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David Kooper, LAUSD board member Richard Vladovic’s chief of staff, has been hired as principal of Gulf Avenue Elementary School in Wilmington.

A San Pedro native who was an LAUSD teacher and magnet coordinator at South Shores Magnet School, Kooper has worked with Vladovic since his election in 2007. Vladovic, himself a former LAUSD administrator, was re-elected this year and will be sworn in Friday, the same day that Kooper takes on his new job.

Local District 8 Superintendent Mike Romero called Kooper an innovator and an instructional leader, saying he’s a good fit for Gulf Avenue, which is one of the local district’s three remaining year-round schools. Classes at the campus start July 5.

“The wealth of experiences serving as Vladovic’s chief of staff over the past few years will pay great dividends at Gulf Avenue,” Romero said.

Kooper said he was excited for the opportunity. Asked if spoke Spanish, Kooper replied: “Claro que sí.” The school is overwhelmingly Latino.

The news of his new position was made public in Vladovic’s blog. Vladovic announced Kooper’s departure with “sadness.” *

Nora Armenta, who’s been principal at Gulf Avenue since 2007, earlier this month became director of early education programs across the district, Romero said. She’s now based at the district’s downtown Beaudry Avenue offices.

* Vladovic may have been especially emotional, because he apparently vented at today’s school board meeting on the new Cameron Diaz film “Bad Teacher,” according to the LA Times. Vladovic took issue with the movie’s depiction of a potty-mouthed teacher who cares little about her students’ academic success.

As many as 100 state schools are to be constructed under PFI because of a lack of spare cash during the public spending squeeze.

It is believed the move will allow ministers to make scarce resources available for flagship programmes such as the expansion of parent-run “free schools”.

But the move was criticised by teachers who said it would prove hugely expensive in the long-term and limit heads’ powers to run their own schools.

It also risks leaving the Government open to claims of hypocrisy after the Tories branded PFI a “totally discredited” system while in Opposition.

Under PFIs, companies are brought in to fund and build public services such as hospitals and schools. The taxpayer avoids upfront costs but is locked into expensive long-term repayment deals.

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Companies can often charge huge mark-ups for basic maintenance and councils face shelling out millions in compensation if schools close before the contract expires.

Last year, the Department for Education’s budget for school buildings was slashed by 60 per cent in the comprehensive spending review.

The Government also axed Labour’s £55bn programme to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school in England, although a small number of construction projects will still go ahead.

According to reports, the Treasury is now considering using PFI to complete the first 100 of these new schools.

“There is a massive need for capital investment at the moment, and if 100 schools can be built using PFI then you are creating additional money – freeing up resources – to fund free schools,” a source told the Times Educational Supplement.

But teachers criticised the use of PFI. Under the system, schools remain in private hands and heads often have to pay charges to use buildings at the evening and weekends.

Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “A lot of PFI schools left massive bills for schools and local authorities. Although it avoids the need to put money up front, in the long term this system is far more expensive.”

Earlier this year, it emerged that a PFI school that was opened to great fanfare in 2009 by Ed Balls, the former Labour education secretary, is to close this summer.

The school – Christ the King in Huyton, Merseyside – cost £24m to build and the local taxpayer is likely to spend the next 23 years paying off the debt.

A Treasury spokesman: “HM Treasury has changed the rules for PFIs. No decision on funding has been made in this case.”

OK so you are a student and you are wondering what to do over the summer. Perhaps you have a job but maybe it is not fulfilling. And besides wouldn’t it be cool to write some great code and win a new Windows Phone for your efforts. Right? Well the Windows Phone team has a contest just for you. They are looking for students to write applications targetting the new “Mango” update for Windows Phone 7. Though DreamSpark all the software you need it free. What more information? Here is some detail “borrowed” from the Windows Team Blog:

1. Make sure you’re registered for DreamSpark
2. Download and install Expression Studio Ultimate and the new Mango Windows Phone Developer Tools (available free as a member of DreamSpark)
3. Get the free Sketchflow Template for Windows Phone and create a Sketchflow mock-up of your app
4. Post the Sketchflow mock-up somewhere online and
5. We will review all prototypes and will contact the developers who submit the best ones and send them a special Mango developer device.

Come on and show the world what you can do!

Trainees will be taught about restraining techniques, legal powers to search pupils and practical tips to manage low-level disruption as part of an overhaul of teacher training, it has emerged.

New style courses will also place a greater emphasis on tackling bullying – particularly homophobic abuse – in schools.

