Wikipedia defines E-learning as the use of electronic media and information and communication technologies (ICT) in education.
"E-learning is broadly inclusive of all forms of educational technology in learning and teaching. E-learning is inclusive of, and is broadly synonymous with multimedia learning, technology-enhanced learning (TEL), computer-based instruction (CBI), computer-based training (CBT), computer-assisted instruction or computer-aided instruction (CAI), internet-based training (IBT), web-based training (WBT), online education, virtual education, virtual learning environments (VLE) (which are also called learning platforms), m-learning, and digital educational collaboration. These alternative names emphasize a particular aspect, component or delivery method."
But what does it mean for our students? Our schools? and our society?
Below is a playlist of mine featuring three videos that discuss this very topic.
There may be additonal videos in this series as I will be adding to the playlist. Watch, think and feel free to comment.
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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks about the importance of getting the balance right in the curriculum.
Some food for thought for all educators. We are all in the business of bettering the next generation for an unseen future.
"The best ideas always come at the local level. Not from me and frankly not from anyone in Washington"
The Global Transformation in Education addresses the forces of change that are causing educators globally to rethink what education for today’s students should involve. Mark Treadwell author of The Perfect Storm discusses the collision of three “storms” that are now rocking the world. Read more…
Plane Project
The PLANE project seeks to develop a suite of on-line learning experiences to meet the needs of today’s teachers. A key feature of the project will be its utilisation of two environments for the delivery of the online experiences:
a 21st century immersive learning environment – a “digital virtual world” for experiential learning, problem based simulation learning, collaboration and communication.
Chris Anderson’s video above highlights the powerful way in which online video is inspiring innovation. With 800 million hours of online video viewed everyday around the globe there is power in use of video.
There are educators around the globe who are sharing their lessons, such as Khan Academy and MIT.
There are thought innovators sharing their ideas and and challenging our thinking. For example Mister Sharp or the vlogbrothers.
There is TED, RSA and EdTalks sharing experiences and allowing us to reflect on the passion and practise of others.
There are even educators in New Zealand who are beginning to share their own and their students experiences through video.
For example eMartian and 29sisroom.
We, as educators in New Zealand, are a crowd just like that shared by Chris Anderson. We need to shine a light on the way we are educating students. Share the desire and the passion we have for our profession.
Celia Lashlie continues to be a quality speaker when on the topic of how dad’s should step up and mum’s step back if we’re going to stem the flood of boys ending up in prison.
Made wrong
In our currnet pareting scheme and education system boys are are made to feel wronf just be the mere fact of them being boys. Celia noted that sometimes a behavior is not inheretaly bad but simply a product of boy-ness. We should, as parents and teachers, learn to tell the difference between the two.
Given time and space
Far too often we exclaim “this is happening NOW” “Get your coat on, shoes, get in the car… let’s go, let’s go, let’s go” This approach is poor people management and when those people are boys… oh dear.
Instead, place things in a time frame. “Dinner is in 15 mins”, “ We’ll be leaving at the end of that programme.”
Boys can and do think reflectively but they may need more time, more support than your average daughter.
Tell truth to boys
Finding the simply language that matches the age of your son, your pupils, can be tricky. But telling the truth, putting boys ‘in the picture’ allows them to process the world better. We as adults have a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that our boys seem not able to access. The way we talk to boys needs clarity and conviction Truth wins out with boys over embellishment or exaggeration.
Think then Talk
Boys process and then talk or explain or ask as necessary. Women on the other hand talk out loud. Celia did this demonstration and my words would not do it justice but basically women, mums, teachers, talk through an issue and process it simultaneously. That’s a whole lot of talking that, to a boy, is irrelevant. No wonder they stop listening.
Digging down inside
Over the years, boys pick up on everything, they may not be able to articulate it but it is all stored deep inside. All we need is the questions (not too many) and the time to allow them to process what is asked and articulate an answer. Boys come across as lazy but the one thing they have access to is that knowledge that women WILL jump in and answer their own question before any thought is required on his part.
Give him the time to process, make him aware it is HE who has to answer, make time for it, let him know you’re not going anywhere until he’s answered – take a newspaper if you think it’ll take a while – maybe not.
Julian Treasure speaks in Edinburgh about the slow demise of listening. He offers five ways to listen.
Below are the summary titles of the five but it really does make more sense is you…. You know… listen to him.
Silence – Just three minutes of silence a day will help reset out listening skills.
