Educating the Dragon

Today was the day of Peter Holmes’ visit. Now Peter the teaching principal of Otford primary school, Otford being about a hour outside of Sydney as you can see in the picture. It is good to know that there ARE principals out there who ‘get it’. He shared a podcast with pictures that his year 5/6 kids have done, I want to encourage him to post it on Teachertube because it worth looking at. In fact it would be well worth viewing for classes around the world to follow the same format as his class, we could really get a comparision resouce going. Globally- How cool would that be?

I also hope that he gets a chance to share, by way of commenting here, some of the things he was able to glean from his time a Peterhead. All I’d like to say is a huge thank you to Chrissy for her tireless work today and inputting into our discussions about Technology in school today. As always your contribution is invaluable and I appreciate you getting yourself into school for me today. Gush, gush.- And to Voyagers who sat beautifully through a chaotic session with my class today

Back to MY learning…. I am so grateful for what is essentially unlimited internet access for my class. The way my school is organised we have access to all online learning tools and we appreciated as professionals to make professional decisions about the online learning environment of our kids.
Australia, it would appear has huge limitations placed upon school access to the internet. Peter shared a great analogy with me today which illustrates to point beautifully:

“What happens when a couple of kids while playing in the part come across a discarded playboy magazine? Age dependent, obviously, (but we’re primary trained and so our minds think of our own kids in our class) the kids would probably flick through, have a giggle and, if we have brought them up right, either discard it or tell someone. Are we going to issue a blanket ban on kids going to the park on the off chance that they will stumble across a discarded magazine as they play? Of course not, neither should we blanket ban access to the internet, we should educate kids to discern for themselves what is appropriate and what is not, we’re in the business of education, let’s educate.”

Another discussion we had, or was part of the original one?… either way we were talking about the integration of technology in the classroom setting. Why use technology? We discussed how kids today do expect a educational experience to have ‘all the bells and whistles’ and how computers and their adages provide that level of engagement and interest that is required for the digital generation. Kids ‘powering down’ when they come to school may or may not be an overstatement but the reality remains that child level of engagement with technology at home, burning the CD, downloading the music, IM-ing their friends, needs to matched with the engagement on an educational level, the wiki, the blog, the digital story. Schools have access now to new technologies. Peter’s analogy was this:

“He found it interesting that we have a dishwasher in the staffroom, coming from a small 3 teacher school there is no need for one, but to think that if you had one and then expect someone to stand for 30 minutes, run a bowl of hot water and do them by hand is such a waste of a fabulous resource, of course, you’d use the dishwasher! To not would be dumb! So why are we as classroom teachers shying away from technology when its sitting right there, available to enrich, enhance and extend our kids learning?”

I learnt a lot from Peter’s visit. Much of it I am still processing and will be talking to my Principal and Senior management about where education sits with the flattening world.

Thanks Peter.