Comments on: Changing Education

By: Ewan McIntosh

Ewan McIntosh — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 07:46:37 +0000

In Scotland I am helping develop content for the new Scottish Schools Digital Network, a high-speed intranet for all of our 800,000 teachers and pupils. The first phase of this content is support for teachers of Modern Foreign Languages. Support for other subject areas and, importantly, for pupils, will be based on our achievements and errors and will be created over the next few years.

However, if you take a look at our Creative Teaching area you’ll notice that we are concentrating on a holistic, blended teaching approach. All ICT is imbedded in each area, whether that be drama, creative writing, school trips, …

Is this not a move in the right direction? We are finding that teachers still want “Resources” (which normally implies Death By Worksheet or PowerPoint for their pupils), but are quickly seeing the advantage of these kinds of resources that empower them to teach using their own existing skills used in a very different way.

Old Teacher + New Technology does not equal New Teacher.

By: Murray Bourne

Murray Bourne — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 06:50:21 +0000

Friedman missed a key point about Singapore when he was here - the IT infrastructure is superb - yes - but the implementation of IT strategies for effective learning is somewhat lacking.

You may be interested to read my review of Friedman & HeyMath.

By: Janice Friesen

Janice Friesen — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:19:12 +0000

Things are changing. I remember my first attempts to get teachers to use email. They had no need for it and thought of it as too time consuming. I wasn’t very successful. The situation now is completely different. There are still a few teachers who do not use email, but almost everyone sees it as necessary and helpful. Now it seems ubiquitous (not for students in school yet, but for teachers). Maybe the same thing will happen with use of the web, blogs, wikis, collaborative learning.

By: Ewan McIntosh

Ewan McIntosh — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 07:58:50 +0000

I’m making the same point next week at Glasgow’s SETT Learning Festival: business and media are getting turned on to this and if we can’t educate our students in the way of the world that they are entering then we have failed. The comparison made with Singapore’s size (4 million people) and its desire to nurture all its citizens made me think about Scotland (5 million inhabitants). There’s a lot of will here to do that but I’m still facing public refutes of the collaborative approaches (using or not using weblogs) that I have been putting on the agenda here.

What can we do push all our (very good) points home? Do we continue to chip, chip away?

By: John Blake

John Blake — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 19:07:14 +0000

“The Web gives us access to much more in the way of individualized and quality resources than we’ve been able to access in the past, and it now allows us to create and to use classroom created content to teach wider audiences and serve real purposes.” I really like this and had to share my experience today from my classroom as far as it relates ot individualization and quality resources. I spent most of last year experimenting with Moodle in my school. Over the summer, I talked my district into dedicating a small server and static IP address to our project. Today I had two Exceptional Children throughly engaged. One of them had a multiple handicaps including Autism and something I can not even try to spell. The other is emotionally handicapped. One the has a full-time behavioral technician. I have set-up Moodle accounts as part of the class. The assignments in Moodle are short, high-interest, and as interactive as I can find. One of them was creating his own acrostic poem and the other student was view a video about Hurricane Andrew as he studied how to survive during servere weather. The poem was sent home to mom, and staying safe in servere weather my save the other kids life on day..serving a real purpose? Absolutely…