Malaysia Boleh

I haven't blogged since I arrived in Johor Bahru in May this year so I thought it was time to get 'back on the blog'.
I am very privileged to be working here as an Education Advisor contracted through a company called LeapEd, to the Malaysian Government.  We are working on a transformation project in government schools called Trust Schools.  To meet accreditation in Year 5 of the programme these schools must meet certain standards across a range of criteria.
The biggest shift is in the Teaching and Learning in these schools and some teachers have come a very long way on an amazing journey. To that end some of the biggest challenges are to meet the AfL and differentiation criteria.
At the highest level this means students need to have far more autonomy and be able to set their own goals, using strategies that suit them and their individual learning styles. To support teachers in doing this it is essential they understand the development and progression of students across the range of skills in their curriculum area. So (or 'jadi' in Malay) to that end I am currently working with a group of teachers in the two schools where I am based to encourage teachers - and ultimately students, to be clear about next steps in learning.
I have found some amazing resources on pinterest and will attach one example with some other links here.

From Pinterest

Grade 5 LearningTargets
Young Teacher Love
How to Write Learning Targets
Learning Targets Images & Examples

15 Best freeware apps for Mac

Thanks to @guykawasaki for this link - when my new macbook pro arrives I'll be hooking up to most of these!  Meanwhile I have had a great weekend adding photos (once I upgraded my account) in flickr, twittering and skyping with a bunch of great educators around the world including my awesome friend Margit in Hawaii who is still really a kiwi girl at heart.  Today I am heading for Rotorua to attend a Digital Technology Guidelines meeting - prelude to next week's two day symposium, then tomorrow 1pm NZ time I am skyping in to a PD session in Buffalo with Mike Fisher, Angela Stockman and some other cool folks.

The twitter blog

The twitter blog has some great ideas and thoughts about using twitter. Twitter for librarians blog is a useful one, and the twitter short short story writing competition is great. In the last few days while creating a few animoto presentations (that all need a bit of modification) and uploading them to youtube, I have been researching teacher mentoring as PD. It is interesting that one of Vicki Davis's recent blog posts on Cool Cat Teacher refers to this specifically regarding social networking.and calls it Viral Professional Development. This is a pretty exciting discussion and I am looking forward to taking part in it via Vicki's voicethread and panel discussion soon.

Query about Social Networking

In response to a query from a colleague this morning as to what we 'boomers' can use Social Networking for. The list is endless and limited only by how far we want to take it I guess. In the course of a day there are numerous reasons to network. Communicating with educators and technology enthusiasts (not that these are at all mutually exclusive) is a great way to enhance one's own use of technology by finding out new ways of using it to be creative and innovative in the classroom and in our own use of web tools. One of the most important aspects I see here is that we are modelling responsible behaviours of these tools for students and showing ourselves as lifelong learners. Maybe I am trying to rationalise my addiction to twitter and facebook and ... but I love the fact that in any given moment I can be interacting with like minded people all over the globe e.g. this morning on twitter I have met a teacher in Regina, Saskatchewan who has a great blog site, and have been looking at the blog challenge a group of students are competing in. All of this is innovative and outward looking which is what learners need to be if they are to continue to make sense of the world. Take a look at the research and community sharing Diigo here.