Teacher Effectiveness Profile

I have been thinking about the Teacher Effectiveness Profile (TEP) from the 2004 and 2005 iterations of Te Kotahitanga progamme, but I decided to write this blog after reading a colleague's post.

"The Effective Teaching Profile consists of six elements.

1. Manaakitanga – teachers care for their students as culturally located human beings above all else.
2. Mana motuhake – teachers care for the performance of their students.
3. Nga whakapiringatanga – teachers are able to create a secure, well-managed learning environment.
4. Wananga – teachers are able to engage in effective teaching interactions with Māori students as Māori.
5. Ako – teachers can use strategies that promote effective teaching interactions and relationships with their learners.
6. Kotahitanga – teachers promote, monitor and reflect on outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in educational achievement for Māori students."

Copied from: http://tekotahitanga.tki.org.nz/About/The-Development-of-Te-Kotahitanga/Effective-Teaching-Profile

I had previously lined the TEP up with the Registered Teacher Criteria  (https://goo.gl/XqPZjN) but have not updated it to the new EduCANZ criteria, which, like TEP, are fewer.

The point about this in relation to my colleague's work, linked to above, is that if we do not take her next step "... to find ways to incorporate their cultural experiences into school life and to increase our use of indigenous cultural references in our teaching" in relation to our large Filipino/a students, a she herself mentions, we would be failing in our duty of manaakitanga  to them.

I cannot easily find resources online about what "cultural repressiveness" to Filipino/a students might look like, a next step might be to ask the Filipino families that question. It's an interesting thought but I suspect that, since these students seem to come from homes where education is highly valued, the answer would be expect only the highest standards from them. 

Another point of interest that Tagalog (an official language of the Philippines, spoken by a quarter of their population)  and Māori belong to the Austronesian family of languages, there is some crossover to be exploited in te reo Māori lessons.

Education for a better world

1.      In an ideal world, how do you think education should be organised?

In an ideal world communities would organise their own education.  The central government might fund, or perhaps local councils, but central government would define the nature of the qualifications that students could attain based on principles student relevance, not some archaic idea of cultural need.

Communities could decide curricula, teaching principles (as opposed to evaluation criteria) and priorities for funding.  Teachers, parents and students would all be part of the decisions.

2.      What priorities do you think it should reflect? and who should be responsible for ensuring that it is of a good quality?

A priority should be made for students to be democratised to be the citizens of tomorrow and not just the consumers of today.  They would need to be educated with the skills and knowledge needed to lead a more open, convivial and collaborative society.  (It is an ideal world after all).

Community

3.      Is there anything from the padlet wall that has informed your position?

The post about the problems between unions and the Government of Mexico resonated with me.  Firstly because it paralleled arguments about teacher evaluation in Stephen Balls’ article Secondly because it relates to our Registered Teachers’ Criteria used here in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The ideas propounded by Balls in the reading were very interesting and reminded me of Ivan Illich in “De-schooling Society” and, to some extent, “Tools for Conviviality”. I liked the idea of a collaborative service to communities and it as from there I got the idea of teacher principles not criteria as referred to above.

I am keen to read more in this area.

Priorities for Educators Going Forward

How has your experience of school shaped you as a learner, and as an adult?

I had a privileged schooling in New Zealand, both within the NZ and the global contexts. I don't really think I knew how to learn as a result of my schooling, it was just assumed that we would.  If we did, we were "able", if we didn't we were low stream. As a teacher I have carried those (poor) attitudes into my classrooms.

I do sense things are changing though. We know a lot more, thanks to research, about what damage we can do, we now seem to not know what the solutions are.

In what ways do you think your own schooling could have been improved, and what priorities do you think are the most important for schools today?

My schooling did not teach how to learn, it didn't prepare me very well for the emerging Aotearoa/New Zealand and distanced me from the working class roots of my parents.  That said, I enjoyed school and learned.

I am worried that my grandchildren will be born into a world that is failing as a ecological system.  I want them to learn the skills and attributes. 

I think they will need to know how to think, how to solve problems they haven't met before, and be compassionate and mindful.

How will our schools do this? I don't know.  As a teacher I have to be different from the way I was taught.  My school has to be prepared to do things differently. I think the answers will come by getting "into teachers' heads" as much as by tinkering with the education system.

