The purpose of education

After the earthquakes, here in Christchurch, the minister is looking at restructuring education - see some of my earlier blog posts about this. Teachers are not happy about the proposals at the present time. Teachers, parents and children are all upset about having another change in our city. We actually all need some stability and a chance to get some normality back into our lives before more changes are forced on us. Unfortunately parts of our city were largely untouched by the earthquakes while other parts are still like a third world country. It is those parts where all the changes are proposed and the people in these parts are finding it hard enough just living from day to day without these hassles.

Schools have ten weeks to survey their parents and put forward to the Ministry their own proposals.

It might be good if the Minister looked at Steve Wheeler's slide share about the purpose of education before she makes any final decisions.

The Purpose of Education from Steve Wheeler

Diipo

What is Diipo???

Education 2.0: Social networking for your class

Diipo connects the teacher with their students making it easy for the teacher to communicate with their class. Diipo also connects teachers with other teachers as well as their class with other classes. Diipo uses an easy-to-use and familiar user-interface which is similar to Facebook and Twitter. One of the aims of Diipo is to help students stay connected and engaged.

Teachers can connect with other teachers to share and exchange ideas as well as best practices on how to get the most out of Web 2.0 technologies. In addition teachers can share educational content with each other or brainstorm ideas for collaborative projects.

This is an ideal site to use with the students so that they can also learn to use a social networking site in a responsible way.