On my last leg

Bless me father for I have sinned. It's been one long week since my last blogpost. I've been busy, is my excuse. I'm having a wonderful time here in New Zealand. It's an awesome, heartbreakingly beautiful country, rich in culture and with plenty to see and do. I have been pretty busy touring around the North island speaking at various events, but over the last two days I have had some down-time to spend with my family in Auckland (City Centre pictured left). I have seen some breath taking sights and some spectacular views of the city from atop Mount Eden. I also took a short trip across by ferry to see the namesake of my own birthplace - Devonport - and I was impressed by how similar the two towns are. I have now arrived in Christchurch, on the South island, on the last leg of my tour, and I have to admit that I am a little weary of travel. I'm staying just across the road from the Convention Centre where Ulearn 2010 will kick off on Tuesday.

We are expecting quite a crowd of tech-savvy teachers for Ulearn - around 1800 have registered according to one of the organisers I spoke to. Stephen Heppell is flying in tonight to join us, and we also have Lee Crockett and Lane Clark to make up the foursome of keynotes for the event. All of the keynote abstracts and the entire programme can be found on the conference website. I'm going to be speaking on transformational change in education, and will touch on social media, new teacher roles and a host of other related topics in my own keynote on Wednesday afternoon. It seems, from talking to teachers here in New Zealand, that their local education problems are just the same as anywhere else the world over. Whilst this is reassuring in one way, it is also distrurbing to think that governments across the globe all treat education the same way. They throw some money at it (usually in the wrong places) and then expect the issues to go away. Teachers are hard pressed enough to do their jobs, without having to worry about issues of behaviour management, standardised assessment processes, and all the attendant paperwork that comes with the job. It's often a thankless task, and when it all goes wrong, guess who gets the blame - the teacher, of course.

Look, I don't want to start on a rant, but I am increasingly frustrated about the lack of resources most schools suffer from. Schools with technology that is dated so much, children would rather use the kit they have at home - which is often more up to date. There are practitioner issues too of course. Why the majority of teachers in schools I visit across the world use interactive whiteboards as presentational tools is beyond me. Let's get the kids up and using them too shall we? And when it comes to new and emerging technologies, there are still many barriers up against using social software - YouTube is filtered out, yet contains some incredible learning opportunities for language, music, history, science and sport. And Mobile phones are still banned by most schools and limited to a few isolated activities under strict supervision. All of these issues will be touched upon in my keynote on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to engaging with the audience and hope we can have some useful dialogue.

More pictures like the one above are online.... here's a link to all the photos people have taken of the events during my New Zealand tour.

On my last leg by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.