So what is a good teacher? #wfe3

This week we have been looking at what makes a good teacher.

I watched a discussion with the engaging Alex Moore on this topic.  It was enlightening.

Alex Moore talked about the process of continually becoming a good/better teacher.  This was quite liberating because it showed that becoming a better teacher was an open ended development process.  I have tried too hard at times to do more and more “righter” and “righter”, I sometimes lose the idea that there are many different good teachers, there is no one-model to aspire to.

He also spoke about prominent discourses in education, one of those was about competencies in teaching.  In Aotearoa/New Zealand we have the “Registered Teacher Criteria” that we have to present evidence that we have met each year. There are 12 of them. I was enthralled by Alex’s dissection of them, and it made me feel that they were somewhat irrelevant to the craft/art/science of teaching.  I think you could actually be a good teacher and not meet some of our criteria. I wonder if they are a political move to make us teachers “accountable” instead of being responsible.  (In a bit or reading about this week I read a quote from a Finnish education policy advisor, Pasi Sahlberg, who said the accountability was what you had left after responsibility had been eliminated.)

Alex followed onto talk about whether a good teacher can be ‘made’, that is the function of our criteria, I think.  It was interesting to him opine that competency lists could make a reluctant person become a teacher, but he felt that a good teacher cannot be “made”.  

Behind his words, and behind this week overall, is the big question: What is a good teacher?

This week’s work has led me to reaffirm the importance of networks of relationships, between teacher and learners, as being of critical importance.  In Aotearoa/New Zealand we have had a project called Te Kotahitanga (Unity) running for a number of years.  It has published a Teacher Effectiveness Profile.  With Kotahitanga’s strong access to Māori language and culture it has labelled each aspect of the profile in Māori.  The word for what I am talking about here in Māori is “manaakitanga”, the art of caring, might be a horribly loose translation, a better defeintion is caring for the pupils as people located in a culture.

Good teachers promote manaakitanga.

New Zealand's Registered Teacher Criteria

Teacher Effectiveness Profile

The quote by Pasi Sahlberg was in the Atlantic.  Retrieve it here.

So what is intelligence? #wfe2

During my own education, how has my "intelligence" been assessed?

I can recall doing IQ tests as a youngster.  Back in those days Aoteroa/New Zealand was using TOSCA (Test of Scholastic Ability) but they did a "derived IQ" from that. I can't remember it ever affected my life much but we were streamed (this is the late sixties/early seventies).  

How has this affected the educational opportunities I have been given?

I was A stream so I guess my TOSCA was OK, and there were 5 other sets.  We got to do Latin because we were A set.  (Actually never regretted doing Latin, when I later became a biologist and letter again had my own garden it came in useful! There would be lots of lower sets who became gardeners that could have done with it.)

It also labelled me as someone who should achieve, this bought a bit of pressure.

What judgments have people made about me that have been affected by an assessment of my "intelligence"?
Dad was a London docker (we emigrated to NZ when I was 10) and Mum a seamstress. They had very low educational backgrounds, but coming out of WW2 they had a sense of we could be who we wanted to be. We were as good as the "masters". Dad was intelligent and well read in narrow fields (eg History of WW2) and Mum was a very good sower. This is relevant because although they wanted me to succeed, they really did not understand what studying meant.

Do you consider myself to be a "learner"? why?

As a result I did not study well.  I am highly dis-tractable. Even this morning writing this I wanted to check out on-line auctions!  I have learnt, I have an MSc, but I could have done better. I think I have a natural ability to learn but a disinclination to focus.  The result is I underachieve a bit, but I am not unhappy with that.  I know a lot of different stuff because my mind wanders as opposed to knowing a lot about one kind of thing.

What future for education

So I'm involved in my first MOOC and it's exciting and confusing.  But it's delivering what I want, a chance to be reflective about my practice as a teacher by putting students' learning at the centre of that conversation.

So far the conversation has been very wide, a real multiplicity of views and topics, Chaotic comes to mind!

I have picked up some good resources at infed.org and I think I will learn a lot in this MOOC. A piece of incidental learning so far has been the rather marvelous padelt.com

A new strategy for an online education presence

I will trial a mix of three google products this year for my classes, along the lines discussed in a web posting 

If I have understood this post right the function of the three elements would be:

1. Google Classroom.  Workflow management.  Issue assignments and collect them back in.
2. Google site for each class, not the monster one.  Engage students and parents, useful videos and other web resources, extension material, power points and other resources used in class.
3. Blogger.  The new one.  Lesson content. File every week.  A place where kids can ask questions, like they might in class, with everyone listening.

