Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The changing face of education


Learning @ School was a great opportunity to observe, discuss and interact with a lot of different individuals from all over the country about the potential for eLearning to impact on how we 'do' education. There are lots of tools and processes out there that promote cooperative, interactive and real thinking/problem solving situations for students today but there seems to be an increasing 'disconnect' with the 1 group we want involvement from - the parents of our students. They still see a lot of e stuff as fluffy and the extra bit rather than a real part of the learning process. How to shift / bring them along on the journey of learning that school is blazing is one that needs as much attention as the way we seek to structure our eLearning and eCompetencies within the school curriculum framework. The following talk from Sir Ken Robinson is one possible example of showing people just why this change is necessary.

Quotable quotes:

"The present time is the most stimulating period in the history of the earth and our children are distracted by boring stuff. " [Sir Ken Robinson]

"We are alienating millions of our youth who see no purpose in going to school." [Sir Ken]

"We have to go in opposition to standardisation which is systematically destroying the capacity for cognitive development." [Sir Ken]

It is one way to try and counter the seemingly opposite direction that we are currently being pushed in. One that seems to forget the amazing potential that the revised curriculum gave us in regards to developing a school curriculum that reflected local content and context and set the foundation for the development of true 21st century thinkers!

1 comment:

  1. What about running learning sessions / workshops where the students are the teachers and show what we are learning to do? It would be great to involve more parents in the blogs. They are keen but are often nervous and unsure of what to write - the children would soon fix this I think.

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