Education

Business mentors use broadband to connect with e-learners

April 24th, 2013

A new school mentoring programme is using e-learning and fast fibre technology to link Year 13 girls around the country with Auckland business people – and potentially their future careers When 17-year-old Kaitaia College student Kadii Irwin signed up for an NCEA Level Three distance learning accounting class earlier this year, she wasn’t sure where it was taking her. She …

It’s the principal that counts

April 8th, 2013

By July this year, over 1,500 New Zealand schools should have access to a fast broadband connection, either via Ultra-Fast Broadband or RBI. A new piece of research is geared to help principals manage the transformation Tawa Intermediate Principal Carolyn Stuart recognises her strengths – and her limitations. E-Learning: now there’s something she loves. Give her a computer and an …

At Red Beach e-learning is great; UFB will be better

February 19th, 2013

Ultra-Fast Broadband is coming soon to Red Beach primary school and will provide much-anticipated grunt behind an already innovative e-learning strategy It’s hard to tell who is more nervous – the group of Year 6 students from Red Beach primary school on stage in front of a hall full of education professionals, or their teacher, Associate Principal Julie Lynch, hovering …

Learning through Minecraft. Surely not?

December 12th, 2012

Chris Bradbeer, Associate Principal of new Auckland primary/intermediate school Stonefields, wanted to engage his students in discussion about improving the school’s learning spaces. He arrived in class armed with large sheets of paper, cardboard, marker pens, scissors, templates of existing rooms, Lego and cameras. He had even loaded SketchUp onto a number of devices.  But the first question the Year 5-8 …

Choosing an RSP So the fibre’s at the school gate. Now what?

November 26th, 2012

You’ve been SNUPed, your number has come up for Ultra-Fast Broadband, and the guys digging up the road outside school have been and gone. You are “lit” and ready for action. Now what? Before the end of 2012, more than two hundred schools will be technically “RFS” – ready for service and able to be connected to the Government’s Ultra-Fast …

Getting excited about BYOD

November 12th, 2012

It happened suddenly. Bring Your Own Devices. A couple of years ago, hardly anyone had heard of it. Now you don’t even need the words; “BYOD” has become the hot topic of New Zealand education.The first few months of 2012 saw half a dozen seminars, workshops or conferences focusing on BYOD – and that was in the Auckland region alone. …

Tuning in and out of accounting

October 26th, 2012

Carolyn Bennett is in class. The NCEA accountancy teacher is in front of a group of a dozen or so students going through a case study involving Michael Hill International and some complicated ratio calculations. What is unusual about this class though, is that most of the students aren’t in the same school. In fact, half of them aren’t in …

Learning from the National Education Network

October 1st, 2012

Right now a tender is going on which has the potential to make or break the Ultra-Fast Broadband/Rural Broadband Initiative roll-out in the education sector. It’s the next step in the development of the Network for Learning (N4L): a call for “innovative” tender proposals for N4L’s network service provider. The experts say it’s so critical because the successful implementation of …

How schools can connect communities to the internet

June 25th, 2012

The Tamaki community in Auckland has a big dream – all its school children and whanau as connected, third millennium, digital citizens by the end of 2013. And Ultra-Fast Broadband is a vital part of that. Russell Burt is principal of Pt England primary school, and spokesman for Manaiakalani, a project working with teachers at nine eastern suburbs schools to …

Build it and they’ll come (and make great content)

May 7th, 2012

“You don’t build a Formula One racing car if you’ve only got a dirt track to run it on,” says Gresham Bradley, General Manager of educational video and TV programme provider eTV. In the same way, New Zealand companies aren’t producing much high quality educational video content, because the vast majority of schools haven’t got the bandwidth or speeds to …