Thursday 28 May 2009

Boards of Trustees – their role in eLearning

  inglewood

Tonight I spoke to the Inglewood High School Board about their schools involvement in TaraNet and what it means for opportunities available for their students. I went through my standard promotional presentation about TaraNet and the VLN and outlined the educational landscape of elearning in New Zealand of which they are a part of.  Boards of Trustees are vested with a lot of power and decision making in the strategic directions of their schools and the allocation of resources. For this reason i think it is important for all our school’s BOTs to have an insight into elearning activities our students are participating in because they contribute to this with the purchase of equipment, allocation of staffing and resources. So often these students are invisible in their own schools, tucked away in the VC room, library or study room working in cyberspace that others can’t see so easily. Inglewood are the first of our schools to confront the need to replace their costly VC equipment (they are currently using borrowed equipment) so some support from the BOT will be needed to keep them going. We are currently looking at options for this which may include the trialling of desktop VC as opposed to a dedicated unit and upskilling our teachers in a variety of other technologies (such as Moodle & Adobe) to supplement more fully their VC classes.

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