In a growing number of simulations, ranging from the off-the-shelf SimCity and to Muzzy Lane's Making History to MIT's experimental Revolution and Supercharged, students -- even elementary school children -- can now manipulate whole virtual systems, from cities to countries to refineries, rather than just handling manipulatives.
In Education Simulations's Real Lives, children take on the persona of a peasant farmer in Bangladesh, a Brazilian factory worker, a police officer in Nigeria, a Polish computer operator, or a lawyer in the United States, among others, experiencing those lives based on real-world statistical data. Riverdeep's School Tycoon enables kids to build a school to their liking.
The missing technological element is true one-to-one computing, in which each student has a device he or she can work on, keep, customize, and take home. For true technological advance to occur, the computers must be personal to each learner. When used properly and well for education, these computers become extensions of the students' personal self and brain.
For the digital age, we need new curricula, new organization, new architecture, new teaching, new student assessments, new parental connections, new administration procedures, and many other elements.
First, consult the students.
But resisting today's digital technology will be truly lethal to our children's education. They live in an incredibly fast-moving world significantly different than the one we grew up in. The number-one technology request of today's students is to have email and instant messaging always available and part of school. They not only need things faster than their teachers are used to providing them, they also have many other new learning needs as well, such as random access to information and multiple data streams.
Dabbling.
Doing old things in old ways.
Doing old things in new ways.
Doing new things in new ways.
But new technology still faces a great deal of resistance. Today, even in many schools with computers, Luddite administrators (and even Luddite technology administrators) lock down the machines, refusing to allow students to access email. Many also block instant messaging, cell phones, cell phone cameras, unfiltered Internet access, Wikipedia, and other potentially highly effective educational tools and technologies, to our kids' tremendous frustration.
the adoption of "curation approaches" will directly affect the way competences are taught, how textbooks are put together, how students are going to learn about a subject, and more than anything, the value that can be generated for "others" through a personal learning path.
The goal is to learn how to learn, to know where to look for something and to be able to identify which parts of all the information available are most relevant to learn or achieve a certain goal or objective.
Content curation embodies these research, investigative and sense-making traits.
find, identify, monitor and update which are the most relevant "information sources", hubs or curators in every possible area of interest. Search engines and traditional media do not presently provide this information
Some of these would certainly include online searching, research, critical thinking, comparative analysis, evaluation and verification of alternative sources, classification and labeling, questioning, summarizing and synthesis skills (among others)
In other words, researchers, educators and guides prefer to refer to trusted "curators" of specific information areas rather than to rely on Google-style secret and commercially-driven algorithms.
Real world, native speaker experience.
Peer to peer learning.
Appropriate levels of difficulty/ challenge.
eal world, native speaker experience.
Peer to peer learning.
Appropriate levels of difficulty/ challenge.
Ideally any local guides should be experienced at using
simple student-appropriate language and pre-teaching of activity-specific vocabulary is
essential
Combining points 2 and 3 strongly suggests that groups should be organised according
to ability.
Combining points 2 and 3 strongly suggests that groups should be organised according
to ability
students will be getting all their social and emotional
learning and their language learning simultaneously
setting open language tasks such as presentations will allow any student
to express themselves at whatever language level they are comfortable with
It successfully combines language emersion with traditional outdoor
activities designed to promote personal growth, team work, and improved communication
skills.
Improved efficacy at communicating for and with non-native speakers (of any language).
An improved inter-cultural (behavioural) understanding.