Other professional sites:

1. Back to it! (This one!) Blogging about professional things, useful for appraisal.
2. Journal. A three sentence journal diarying what happened today. Not shared.

Not all my classes would fit the model.  Transition/Gateway don't really have class content as every student is moving in their own direction.  They wouldn't need Google Classroom either, they 

Next Year I'm Gonna...

It's that time of year again.

I've hardly used Moodle this year and I've been using Google Classroom.  It's quite Zen.  Next year I though I'd maintain a Google Classroom for each module of each class (that'll stop it being Zen!) and keep my behemoth Google Site going as a static brochure of what we do, how to study and links to resources.

I like the way GC sets up a folder on your GDrive.  I could put my planning templates (in XL) there so that kids could learn 24/7.  This would take GCal out of the cycle (and my Plan Book!).

I want to not do extra but make my planning transparent enough for remotely accessing kids able to follow what they missed.

I would like to practise the Flipped Classroom with one module with 12 Px.

Good article on using Google Classroom

You get that

One should expect that from time to time, in any enterprise, that stuff happens.

I had a CASE lesson planned that looked pretty good to me.  It was about looking for patterns in diverse data about humans.  For instance a scattergram of head circumference against height.

The students had a number of different graphs to look for a correlation in.  As it was a Tuesday*  I included a wee task about the vocab of correlation.  It was last period and they never engaged. They were more interested in the vocab sheet than the thinking task.

What did I learn?

1.  Keep trying. You never know when they will engage (or not)
2. Accept that last period is better for cutting out, colouring in, joining dots than it is for thinking

*Tuesday is my literacy day.  I know it's pathetic but if I don't stick to it, it won't get done.

Demmings 14 rules

Demming was regarded by many as the best teacher they ever had apparently.  He helped Japaneses companies develop philosophies about continuous management.  I got this from a site here.

It is very applicable to teaching in all but one or two places.

The 14 Points 

1. Create a constant purpose toward improvement.
   • Plan for quality in the long term.
   • Resist reacting with short-term solutions.
   • Don't just do the same things better – find better things to do.
   • Predict and prepare for future challenges, and always have the goal of getting better.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
   • Embrace quality throughout the organization.
   • Put your customers' needs first, rather than react to competitive pressure – and design products and services to meet those needs.
   • Be prepared for a major change in the way business is done. It's about leading, not simply managing.
   • Create your quality vision, and implement it.
3. Stop depending on inspections.
   • Inspections are costly and unreliable – and they don't improve quality, they merely find a lack of quality.
   • Build quality into the process from start to finish.
   • Don't just find what you did wrong – eliminate the "wrongs" altogether.
   • Use statistical control methods – not physical inspections alone – to prove that the process is working.
4. Use a single supplier for any one item.
   • Quality relies on consistency – the less variation you have in the input, the less variation you'll have in the output.
   • Look at suppliers as your partners in quality. Encourage them to spend time improving their own quality – they shouldn't compete for your business based on price alone.
   • Analyze the total cost to you, not just the initial cost of the product.
   • Use quality statistics to ensure that suppliers meet your quality standards.
5. Improve constantly and forever.
   • Continuously improve your systems and processes. Deming promoted thePlan-Do-Check-Act   approach to process analysis and improvement.
   • Emphasize training and education so everyone can do their jobs better.
   • Use kaizen   as a model to reduce waste and to improve productivity, effectiveness, and safety.
6. Use training on the job.
   • Train for consistency to help reduce variation.
   • Build a foundation of common knowledge.
   • Allow workers to understand their roles in the "big picture."
   • Encourage staff to learn from one another, and provide a culture and environment for effective teamwork.
7. Implement leadership.
   • Expect your supervisors and managers to understand their workers and the processes they use.
   • Don't simply supervise – provide support and resources so that each staff member can do his or her best. Be a coach instead of a policeman.
   • Figure out what each person actually needs to do his or her best.
   • Emphasize the importance of participative management and transformational leadership.
   • Find ways to reach full potential, and don't just focus on meeting targets and quotas.
8. Eliminate fear.
   • Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they're not afraid to express ideas or concerns.
   • Let everyone know that the goal is to achieve high quality by doing more things right – and that you're not interested in blaming people when mistakes happen.
   • Make workers feel valued, and encourage them to look for better ways to do things.
   • Ensure that your leaders are approachable and that they work with teams to act in the company's best interests.
   • Use open and honest communication to remove fear from the organization.
9. Break down barriers between departments.
   • Build the "internal customer" concept – recognize that each department or function serves other departments that use their output.
   • Build a shared vision.
   • Use cross-functional teamwork to build understanding and reduce adversarial relationships.
   • Focus on collaboration and consensus instead of compromise.
10. Get rid of unclear slogans.
    • Let people know exactly what you want – don't make them guess."Excellence in service" is short and memorable, but what does it mean?How is it achieved? The message is clearer in a slogan like "You can do better if you try."
    • Don't let words and nice-sounding phrases replace effective leadership.Outline your expectations, and then praise people face-to-face for doing good work.
11. Eliminate management by objectives.
    • Look at how the process is carried out, not just numerical targets. Deming said that production targets encourage high output and low quality.
    • Provide support and resources so that production levels and quality are high and achievable.
    • Measure the process rather than the people behind the process.

