<quote>...Russell, you may want to investigate Pt England Primary School. They have a stunning program there....<quote>

Thank you Jackie

<quote>..the optimum way of encoding clips to play on YouTube and similar services....<quote>

Russell...
I am a middle aged, female teacher and I am sure you will be cheered to know that I spent last Friday working with an enthusiastic group of teachers from our cluster of Decile 1a schools teaching them how to encode video to play on YouTube, TeacherTube etc and to embed them in Blogspot, Wikis, on Moodle, KnowledgeNET and of course to podcast on iTunes (you do subscribe to Korero Pt England-KPE- don't you) etc. Check out some 5 yr olds animotos embedded on the school website and rest assured that even if it is not happening at tertiary institutions our little kids are having a go.
http://www.ptengland.school.nz/index.php?family=1,338,7
We are aware that one of the ways to raise student achievement with 21st century kids is to give them an authentic audience for their writing/speaking and we are endeavouring to keep upskilled ourselves so we can go there with our kids. At the same time of course we are keeping abreast of the literacy project, the numeracy project, the new curriculum, sun safe, water wise, healthy food in schools, addressing obesity, creating episodes for SchoolTV etc etc. I wonder how many of your the commentors who have been disparaging about teacher technical competencies have to be highly skilled in such disparate arenas in their business lives?
We don't all take our 'superior' skills into higher valued occupations :)
I do agree that there is a lot of difference between schools in the use of technology, but it is not necessarily tied to decile ranking.

So you want a woman, a God-botherer and and IT geek to respond :) I can cover the first two for you and some of my fellow-teachers might even say the third as well. It intrigues me that the flurry of interest in the MS non-deal for Mac schools extends to this forum. What are you thinking should be happening in Primary schools? Do you really want young children in the 21st Century spending their time typing documents and working on spreadsheets ... or pursuing PowerPointlessness (Jamie McKenzie). I prefer our children to be using the creativity of the iLife/iWork/Kid Pix solutions being offered to them and .... be just like you and use Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, forums and podcasts to communicate text-based ideas.
How many of us really expect that it will take our children as long to learn to use MS Word and Excel as it took us? Anyone else take a year - long course in the 90s to learn that sort or thing? - and our kids can now pick it up in no time..