Educating the Dragon

Julia Atkin, Ways of thinking, ways of knowing.She began with talking about the key competency: Thinking skills and how it is divided into creatine, critical and meta-cognative.  

Howard Garder was quoted with his multi intelligences. What I found interesting was how, in 1984 students were asked which they thought school valued and to a kid they said logical and and verbal. Now, Julia was saying, The students tick all intelligences but they say that school is not good at helping students get better at the intelligences they are not so flash at. 

How we view the world, everyone sees the same picture but they see different things- their perspective has a huge impact.

I hope that some folk who also attended could enlighten this post a bit more…. If I find my notes I comment as well.

I may have quit my course but my brain is still working overtime. Over the next weeks you may have to read through my ramblings about the things I have learnt. 

I want to talk about Explorers, I feel we are all explorers in new ICTs. We’re the ones experimenting in the classroom. The edublogosphere is filled with cases of people explaining and reflecting on their ever changing practises with ICT in their classrooms. We’re dealing with real experiences, real students, real observations. But what makes our observations valid? Are we engaging in critical thinking and and reflecting in the right way? Jane Nicholl’s work on Oral Language and podcasting is perhaps a good example. Many of Vicki Davies reflections are critical in nature. But much of our, mine most of all, observations and reflections are low level and classed by academia as ‘anecdotal’. My concern lies in the fact that we are all at the cutting edge, where today’s technologies meet today’s students. But the quality of our reflections, perhaps, needs to go up a notch as Falloon comments “ there has been little conclusive empirical research to prove” (Falloon, 2003, p. 23) that ICT enhances outcomes for students. If academia is dismissing our contribution as ‘anecdotal’ then that filters through to policy makers and curriculum designers. We have an opportunity to drag the educational perspective out of the industrial age and into the 21^st century, as noted by David Warlick , and others.

So do we need to be thinking about our practise in terms of Jonassen’s Mindtools, or Atkin’s papers? How relevant are these theoretical perspectives? Do we need to consider such things to draw our experiences out of the micro level and up to a macro level? Is that our job or is someone else going to pull all this anecdotal material together for us to present the 21^st century classroom perspective?  

If not us, me, then who?

Falloon, G. (1999). Developing exemplary practice: Why are some teachers better at IT than others? Computers in New Zealand Schools, 15 (1), 19-23.

You’re The Giver!

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Found this on Miguel’s Blog. Obviously I’m not as carefree and funny as I thought I was. Perhaps Allanah’s right I do need some sort of theropy.

Just a quick request for information. If anyone reading has information or links about ICT progression in NZ, Australia, US or the UK could you please leave a comment. Currently I can find the Nation Grid for Learning in the UK and that’s it. I’m writing a paper about ICT progression in the 21 Century Classroom. Any and all help gratefully recieved.

Thank you Sheryl for pointing me in the right direction with regard to copyright. This little video is informative and highly entertaining at the same time. A wonderful educational video for our Digital Age. Watch, learn and smile- all at the same time! Multi-tasking for a guy!