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You are here: Home / Archives for education

Author John Marsden to open arts-focused secondary school

February 2, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

Children’s author John Marsden has bought the former Macedon Grammar School site and plans to open a new secondary school focused on the arts…

age

Last week Mr Marsden bought the site of the former Christian college, where he plans to open a new secondary school focused on the arts.

“There is such a huge passion for the arts among young people,” the author of Tomorrow When the War Began said.

“It can be taken much more seriously nowadays. A generation ago it wasn’t really a viable industry for most people, but now there are heaps of ways you can make a career in the arts. It is no longer something treated as airy-fairy or lightweight.”

Macedon Grammar was closed by the state government in December after it accumulated about $1.8 million in debt and was deemed financially unviable.

It will be the second school founded by Mr Marsden, who also runs the alternative Candlebark School in Romsey in the Macedon Ranges.

Mr Marsden said the school would open its doors to creative students by the start of 2016, or possibly even later this year “if the bureaucracy allows for that”.

…

“So many children are learning or experiencing the world in a completely artificial way through computer games, [that] even relationships are conducted at a distance. We are very much the opposite way. We put kids into the bush, send them up mountains and down rivers and into snow.”

via Author John Marsden to open arts-focused secondary school.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: arts, Australia, Australian, education, school

From the maker of Lara Croft: the teenager’s dream of a free school

January 8, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

Gaming magnate Ian Livingstone is receiving flak from the likes of Toby Young for his ambitious plan to hone students’ coding skills…

guardiansmallLivingstone is widely hailed as the founding father of the British games industry. He launched Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game that thrilled adolescents of the late 1970s and 1980s; co-founded Games Workshop, which became one of the biggest games companies in the world; and wrote or co-wrote 15 gamebooks in the Fighting Fantasy series, which has sold over 17m copies in 31 languages. He still has six friends round to his house regularly to play games, keep a record of the scores and compete for their own annual trophy. “I’m the current champion,” he tells me. “I love board games with like-minded friends, having a laugh, doing deals, reneging on them.”

But on the eve of his 65th birthday, he is talking to me about his plans for a network of free schools which, he thinks, can transform our approach to secondary education. He speaks quietly and rather flatly; there’s nothing flamboyant about him, and he sometimes sounds slightly bored, as if he’s reading out an inventory and would rather be playing games. But there’s no mistaking his conviction. “Children today are totally different from 50 years ago. They run their lives through social media and smart phones. They share their ideas and their creativity. They collaborate naturally.” Yet when they go to secondary school, he argues, they meet a regime of standardisation and conformity, requiring them “to memorise a lot of stuff they won’t ever need because they can google it or whatever”.

via From the maker of Lara Croft: the teenager’s dream of a free school | Peter Wilby | Education | The Guardian.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: education, free schools, gaming

How About: My Name Is Parvana + The Breadwinner

December 18, 2014 By achuka 1 Comment

breadwinner

Topical fiction about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban by award winning Canadian author.
Published in the US in 2012, My Name Is Parvana, is a sequel to The breadwinner trilogy.
When Oxford Children’s Books published it in the UK earlier this year, they also reissued the first book in The Breadwinner sequence (with compatible cover design).

Filed Under: Blog, Books, How About Tagged With: Afghanistan, education, Taliban, war

What has YA Author John Marsden Been Up To? Turns out he’s been running a school….

October 18, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

John Marsden, who has been running a school for the past eight years, talks a bout his new book for adults. The link has an accompanying video.

Australian

Given his huge following among teen readers, why write a novel for adults? “It wasn’t really a conscious decision,’’ he says, as a flying soccer ball slams into his office wall. “I’ve gotten a little tired of the young adult market, or the genre. It seems to have gotten very crowded with a lot of pretty unattractive books; a lot of books where writers are trying terribly hard to capture the voice of this funky, cool teenager; it just doesn’t ring true. Too many adults have invaded the territory with motives that might have more to do with their own immaturity than anything else.’’

He points out he hasn’t begun a YA novel — a 2008 adaptation of Hamlet was his last work aimed at teenagers — since he opened Candlebark almost nine years ago.

via YA fiction author John Marsden targets adults with South of Darkness | The Australian.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: Australian, education, schoo;

Michael Rosen: ‘Children are no longer encouraged to read for pleasure’

May 24, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

“We’re talking about reading for pleasure, but what an odd thing to have to campaign for.
“It’s kind of like saying ‘Let’s campaign for air, or for nice soup’. You read, you have a good time. That should be the end of it.”

The "brain-expanding" practice of reading for pleasure is being lost in the Government’s fixation on phonics, spelling and grammar, according to the former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen.
Schoolchildren are taught to decode text, retrieve information and write grammatically correct sentences but they are no longer encouraged to lose themselves in a good story, Rosen said.
As a result, they read books without asking questions or relating the stories to their own feelings.
"We constantly live with governments who concentrate on all these narrow aspects of reading, and not of interpretation and understanding," Rosen told the Hay Festival.

via Michael Rosen: 'Children are no longer encouraged to read for pleasure' – Telegraph.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: decoding, education, phonics, pleasure, reading, test

Google Debuts Free Tool Classroom for Teachers

May 6, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

ogle today launched a new free tool called Classroom as part of its Google Apps for Education suite. In short, Classroom helps teachers create and organize assignments, provide feedback to their students, and communicate with their classes.

via Google Debuts Free Tool Classroom for Teachers.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: classroom, education, Google, teaching

The disturbing certainty of Michael Gove – Is He A Monster? Anthony Horowitz in The Spectator

March 13, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

An important and illuminating interview with the Secretary of State for Education, conducted by Anthony Horowitz.

