by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)
A combination of Friday night excitement, passionate change agents, twitter and of course lots of humour: this is #pencilchat. Once again, education tweeps from all over the world united their voices in a twitter chat, but this time they added big doses of irony and sarcasm. The topic is simple and its message is deep: imagine that you living several years ago when pencils were beginning to be introduced at schools. What are the benefits? Most importantly, what are the implications for teaching, learning and schooling in general?
As much simple as this may look like for today’s world, it couldn’t be that simple back in the day... Now, replacing the word pencil with the tools of today’s world, computers, mobile devices and other innovations that still don’t have a natural place in most educational systems, this is how peculiar and funny the whole debate about using ICT in the classroom might look like in the near future.
But this is our aim as change agents after all. We want future generations to enjoy teaching and learning in an environment that is meaningful and relevant to the real world. We want them to find difficulty in understanding why there was so much debate regarding the blend of ICT in teaching and learning, just because the seamless implementation of all these tools will be a natural and undisputable thing to do for them. There will be a time that discussing about educational use of ICT will be as funny and weird as #pencilchat.
You can follow and contribute to #pencilchat anytime. The community is growing with thousands of tweets sent over the last three days! Here are some of my favourites:
Resources:
Photo by jimmiehomeschoolmom
Why #pencilchat may be the most clever education allegory ever by Liz Dwyer
How #pencilchat started by John T. Spencer
Why do you like twitter? by David Coffey
A head teacher writes... by Steve Wheeler
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