Self regulated learners is what I want!

I ran into a reference to POSBGIL at Lance King's TaoLearning web site.

 It got me wondering about how to teach next year. In order to use Guided Inquiry Learning (that's the GIL bit of POSBGIL) I would have to promote self regulated learners.  Three things from this article interested me.

Firstly that self regulated skills need teaching and the way to do that was to teach the key competencies of the NZ Curriculum. But how do you do that?

Secondly, students vary in their ability to self-regulate their leaning so you need to scaffold learning more for some.  This leads on the the last point.

Thirdly, readiness for self regulated learning was testable. I found a LASSI index to test a student's relaxation. It cost $US3.50 a copy. Thought I'd make my own and this brought me back to HoM (Habits of Mind).

Art Costa who invented Habits of Mind said they were what people did when they didn't know what to do. That seemd to me they were self regulating using HoM.  I looked in our students' planners and there's a self assessment of HoM there, but it's a little complicated.  Interesting idea though; I will pursue this.

Also looked for the scholarly articles referred to in TaoLearning link; they have also whetted my appetite for further investigation.

How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day

Listened to an interview with Tony Benn on TV today. It was a very entertaining and kind of uplifting interview.  n it referred to a book called "How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day" by Arnold Bennett.  It has a Wikipedia entry and can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

I liked the way it talks about reclaiming 90 minutes a day to improve oneself. Whilst he meant his message for salaried workers working a 40h week it still makes me long for time to do things like wrote this blog or read a book.  Worth a go? Certainly worth a think.

Systems Thinking

Space as a context for systems thinking.

Habits of Mind

Would Art  Costa's ideas be a good way of teacing thinking next year.  There's more to them than our MALL (meta-cognition, analyses, lateral and logical thinking) and they would intersect at times.  There are 16 HoMs we could focus on one per week and that way we'd get through them all twice in a year,

• Persisting
• Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
• Managing impulsivity
• Gathering data through all senses
• Listening with understanding and empathy
• Creating, imagining, innovating
• Thinking flexibly
• Responding with wonderment and awe
• Thinking about thinking (metacognition)
• Taking responsible risks
• Striving for accuracy
• Finding humour
• Questioning and posing problems
• Thinking interdependently
• Applying past knowledge to new situations
• Remaining open to continuous learning

They actually don't look like ways of thinking.  Habits is a good word.

Maybe not.  They will arise so opportunistically that it's possibly better to have them as 16 posters to refer to and remind of.  Sometimes you could engineer them in. 

Thinking the Titanic

So the other day I was doing a "CASE"  lesson with one of my Y7/8 Science classes.  It was about sinking and floating.  The first activity was a true/false/partly true set of questions about sinking and floating. The questions were pretty ambiguous and the "right" answer was often "partly true". They collaborated and quarreled over the answers.  The second activity asked them why the Titanic sank and gave them four reasons, all of which were nearly right. More argument!  The third activity was a series of 7 or 9 sentences that could be assembled into an accurate statement about the principle of flotation.

