NAPLAN Online delayed for this year in WA

Uncategorized

Western Australia to delay NAPLAN Online to 2018

I am reposting this on behalf of my colleagues as an FYI.

Originally from https://www.mediastatements.wa.gov.au/Pages/McGowan/2017/04/Western-Australia-to-delay-NAPLAN-Online-to-2018.aspx

Wednesday, 19 April 2017
  • NAPLAN Online to be delayed by one year
  • 99 schools participating in the online trial will now be undertaking paper tests
  • NAPLAN is a national assessment of all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9
  • NAPLAN testing starts in May

Western Australia will not participate in an online trial of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) this year.

 

Testing of the NAPLAN Online platform during the school holidays identified several issues that could impact on students’ ability to complete the tests.

 

All Western Australian students will sit pen and paper tests this year.

 

This decision will allow the additional time required for the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training to make improvements to the NAPLAN Online platform, so the project can continue in 2018.

 

Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory also withdrew today.  South Australia and Queensland had previously withdrawn from NAPLAN Online.

 

The three-year transition period to NAPLAN Online started this year.

 

Comments attributed to Education and Training Minister Sue Ellery:

 

“The advice I have received means I am no longer prepared to commit Western Australian students to participate in NAPLAN Online in 2017.

 

“My primary concern is to ensure students are able to demonstrate their literacy and numeracy skills without experiencing IT issues.

 

“Contingencies for this decision have been put in place by the School Curriculum and Standards Authority and all schools affected have been contacted.

 

“We will work closely with our partners across Australia to ensure a successful rollout in 2018 and 2019.”

STEM vs STEAM – What are they anyway?

ICT, STEM, Teaching

Picture from https://www.globalstudentnetwork.com/steam-ideas-homeschool/

I first came across STEM in 2014 as the word started to appear here in Western Australia as well as other parts of the world via education and politics. Referring to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, it is an attempt at an a combined philosophy, emphasis and focus in keeping with the overall push for innovation and new thinking. It has become a real buzzword in politics and education in the last few years. Is there anything real behind it, particularly for primary educators like myself? To quote the NSW STEM website (see here) ;

 

STEM education is the learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in an interdisciplinary or integrated approach. Students gain and apply knowledge, deepen their understanding and develop creative and critical thinking skills within an authentic context. It may include inquiry and project-based learning.

A vibrant capacity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is pivotal to increasing our nation’s productivity.

“Australia’s STEM teachers at all levels, from primary to tertiary, must be equipped to deliver course content with confidence and inspiration, and develop all students to their full potential. Curricula and assessment criteria should prioritise curiosity-driven and problem-based learning of STEM – STEM as it is practised – alongside the subject specific knowledge that STEM requires.”

Professor Ian Chubb, Chief Scientist
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Australia’s Future 2014

Certainly there is a lot of synergy between the four areas – though in WA, Engineering has always fallen under the Technologies banner and never really been a separate subject. It is still in the current curriculum, with Engineering principles and systems falling under the Design and Technologies part of the Technologies Curriculum.

A focus on Science and Maths is a good thing, certainly in my experience they are areas that can be neglected in Primary schools as most teachers tend to be much stronger on Literacy (English) than these 2 subjects. Engineering and Technology (outside of ICT) in the past also has really been a bit of an afterthought – though many schools have provided considerable time and resources for the use of ICT in teaching as a separate area.

Added to this recently has been a push to add the Arts to STEM to make a new acronym called STEAM. This article explains the concerns I have with this approach better than I can. It is true however that as someone who has worked in this area for years as well as now teaching it, there is a significant creative element to the activities and tasks we do. It is impossible to teach publishing or presentations properly without considering the use of design and creative elements like whitespace, for example. In creating photos or movies using technology, artistic merit can be as important as the technical competence.

Is this doing Art justice though? Or are we confusing the process and design elements with art elements? Art is a multifaceted and broad heading under which we as educators lump Dance, Music, Drama, Media and the Visual Arts all together. Are we right to combine all that with the STEM subjects too?

I started this article unconvinced that Art belongs with STEM. However, now I find myself wishing to be fair and note that technology is often heavily used in the creation of modern artworks. It is evident in Dance, Drama, Music and definitely in Media and Visual Art. In teaching technology, it is also true that it is a creative process and requires an understanding of many of the same principles and techniques that artists would be familiar with. Does this extend to the teaching of Science and Maths though?

Hopefully this current STEM / STEAM push will end up with better outcomes for our students. I not sure there is enough evidence yet. It is all food for thought, however, I would wonder though how many Maths teachers would be comfortable teaching art? Lucky us primary teachers are already adaptable and capable generalists I guess. Feel free to let me know your own thoughts.

ICT Capabilities – Skills and Terminology

ICT, Teaching, Uncategorized

ICT Capabilities Skills P-6 Document in PDF format

I have taken the approach that I  need to cover the ICT Capabilities in the curriculum first and then move into Digital Technologies after giving the students the basic skills to operate the technology they are learning about. This document is part of that philosophy.

