Tux is depressed

Tux has decided to stay at the hotel today and miss out on the meetings. Yesterday he went to the Ministry of Education and KERIS and found no friends to talk to. Jae Duk at the Ministry of Education was friendly in that the schools administration system was running on Linux servers as best we could tell. Mary-Jane at the Australian Embassy seemed to be able to see the sense of some of the Tux arguements. Other than that there were no Tux friendly faces. Curriculum delivery and ICT use by teachers and students seems to have no place for Tux.

We could have been in South Australia for what we were seeing in many respects. Similar challenges are being faced with the need to change learning and teaching methods. There is a repository of learning objects being developed. Class sizes are bigger but there was a indication that they wanted to make improvements on this.

The schools administration system was centralised with a web interface. Parents can access their students academic, behaviour and other information via the administration system NEIS. Apparently it has been successful because of the better information and time savings for teachers and schools. It would be great for the transition from primary to secondary as the data is on this centralised system.

The bandwidth to schools is impressive.

While the computer student ratio is about 1:5.5, this resource seems to be provided centrally. Some schools are using their resources to improve this ratio. I need to find out how they are doing this. Maybe Tux is having a role there somewhere???

One of the standout features of Edunet was the forum/faq that presented teachers with a place to ask questions relating to their work and get some expert advise. The part of this that struck me most was that teachers could use it as a place to ask questions relating to classroom management and methodology. Most of the forums and email lists that I am involved with seem to cover content well and the idea of having a centralised place to ask these method and mangement type questions seemed to be a good idea. Although any teacher could make a response, their was a commitment by Edunet that questions posed there would be responded to within 24 hours.

There is a growing number of students coming to Australia for some of their schooling. The key reasons cited were to learn English and to have a happy childhood. Australia is seen as being able to achieve this while still achieving high academic results. This spoke to me the loudest and the work that we are doing to further improve positive relationships in our school is worth it.

Our group's observations for our first day of visits