It was a very good lesson and the part that enabled that was the questions were well constructed to get argument going.  So what sort of thinking was it?  I think it was 'critical thinking'.  Here is a definition from "The Critical Thinking Community":

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

 I guess it fits into our pin-up thinking styles because it is part analytical and part logical.

CASE is an acronym for Curriculum Acceleration through Science Education and claims to lift student achievement in all subjects by getting them to think in Science.

I've Been Thinking

"I've Been Thinking" was the title of those a poorly titled book by a politician. I went to a meeting today organised by a couple of colleagues about thinking and more importantly the teaching of it to my Y9 class. I am pretty enthusiastic about this focus and I thought I would blog about it so as to clarify my thinking. (is reflective thinking a style?)

Lateral v creative
Lateral thinking needs the thinker to look outside the square.  Sometimes called 'helicopter thinking' it needs a wee bit of suspension of rules so your brain can nonjudgmentally create options.  But is it creative thinking?

Lateral thinking is a problem-solving thinking style.  In fact I think three of the thinking styles our school "posterizes" are problem solving (analytical, logical and lateral), the fourth, meta-cognition, is not problem solving but seems a fundamental skill if you're going to be aware of what thinking style you're employing.

Have we got a problem solving bent to our thinking focus because of the way we set up the styles (a group of GnT students working with a Science teacher)? Or is thinking defined by the way it solves problems?  If that's the case what is the creativity of the poet, the artists or the sculptor?  Can artistic creativity be taught?  If you wanted to take a arty photo you would need to know what parameters you had at your disposal to manipulate but perhaps that's analytical thinking?  Lots of questions!

Types of thinking
So the "unknown" (the GnT students who first come up with Mackenzie's MALL (metacognition, analytical, logical, lateral)) came up with four styles.  What did they sift out?  I have  become aware that I do teach thinking but implicitly not explicitly; are there other types of thinking I am implicitly teaching?  I'll try and be aware of what the students are being asked to do to see as well as do some literature search.

Teaching thinking
How do you teach thinking?  We got talking about graphic organisers and http://www.nctt.net looks like a site to explore.

More later as the focus develops.  Comment is free and welcome!

Learning Reflection

This is an exercise prompted by my involvement in an Opel Content Licensing for Educators course.

I began this course more for the experience of learning online than its content per se.  My institution (a small rural high school in New Zealand ) requires me to maintain an on-line presence with my classes (we close for snow etc from time time plus learning should be happening when the students want it to) and what better way to learn than be an "e-student" myself?

Well I did achieve that goal.  I did learn a lot about structure and the type of activities that can make learning happen.  But the content surprised me.  I enjoyed it (that's not too surprising) but it made a big difference to me, and that's going to be hard to put into words- so I'll use a mind map!

I guess given that I wasn't very motivated by the 'what' in this course, my prior thoughts were not very helpful!  I have been a principal and as such had a vague worry that one day we would get "done" for breaking copyright and it would be expensive and messy.  I had heard of Creative Commons as the schools I have been involved with were members of virtual learning networks (VLNs), and for about a year I was chair of the council for the VLN Community here in NZ.  But what I wasn't aware of, until I did this course, was that Creative Commons is connected to the moral purpose of education (I would define that as making a difference in others' lives); I had merely thought that Creative Commons was a form of copyright that would help protect our school from messy and expensive copyright infringements.  How wrong I was!

Where I am now then is in a somewhat morally uplifted place! I can see that the moral purpose of education is better served by CC licenses; the freedom to reuse, remix etc is a fundamentally useful and liberating thing. As a relatively rich white guy (with a liberal streak) I can see that students and their educators around the world would be better off if these licenses were commonly used. Creative Commons is a better way in so many ways. I have made a decision to use a BY SA license in anything I do (like Chris Bletcher though I doubt that what I do will ever be useful!) and part way through the course I would have said and I'll have an NC in there too please.  I didn't want any multi-national ripping my ideas off!  That change really surprised me.  And that brings me on to how I learnt.

How I learnt was my prior focus for this course. I was not disappointed here. One of the surprising things here may not be a surprise to educators in other countries.  It's the multi-choice question (MCQ).  In New Zealand we have moved to a system of assessment that does not value MCQs. To a large extent we rely more on extended writing as we try to judge a student's ability to evaluate, justify etc etc. The resources we read on MCQs has made me reconsider that and I'll be trialing that in my classes this term.