Mixer – When you’re in a noisy environment pick out the threads of sound you hear.
Savouring – listen for the mundane sounds and savour the rhythm it has.
Listening position- Move your position of listening.
RASA – You’ll just have to listen to Julian for this one.
The key message here is you must listen consciously to live fully.
There needs to be a shift in assessment and how data is gathered and used
There needs to be a improvement in student experience
Students learn differently, at different rates and in different ways
New Challenges for education:
World population is approaching 7 billion and continues to accelerate putting pressure on global resources.
Technological advancement is also accelerating meaning there is no clear picture as to what the future will look like for students today let alone their off-spring.
Age old issues:
Education needs to address the motivation, engagement, interest and imagination of students.
The principal of Pukeokahu School, Marama Stewart, reflects on how the education system has changed and asks what we want for our children's future education.
She highlights some difference in the presentation of education:
Schools were formed to create batches of cookie cutter graduates that fit into an industrialised society.
if you were lucky you had one or two teachers who inspired you and broke the mould.
[we now] move away from this industrial model in order to meet the dynamic needs of our 21st century society.
New Zealand is already way ahead of the ball game when it comes to dynamic education, with it's world renowned New Zealand Curriculum.
[It is] really important that our community have a long hard think and begin a robust conversation about what we really want for our children in education.
I want the school I teach in to be a place that inspires children to shine in all areas of their life.
Lane Clark spoke very powerfully at ULearn10 about the need to acknowledge how we educate being more important than what we educate about, and that we need to work with students on how to learn, how to think and the relationship between the two.
To support this Spectrum Education have a limited offer on Lane’s Books.
If it is our goal to see an increase in student levels of engagement and levels of high school retention, an improvement in student performance standards and learners skilled and ready to contribute to their world, then we have got to rethink what we are doing, and how we are doing it, in our schools.
We've got to teach our kids how to think and how to learn.
In Where Thinking and Learning Meet, Lane Clark challenges our individual and systemic educational beliefs and practices. She offers an approach to re-thinking and re-engineering how teachers teach and how learners learn.
A symbiotic relationship exists between thinking, learning and assessment. Criteria, void of thinking, result in little more than ‘quantity' statements or statements of subjective ‘quality' language. Neither stretches the learner in their performance, and the latter results in confusion and often a need for moderation.
When a learner is provided with criteria, but is not given the opportunity to develop knowledge and understanding of their elements, its use is compromised and the end result disappointing. This book is about the thinking and learning process. It's about the relationship between assessment, thinking and learning. It's where assessment meets thinking and learning!
Research has found that Year 5 students in New Zealand schools receive, on average, just one hour of science education per week. The inaugural National Primary Science Week aims to change that. Breakfast speaks with its organiser Chris Astall.
Homework these holidays can be a real pain. Trying to keep kids occupied and engaged in their learning. Especially if they have only been in school for a few terms, total.
There are a few suggestions for making time at the computer active, engaging and educational.
Spelling City allows you to input a few choice spellings from the past term and leave them to follow the activity though to conclusion, learning the spellings while having some fun.
"Building learning identities: what we've learnt from the Competent Learners' longitudinal project"
Breakfast Seminar
Friday, 20 May at 7.45am
Cathy Wylie is a Chief Researcher at NZCER, and is currently the J.D. Stout fellow at Victoria University. She has led the Competent Learners' project as it has followed a sample of students from the wider Wellington region from their final early childhood education days through to age 20. She is currently co-editing an international handbook on student engagement. She also researches the impact of educational policy on schools and learning opportunities, including the ways in which schools can engage students.
The Competent Learners' project provides a rare opportunity to follow the development of individual students through primary and secondary schooling. In the age-20 phase of the project, we see out how earlier experiences and performance levels on both cognitive and attitudinal measures related to some of the Key Competencies, influence secondary school engagement, achievement, and what happens post-school. We also see the kinds of learning opportunities and support, in and out of school, that can make a positive difference.
This session will discuss key findings from the age-20 phase of the Competent Learners' phase. To find out more information about the Competent Learners' project click here.
This CORE breakfast session will :
Discuss the factors that allowed students with low levels of performance at age 8 to achieve well at NCEA
Show the importance of Key Competencies in gaining NCEA Level 2
Discuss the importance of the period from age 10 to age 14 in terms of forming or maintaining positive learning identities
Question the reality of 'second chance education' for those with low engagement in secondary school or low qualification success
This session will be particularly useful for school leaders, classroom practitioners, and policy advisors.
