Now I know of, and have read, the Williams Report on Maths and recently I was in Manchester to listen to Mike Waters and others explain the Rose Review and I have read the Cambridge Review ... so what happens if, in the not to distant future, there is a general election? (check out the odds here)

It could easily happen before any of the reports/reviews have a chance to impact upon teaching/learning/parents/schools etc ... never mind BSF and Primary Capital Programme.

Any views or ideas on this would be appreciated ... check out the Conservative Party, Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats policy documents for enlightenment.

Cast some light on things for me ....

And remember - you have until the end of July to have your say about the Rose Review ... if you don't take the chance - then ....




"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things ..." and to have your say about them, it is not all 'done and dusted' yet. But let's hear it for ICT as it enters the 'core' (where did science go?) And if you wish to get a sense of déjà vu then read here ... and you could, while you are considering all of these things, ask where Sats fit into this plan.

Curriculum reform consultationThe Secretary of State is launching a public consultation on proposals for a revised primary curriculum and changes to Personal, Social, Health and Economic education. Alongside these proposals, the Secretary of State is also consulting on changes to national curriculum subject level descriptions and updated guidance for the teaching of religious education. The consultation takes place from 30 April to 24 July 2009. The questionnaire, an interactive tool to explain the new curriculum, detailed programmes of learning, revised level descriptions, the updated guidance document, and other information on all aspects of the consultation can be found here.

This is really important stuff and the chance for everyone invloved with teaching and learning to say what they feel should be happening and perhaps why they feel so strongly about it. I wonder if it will, as usual be the LA advisors and those with more vested interests who will spend the time to respond or whether teachers and TAs will take the necessary time. It would make a super staff meeting!

PS

Also have a read of the 2009 Horizon Report and check out where people thing that the innovation is going to take place over the next five years.

These are the things to become familiar with if you wish to be at the cutting edge of things:

Mobiles. Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly. New interfaces, the ability to run third-party applications, and location-awareness have all come to the mobile device in the past year, making it an ever more versatile tool that can be easily adapted to a host of tasks for learning, productivity, and social networking. For many users, broadband mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to assume many tasks that were once the exclusive province of portable computers.

Cloud Computing. The emergence of large-scale “data farms” — large clusters of networked servers — is bringing huge quantities of processing power and storage capacity within easy reach. Inexpensive, simple solutions to offsite storage, multi-user application scaling, hosting, and multi-processor computing are opening the door to wholly different ways of thinking about computers, software, and files.

Geo-Everything. Geocoded data has many applications, but until very recently, it was time- consuming and difficult for non-specialists to determine the physical coordinates of a place or object, and options for using that data were limited. Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses. The full implications of geo-tagging are still unfolding, but the impact in research has already been profound.

The Personal Web. Springing from the desire to reorganize online content rather than simply viewing it, the personal web is part of a trend that has been fueled by tools to aggregate the flow of content in customizable ways and expanded by an increasing collection of widgets that manage online content. The term personal web was coined to represent a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet. Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create a customized, personal web-based environment — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning, and other activities.
Semantic-Aware Applications. New applications are emerging that are bringing the promise of the semantic web into practice without the need to add additional layers of tags, identifiers, or other top-down methods of defining context. Tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract embedded meaning are providing rich new ways of finding and aggregating content. At the same time, other tools are allowing context to be easily modified, shaped, and redefined as information flows are combined.

Smart Objects. Sometimes described as the “Internet of things,” smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information. A smart object “knows” something about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, where it should be, or who owns it, for example — and something about its environment. While the underlying technologies that make this possible — RFID, QR codes, smartcards, touch and motion sensors, and the like — are not new, we are now seeing new forms of sensors, identifiers, and applications with a much more generalizable set of functionalities.