to blog… and so much sleeping, work and keeping fit to do too.  This environment will become an increasingly important tool for me and I am planning to make it a more reflective avenue for me to continue to grow and learn.

I am so pleased to be able to bring some wonderful educators to Nelson on the 22nd and 23rd of September for our cluster’s curriculum seminars.  This is going to be an exciting time for us all.  While we are all doing a variety of things in terms of implementing the curriculum in our own schools, it is fair to say that we are not quite ready to implement our own school’s curriculum… actually, it is not even in its design stage yet, but that is cool – because we are getting ourselves into a position to do this, and do it well!  :-)

Over this next month there will be an incredible amount of development and professional learning around curriculum and curriculum designs for schools in our region.  This is going to help our team and provide us with some much needed ‘digestion’ and ‘reflection’ time to enable us to review our plans and assert what it is we are going to do.  What’s more is that it is collaborative and will lead to some projects and developments across schools too!

This leads me to the reason for this entry… What would you ask schools and school leaders who are well down the track of implementation of the NZC and development of their own curriculum?  Please add these questions as comments below.  I would love your feedback!

Many thanks.

I had a great afternoon completing some development around numeracy teaching and learning in our School.  This was extremely well facilitated by Elizabeth from UC Ed+ and it is really getting our team together to think about how we are teaching and how we can work together better to enhance outcomes for students.  I am so proud of our teaching team and the attitude and approaches they bring to this… our team is going to be successful due to the fact that they care so much about the student’s learning.