This week the task was to read two chapters of a book “Teaching
and learning in the digital age” and find examples of recent news in
the internet for every part in the first chapter. Respect to the other chapter
(number 4), we had to invent a situation according to every section in it. On
Monday we read everything and divided the parts to work in. Then, on Tuesday,
we did a meeting to explain every part to the two stars and discuss our
examples because the stars wanted to do a good job for the whole group.
We always work in this structure; read everything, divide parts and
individual work on Mondays, group meeting on Tuesday to finish the artefact and
discuss all the details of the task and presentation on Wednesdays. We have
discovered that this way to work is working well and from my point of view the
connection of the group is improving every week.
Continuing with the week, Wednesday came and they were ready for
whatever we would have to do (we just knew they would be an editor from a
newspaper and a director of a theatre company), they had the printed papers
with everything in them. But finally they didn’t have to present anything, the
task get more complicated now. For next week, they will be the facilitators and
they will organize the task 7, very related with the work we did this week. All
the class will work as a group. The editors will work with writers (half of the
class) to do the best news TV program and the directors will work with actors
(the other half class), to do a kind of informal news program such as “Diario
de Patricia” or something like that.
Thanks to this
task, we were in contact with current news about education in Spain and Europe
and we could realize the importance of the matter is (teaching in the digital
age, teaching to learn above all). For example, the news about that computers
which don’t improve pupil results, is because teachers and schools don’t use in
the right way these technology, because they just try to teach in the same way
they did all their lives and they use computers as a
support for traditional learning processes (Computers 'do not improve' pupil results, says OECD).
Finland surprised me too with the news about the next step in their educational
system, they want to change “subjects” for “topics” (Finland
schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with 'topics' as country reforms its
education system). They have the best educational system of Europe and
probably the whole world but this change will be the biggest one. If it works
well, maybe in several years we will be copying them, if it is not, they will
lose the top position. In my opinion, it’s a huge challenge but like the
sentence says: “ If you want to win, you will have to be risky”. With this new
method they will break the boundaries between knowledge areas and I think this
is something good, because in the real life, everything is connected. It’s not
maths or science, geography or history. It’s about facts, experience, points of
view, common knowledge and so on.
The
future of education is a mystery, and we need to be ready to adapt and learn to
teach not in contents, because they will be accessible for anyone from
anywhere, we will have to know how to teach to be creative, collaborative and
to be able to use in the best way all the tools we have and it will be coming (http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/10-global-trends-in-ict-and-education).
And to
conclude I will use this phrase from John Dewey: “If we teach today’s students as
we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow”.
Cristina.
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