Daily Archives: July 19, 2007

This year's conference is being held here at the Thebarton Senior College and the keynote is being held in the cosy environment of the Study Centre. After all the housekeeping from our president, Trudy Sweeney, we are about to hear from Gerry White, former head of educationau , but he is now an Education Strategist and Adviser. CEGSA is now 23 years of age.

The Internet Today. Australia's broadband penetration ranks 2nd to last in OECD countries just above Mexico. the identifies Telstra as a big problem -should be 2 Meg minimal for schools, not the 512k we get at the moment. Internet only provides information, publishing and communicating. Talked about the acronym SaaS - software as a service. Using Google as a service - we could use a browser without any local proprietary software. (Although, Google is a free form of proprietary software!) Talked about the impact of low cost laptops, then the low/ free cost of operating systems like Ubuntu, (he found out about Flock about three weeks ago ;)) and free software suites. Showed the crowd through a suite of interactive tools (maths) and then talked about portal services including edna . Highlighted the Philippines model that combined open source and SaaS that was essentially free to build.

But we need technical support and a robust network. We need 50% of our ICT cost to go towards teacher training.

Future of ICT in education - web based, wireless, mobile, open, personalised. Copyright legislation in Australia is very prohibitive and a big barrier to moving forward in education. Quoted Grey Whitby from Catholic Education in NSW as saying we need better infrastructure, not new buildings. Highlighted some news bit and pieces and quoted from this article.

Gave us the report card on SA education with very for marks in all areas - we have a long way to go.