I wish I’d seen this piece before last night’s Orion authors’ party. It would have been good to have a few minutes chatting to Horowitz about it.

Previously a Gove admirer and apologist, Horowitz finishes the interview thinking the man might be a monster.

It’s a longish piece and this is just the conclusion:

We are nearing the end of my allotted time and here is the impression that I have of a man for whom I have always had a very high regard. He is brilliant and erudite, doing an almost impossible job and doing it with passion and commitment. And yet it is just possible that the minister is a monster. I would not normally use such a word of a secretary of state but I am only picking up on something he said himself. Referring to the teachers who inspired him as a boy, he remarked, laughing: ‘There’s a direct relationship between the opportunities that I’ve enjoyed and their influence. They might now, like Victor Frankenstein, hold their head in horror and think “What have we created…?”’

It was the only moment of revelation in our encounter that struck me as truly insightful, the only awareness of the amount of power he wields. He assures me that he consults much more extensively than people believe, but continues: ‘One of the things that I think is a challenge here is that there isn’t a monolithic view within the teaching profession — about anything. It’s a bit like saying authors believe x or journalists believe x. There are some vocal people within the profession who might appear to be the dominant voices but by definition they can’t be representative: no one’s elected them.’ But actually there is one monolithic view that is out there and which will brook no argument. It is Gove’s.

My American friends are shocked by how much power one politician can have over a whole generation of children and even Gove agrees. ‘I do think that education secretaries do have too much power.’ (Even so, he has allotted himself around 50 new powers since he took office.) ‘But part of what I want to do is to ensure that lots of things that were fixed or arranged or decided in the Department for Education and its quangos are now decided in schools. And that’s the big change.’

His vision should be uplifting but I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed my encounter with Michael Gove. It’s very strange. I have argued with so many teachers and other authors that he is a wholly benevolent man, a reformer who is actually improving the lives of children across the country. Even now, that opinion has not changed. But nobody can be as certain as he is. Nobody can be right all the time. It’s his single-mindedness that troubles me, and so for all his quips, his humanity, his courtesy and his eloquence, I leave with the faint worry that, after all, I am the one who’s wrong.

via The disturbing certainty of Michael Gove » The Spectator.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Education Tagged With: Anthony Horowitz, education, free schools, Michael Gove, schools, Spectator

Coding, killjoys and the science of education – The Next Web

February 7, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Good piece by Paul Sawers with a plethora of inline links surveying a full range of current educational themes, including coding, creativity, testing (of 4-yr-olds) and computer-based mathematics (as espoused by Conrad Wolfram).

Reading of the full piece recommended – follow the link:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/02/06/killjoys-coding-future-education/#!uDbe1

Filed Under: Blog, Education Tagged With: coding, computing, Conrad Wolfram, creativity, digital, education, mathematics, maths, programming, tablets

Self-Publishing MA University of Central Lancashire

February 6, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

You can now get an MA (1 year full-time, 2 years part-time) in Self-Publishing – though some might think it might be better spending that time writing your book.

This course will equip you with all of the necessary skills you will need to be a self-published author including how to edit your book, how to lay it out, how to monitor sales, how to manage yourself and your finances, marketing yourself and your book and how to create an eBook. The final part of the course will give you the opportunity to complete a finished copy of your book.

The course is taught by industry experts with contributions from successful self-published authors. Students have round the clock access to our bespoke publishing house in the state-of-the-art Media Factory with all the latest equipment and industry-level software such as Creative Cloud, InDesign and Nielsen Bookscan.

via Self-Publishing MA | Postgraduate Degree Course | University of Central Lancashire.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Education Tagged With: course, education, MA, publishing, self-publishing, study, teaching, writing

A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning

January 25, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

This report is about three new forces that are converging to break open prodigious learning
possibilities. The first force, ‘new pedagogies’, springs from the new learning partnerships that
emerge between and among students and teachers when digital tools and resources become
pervasive. The second, ‘new change leadership’, merges top-down, bottom-up and sideways
energies to generate change that is faster and easier than anything seen in past efforts at
reform. The third, ‘new system economics’, makes the powerful learning tools and resources
that accelerate the first two forces more affordable for all. These forces are nascent, but we
see them expanding rapidly – together acting as a form of positive contagion that becomes
unstoppable given the right conditions. [my emphasis]

Worth a read…
Describes changes that do not become possible until “digital tools and resources become pervasive”

http://www.michaelfullan.ca/a-rich-seam-how-new-pedagogies-find-deep-learning/

Filed Under: Blog, Education Tagged With: digital, education, paper, pedagogy

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