Breakfast will be served at 7.45am, with Cathy beginning the discussion at 8am. She will wrap things up around 9am but you are invited to stay and chat with Cathy, CORE staff and one another after the seminar.
Wellington breakfast seminars will be held at Connelly Hall in Guildford Terrace while our usual breakfast venue is undergoing renovations.
Click here to register online.
VENUE
Connelly Hall
Guildford Terrace
Thorndon
Wellington
Nga mihi,
Some of you have seen the article in this month's Interface magazine about the 2011 Emerging Leaders' Symposium, but here is more information. It's an 'unconference' for emerging leaders in education; please consider either registering yourself or passing it on to the young guns in your school. It promises to be quite an exciting and inspiring event.
Did you know?
10,000 of New Zealand's 50,000 teachers are nearing retirement age.
50% of newly-qualified teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.
We need to foster emerging leaders in education. We need to give them a voice and support them to develop a vision for the future of education, because soon that future will be in their hands. To this end, a group of emerging leaders have convened a two-day symposium in Auckland on 28th and 29th April 2011. Emerging leaders are invited to attend this 'unconference' to prepare a vision for the future of education in New Zealand-Aotearoa. This vision will be presented to Karen Sewell on the second day of the symposium.
Financial literacy is perhaps one of the areas of a child’s education which really should be ‘out-sourced’. The last generation were not taught financial literacy well, for a variety of reasons, and to say that parents alone should be solely responsible would lead to a spiralling downwards of understanding of money.
As the article identifies there are many worthy programmes out there that schools and educators could, and should adopt.
That is not to say that parents should not take a lead in this area. It is just that there needs to be a more solid foundation to financial understanding than ‘treating your kid on every visit to the Warehouse’. Tweet
It would appear that students from Christchurch will be scattered throughout the country this coming week as they disperse to family and friends.
Rumour has it that MathsBuddies is offering to enrol all Chch students from Year 4-13 free from the remainder of this term. The hope is that through its online tutorials and activities, set by their original teachers, will mean little ground in their learning will be lost. Find out more...
There are only a few languages in the world that feature so highly for the future and English is not really ‘all that’.
Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and English are all key languages for the future. It is good to see that language learning is beginning to feature more prominently in Primary schools but as the old adage goes ‘you use it or lose it’.
So in light of that, there is mounting pressure on Intermediate and Secondary schools to continue the language learning options that are first presented to primary students.
Teachers will also be put under the spotlight. Primary school teachers with language skills in the three ‘foreign’ languages mentioned earlier will be in something of high demand. Secondary school teachers may feel the pressure in the coming years as increasingly more students will present in their classes with higher abilities in international languages.
But what languages are offered in the schools that you know? Tweet
First diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome as an adult, Christchurch's CAROLINE HEARST believes everyone should be aware of the importance of acknowledging the condition. There are such a wide variety of ‘special needs’ that sometimes it can be a little too much for any SENCO. But reality bites when there is not nearly enough funding to go around.
We, as teachers, become very good at picking up that there is something ‘amiss’ with a particular student in our class. We may not know the name for it and we certainly don’t have the qualifications to diagnose it but we are prepared to work with what we have and meet their needs as best we can.
Where a school is identified as ‘good or bad’ with their special needs programme often comes down to the quality and commitment of the Special Needs Coordinator. There is a huge raft of funding available to get students the support they need to succeed in today’s classrooms.
Not every student is entitled to one-on-one support, precious few are, but how funding is allocated within the school can go a long way to supporting students at their point of need.
Many primary schools weight the funding to the early primary years, often many classes have not one single teacher but often a Teacher Aide (TA) and other support staff that float between these junior years.
The rationale behind such funding allocation is that provided ‘special needs’ are heavily supported in the early years then the majority of students are ‘caught up’ by the middle and senior years in Primary school and support for additional staff beyond the class teacher is not needed.
Good sound theory that may be but reality is often very different, despite our best intentions let alone issues of transitory kids and supporting those teachers of Y5/6/7/8 who invariably suffer larger class sizes and arguably a heavier administrative workload.
Within military and business circles two people working closely together achieve far more than double their efforts.
This would translate to the classroom. If every teacher had their own TA their ability to support all the students would reach far beyond what would be achieved with half the students in a class with a single teacher. It is why so many ‘team-teaching’ scenarios work well. Sure the budget can’t stretch to two teachers to a class but an effective Teacher/ TA team could deliver an equally favourable result with student achievement.