The changes come amid concerns that training for many student teachers is too “theoretical”, leaving them ill-prepared for the realities of classroom life.

Failure to cope with bad behaviour is already seen as one of the main causes of staff abandoning the profession, with one-in-10 new teachers refusing to work in schools after training and a similar number leaving just a year into the job.

Charlie Taylor, the Government’s new expert adviser on behaviour, said: “Making sure trainee teachers get the right training in managing behaviour is a hugely important issue. Too many trainee teachers feel under trained, making them more likely to leave the profession.

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“The Government’s new teacher training strategy will include more specific training in understanding and managing behaviour for teachers, especially those working in challenging inner city schools. This will help ensure that new, young and talented teachers remain in what is a hugely rewarding career.”

A consultation document – published on Monday – sets out a new system of teacher training in England.

As reported in the Telegraph, it includes the introduction of tapered bursaries to attract the best graduates into the classroom, beefed up English and maths requirements to weed out trainees with a poor grasp of the three-Rs and new-style tests of interpersonal skills.

But ministers are also determined to use the reforms to crackdown on indiscipline in English state schools.

The consultation paper – Training Our Next Generation of Outstanding Teachers – said training courses would be changed to tackle “two specific weaknesses”; ability to teach reading in primary schools and managing behaviour at all levels.

More training will be based in schools, rather than universities, where tuition is often too theory-based, the document said.

It added: “Trainees who follow teacher training programmes that are led by schools… are more likely to find their training provided relevant knowledge, skills and understanding to teach their specialist subject, and better prepared them for the classroom and behaviour management.”

The consultation outlined plans to help local networks of schools to develop teachers as “behaviour specialists” who can work across their area to “improve the quality of training that trainees receive while on placements in schools”.

A Whitehall source said toughen-up behaviour training would focus on areas such as restraining violent pupils and giving staff more confidence to use powers to search for banned items. Under new rules, they can search pupils, bags and lockers for anything prohibited by school rules such as mobile phones, alcohol, drugs and stolen property.

Courses are also expected to place a bigger emphasis on the interpersonal skills needed to communicate better with pupils and offer “real life” advice to help trainees deal with low-level disruption, uncooperative children and irate parents.

On Monday, unions criticised the training strategy, saying the focus on recruiting top graduates risked alienating thousands of students.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: ““We should have demanding expectations of recruits into teacher training. It is, after all, the most important job in the country.

“We should not fall into the trap of thinking, however, that academic excellence necessarily makes someone a great teacher.”

Yesterday I was giving a career talk to a group from Year Up in Microsoft’s Technology Center. (Picture below) A great bunch of people and we had a good time. Well I did and they laughed at all the right places and ate a lot of pizza so I am assuming they did as well.

I have been playing with some Kinect Sensor for Windows code lately and one of the samples I picked up allows one to send keyboard signals to applications based on you’re their movements. Ah, ha, I decided “I can make my talk more cool by using hand signals to advance the PowerPoint slides.” Sounds great right? So with almost no understanding of the program I brought my Kinect Sensor and this sample code with me. The practice went great. I waved my hand and the slide advanced. I felt all Jedi Knight – “This is not the slide you want to look at.”

Then the students came in and I started my presentation. Now it turns out that I am not very good at standing still when I present. Nor do my hands stay quietly at my side. You know where this is going right? Yep, the PowerPoint did all sorts of interesting things from advancing to retreating to jumping completely out of the presentation. I finally gave up and used a hand held clicker. What went wrong was that the software, a simple demo after all, didn’t have the “smarts” to know what was a “please move to the next slide” motion and an “I’m just fidgety and can’t stand still while I talk” motion. Could that sort of smarts be programmed in? Yes, I think so. But it would take some work. Someone is going to do this work. I may even give it a try myself. But the point is that the computer, even with highly sophisticated sensors like those on the Kinect, is not really all that smart on its own.

A co-worker and I were talking about what else, besides programming concepts, could we teach with the Kinect SDK. I’m thinking, based on this experience, that some basic artificial intelligence is one such extra topic. Of course we can teach about the math involved in depth perception, the techniques that are used with the RGB camera to pick out different objects, and many more such obvious things. But along the way I suspect we are going to find some unexpected lessons that need to be taught as well. I find this exciting. It’s a new world in user interfaces!

Related posts:

• Kinect SDK–Think Beyond the Mouse
• How Does Kinect Work?