I am slowly reworking this to be more informed by the ICT Capabilities section in the WA / Australian Curriculum. It is essentially based on an older planning document which I developed and used before the WA Curriculum in this area existed.

Please be aware this is a “living” document which is changing as my classroom experiences dictate. As such it is currently a draft and a working document which I am updating as part of my planning for this year as a Digital Technologies / ICT Teacher. It is intended to complement the existing curriculum documents with practical skills and terminology rather that replace the Scope and Sequence documents. It is not complete but I will try and update it here when I can.

My intention is to have a similar document for Digital Technologies as well in the near future which I am focusing on teaching in the second semester this year.

To get the doc just click the link at the top of this post. Or click here Craig Talbot ICT Capabilities Skills P-6

Write zeroes to drive

ICT, Programming

If you have to send a hard drive somewhere for repair or dispose of it and you can still access it is sometimes needed to quickly clear off the data on the drive. One way to do this is format a drive and writing zeroes to it. In Vista or Windows 7 this is now quite simple. First,make sure the drive is mounted with a drive letter say e: in Disk Management and then in a elevated command prompt ie. Run As administrator, type the following:

format e: /fs:NTFS /p:2

This command will write 2 passes of zeroes to the drive and then format it as NTFS. It will take quite a while on a terabyte or larger drive. While not perfect, for most uses this should be enough to deter snoops as most software recovery programs will find it hard to recover anything from a drive treated this way.

If you are really worried about data security then use DBAN from its boot disk to wipe the drive fully and securely. Or just bash the drive with a hammer or some such before disposal.

Access 2010 SP1 crashes

Programming

This problem hit me today on my main working database after upgrading to Office 2010 SP1. To help out others I have post the text of a solution below as well as the link.

Access 2010 SP1 – You receive random crashes in certain database or when opening the VBA window in those databases after installing Office 2010 SP1

Applies To: Office | Office 2010 | Microsoft Office Access

Issue:

After installing Office 2010 SP1, you may receive random crashes when opening objects in certain databases and when trying to open the VBA window in those databases. If you look in the event viewer the crash info may look similar to the following:

Faulting application: msaccess.exe

Version: 14.0.6024.1000

Stamp: 4d83e4fc

faulting module: vbe7.dll

version: 7.0.16.19

stamp: 4d430aec

Workaround:

Microsoft is aware of the issue and it is currently being investigated. In order to work around the problem, you can try the following:

1. Make a copy / backup of your database.

2. On the problematic machine decompile the database by running the following from a Run command line:/decompile ex. C:\test.accdb /decompile

3. Close the database.

4. Open the database again normally.

In addition to this, if you experience the crash please send the error report when prompted to do so after the crash.

Best Regards,

Nathan Ost

Microsoft Online Community Support

see original at : http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-access/access-2010-sp1-you-receive-random-crashes-in/d2bf6175-075a-4a12-a2b1-f55d40af271b

EEEPC 701 issue with dcopserver

Commands, Programming, , ,

My wife has a original 4Gb Asus EEEPC. It has an issue periodically where it refuses to connect to our wireless network. It is an EEPC 701 running the original software and operating system. Its symptoms are not being able to do anything especially connect to a ethernet or wireless connection. It comes up with a mysterious message asking you to check if the dcopserver is running (which it usually is: see the Task Manager; View All processes). After googling around a lot, I found the following solution which worked for me and saved any other drastic measures, like re-installing.

Try the following;

Press CTRL – ALT – T to get a terminal up – equivalent to a command prompt on a windows machine. Then type;

df -h 

This will show remaining space on your storage cards and internal drive. If it says you have plenty of space left i.e. the space used is well under 100% then try;

df -i

This may come up saying that 100% or close to it of your inodes are in use. This version of the command shows available inodes, inodes are kind of like indexes the filesystem on the EEPC uses to keep track of files stored on the computer in linux see here for more information. On this version of Xandros linux they apparently will get used up as the machine creates lots of temporary files as it is used day to day and instead of these inodes being cleaned up once in a while they are not due to a fault in the setup of this version or distribution of linux.

The following series of commands will fix the problem by mounting the main drive on a second mount point, finding the files which appear to cause the problem and deleting them as it does so. The last command removes the second mount point and so cleans up after itself.

sudo mkdir -pv /tmp/sda2
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /tmp/sda2
sudo find /tmp/sda2 -iname '.wh*' -delete
sudo umount /dev/sda2

After that I did a df -i again and found the filesystem went from 100% inode usage down to 7% on the  EEEPC my wife uses. This has happened several times now which is why I am posting it on my blog partly to help me remember how to fix it and also in the hope it will help someone else with the same problem.

Time for a new WordPress version and theme upgrade

General, ICT, , ,

Really got to update this more often. As an ICT teacher at two primary schools I need to make an effort to use current technology more I guess. Must say WordPress is very impressive though. Well done to those involved.

I have just upgraded this site to the latest version of WordPress and given it the Twenty Eleven 1.2 theme from WordPress which I thinks very clean and modern. It was a remarkably simple and painless process, all done from inside the Dashboard. I have added a number of pages to make it easier to find things and to contact me.

Still learning how all this works though so bear with me as I improve things and more content.