"This year Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK, has been awarded $1 million in seed-funding for his wish to design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. He hopes to build a School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online."
My presentation for the ECIS IT conference, London March 2013
Recipe to flatten your classroom - 3 essential ingredients:
1. Connection
2. Citizenship, with a dash of global competency
3. Collaboration, the sort that includes co-creation
4 Traditional Theories Of Learning
Of the published research and science, three of the more popular theories in the last fifty years are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. The infographic below reviews the pros and cons of each approach while making a case for connectivism as a response to the age of the internet and information.
1. Behaviorism: learning is a process of reacting to external stimuli
2. Cognitivism: learning is a process of acquiring and storing information
3. Constructivism: meaning is continuously "constructed" through experience and reflection
4. Connectivism: learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes
A one-semester program where students design their own learning. Inquiry-based, student driven.
Has great potential for 'passion' based learning and connecting with the world - allows time for creativity and co-creation
Includes time for team work and personal endeavours
Invest orientation time at start of year building on TGS Digital Library with resources and allow teachers to briefly present their top tools and ones they'd like to improve upon
This should linked to a teacher's professional growth plan/annual review.
I'm dubious about digital resource libraries--but can be swayed. TGS has a small faculty who work closely together. F2F is a better way to share. We get a lot of milage out of our "Idea Fairs" and that's with a faculty of 80. It's more important to identify a person from whom you can learn than to identify apps, web sites etc. People are the most important resource.
Also wonder how the students are brought in as resources...?
While a traditional model of one person putting together a list of resources is quite limited. Our approach digital library is more about being a place for a group to curate resources. Everyone contributes to it and everyone comments on the effectiveness. If a teacher finds, uses and endorses a particular resource - and then shares those finds digitally, we can grow a collection of effective resources. Sharing face to face is important but there is a tendency for great resources to become "hot topics" and then forgotten a few months later. It also is not "inline". Somebody might mention a useful tool but that's not relevant to another at that particular time. If we can capture those recommendations and share them in a central place to be searched then. Finally, TGS continues to have large turnover (and will likely continue to given our nature). Without underpinning shared resources with some kind of "library" a large amount of institutional knowledge goes out the door with every churn. The role of the library is still valid, it just needs to be re-imagined in the context of today's web.
Love the "Idea Fair" concept. It's a great idea. Again, I would like to see that "captured" and made available digitally to help grow the organization's knowledge.
- Easy export to external site or a package/comprehensive "portfolio"
- Connect drafts to final products (blogs, videos, maybe others?) so we can show progress on Spot
- RSS embeds in Spot for daily reading
- RSS widgets curated by admin to stream outside world into Spot
- that's all for now...
- Adobe Bridge (great for media organization and also a skill in that industry)
- Diigo to multi-device?
- Re-evaluate Documents in place of GoodReader? Students are tending to do this already
- Google Reader? In conjunction with Spot or Flipbook?
- Build in the time for them to curate these with the support of their teachers (e.g. students can get suggestions on which pieces each month or at mid-term markers should be included in their portfolio for the time being)
- Friday Homerooms?
- Advisor meetings?
- On Spot for storage and display with easy
Whatever you do, make the kit as lightweight as possible. A plain text editor, for example, is preferable to a full-on word processor such as MS Word or Pages.
Look for lightweight apps that work across many platforms in order to avoid translation issues that would challenge "Global Impact & Sharing"
Also, look for tools that are tightly integrated with multiple services as this saves duplication of effort and encourages sharing and collaboration. For example, Reeder amkes it dead easy to share RSS feeds (see note under Global Impact and Sharing re using RSS) to Delicious, Twitter, FB and through mail to a host of other services without leaving the app.
A lot will depend on how TGS weighs several drivers: individual achievement v. global collaboration, for example. Also, TGS may see different drives for the 9-10 grou v. the 11-12 group