The video signposts were very well chosen.  From Tutu to the more prosaic Bletcher, they were the equivalent of a high class conference.  The readings were very good too; Moller's article was the turning point in dropping the NC tag for me.  I was surprised by that (I need to rehearse his arguments though as I find I'm unable to explain concisely why the NC tag should be not preferred.).  The definition of free and libre was a subtle point for me too and was partly responsible for some of the shifts I've made in my thinking.

I see great value now in micro and macro blogging and the use of reflective thinking and writing in learning.  I'll need to find a "safe" way of doing that with adolescent students, our school blocks Twitter among other things, but the concept will work well with pen and paper too. As for me; I think I'll carrying on blogging.

Thanks OERU for this course. I would recommend it.




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The last mission

The shuttle gets a piggy back home to retirement in California. Photo from Flickr.
The photographer was Michael Dorausch

In July 2011 the Atlantis took off for its final mission, the 135th of the Space Shuttle program. 

After a journey of over 8 million kms it touched down almost 13 days later.

What was that journey like and why was there so few crew?. 
"Only four astronauts were assigned to this mission, versus the normal six or seven, because there were no other shuttles available for a rescue following the retirement of Discovery and Endeavour. If the shuttle was seriously damaged in orbit, the crew would have moved into the International Space Station and returned in Russian Soyuz capsules, one at a time, over the course of a year. All STS-135 crew members were custom-fitted for a Russian Sokol space suit and molded Soyuz seat liner for this possibility." [Wikipedia]

In the upper video from the Ames Research Center (retrieved from the Internet Archive) a fusion of several visible light cameras and infra-red camera create a beautiful image of STS 135 taking off. The lower video is an amzing shot of the Earth receeding as STS 135 takes off.  It's in the Public Domain as was also retrieved from the Internet Archive

Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, these four astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-135 crew portrait. Pictured are NASA astronauts Chris Ferguson (center right), commander; Doug Hurley (center left), pilot; Rex Walheim and Sandy Magnus, both mission specialists. [Wikipedia]

In this longer (34min) interview Sandy Magnus talks about her experiences growing up. It's a Youtube video on their standard license.

This post is in partial fulfillment of my participation in #OCL4Ed

It was easy enough to search for Creative Commons licensing. What was harder was finding stuff on Space.com where all rights had been reserved. There was a good quote there from Chris Ferguson the mission commander that would have been good to use as I didn't want to rely on Wikipedia.   I can't help thinking that Space.com would have got that from somewhere else!

I also ran into problems with NASA as they have been affected by the US Govt close down!

Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. 
We sincerely regret this inconvenience.

The Archive site is interesting with over a million videos.  It's well known as a "way-back" machine but it's much more than that and worth a look.



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A scenario on copyright

This post is in fulfillment of a course I am doing (#OCL4Ed).

Scenario:

A teacher of Science in New Zealand, Michael Faraday wants an "accelerated" group within his mixed ability

Year 9 Science class to justify the continued spend of humankind on space exploration. The whole class is involved in the topic of Space Exploration.

He downloads and makes available the following on the school's intranet::

1. The Global Exploration Map a downloadable PDF from the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG)

2. A downloadable PDF "Benefits Stemming from Space Exploration" also by the ISECG but obtained from the NASA website.

Neither of these two items has any indication of asserted copyright.

Whilst in his classroom he makes available his personal copy, on DVD,  of

3. "Apollo 13" a movie starring Tom Hanks. The students are not allowed to take it home but may watch on a laptop during class time.

The student's brief is to produce a seminar/presentation to the rest of the class about the dangers of space exploration and why they are worth it [or not].

Q1 With regard to the two downloadable resources Michael may assume:

1. That freedom to store on the school's server is implied by the PDF's free availability on the internet.
1. Distractor.  Probably Michael will get away with this, especially since he wants it for science education,  but...

2. That copyright is not permitted
1. Correct. Strictly speaking Michael should get approval from the publishers.

Q2. With regard to the video Michael may assume:

1. That since tis is a "private viewing" of a DVD he has purchased that there in no copyright infringement.
1. Correct

2. That he is showing the video as part of his job and therefore it is subject to the provisions for a public broadcast.
1. Distractor. The video showing is not generating income.

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