Praetor Education Technology - Planning for 2010

Planning for 2010

Written by Administrator

Monday, 28 December 2009

It is soon back to school for educators. Educators make an early start this year on 11 January 2010. Learners from all schools (coastal and inland) start on 13 January.

Here are two versions of the 2010 school calendar:

The Teacher Laptop Initiative is due to be rolled out in practice, although theoretically speaking it was supposed to have been launched in July 2009. This will probably only start happening in the new financial year which begins in April 2010.

There are some drastic changes that Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, has announced - mainly to lighten the administrative burden of educators. This will affect the way you set out your teacher file - which now only needs to consist of a single file. Motshekga spelt out what needs to be in the Teacher's File. Read about it here (PDF document).

The Western Cape Education Department has set definite education priorities to be achieved over a period from 2010 to 2019. They have a Back To School 2010 page with letters addressed to various stakeholders concerning their vision. Even if you are not in the Western Cape, it will not harm you to peruse it.

If you have the inclination to integrate technology with the curriculum (ICT Integration) then implementing Moodle should form a core part of your planning for 2010. If you are teaching Computer Applications Technology (CAT) or IT - where you have the learners in the computer centre for all their periods and you are not using Moodle, then you are not very clever .

"Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective courses based on sound pedagogical principles. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 200,000-student University. Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 50,000 installations worldwide speaking 75 languages in 200 countries." (Meta description of moodle.org)

If you do decide to start using Moodle , your teaching will never be the same again - I guarantee that.

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Last Updated ( Monday, 25 January 2010 )