teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk
…Doug Belshaw’s teaching-related blog: news, resources and ideas for busy teachers!
The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
- #uppingyourgame v0.4 now available!
- Things I Learned This Week – #11
- A brief history of infographics.
- You’re doing it wrong.
- Seven types of ambiguity and new literacies
- Wednesday Wisdom #10: Application and ability
- HOWTO: Create iTunes audiobooks from MP3s
- #uppingyourgame: an audio preview
- Things I Learned This Week – #10
- How I put together ‘Things I Learned This Week’ [visualization]
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As regular visitors will probably have already noticed, last weekend brought two new additions to mrbelshaw.co.uk/teaching…
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Concluding our look at the 5W’s of ICT in Education, today it is the turn of who – as in who are the people who are going to make widespread ICT in Education a reality?
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Continuing the look at ICT in Education using the 5 W’s as a focus, today it is the turn of what, as in what kind of ICTs have the potential to make the biggest impact on education? :d
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Today we look at the aspect of when in the subject of ICTs in Education. By this I mean the time in which we can come to expect some of the predictions of educational commentators and policy formulators to come true. First of all let’s have a look at some of those predictions and comments… (h)
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Continuing the 5W’s of ICT in Education, today we look at the question of where. This presents itself in several aspects, but I shall consider mainly the question of where pupils should spend their time being educated. I shall argue that developments in ICT make attendance at school 9.00-3.30 on weekdays a matter of social rather than educational need.
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Over the next 5 days I’m going to look at the issue of the use of ICT in changing education and school culture, and its power to change fundamentally what we do with learners. I’ll be focusing this through the classic 5 W’s lens – i.e. who, why, when, what, where. I’ll start today with the why of ICT in education. :)
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I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently towards the dissertation I’m doing for my MA in Education (University of Durham). I’m looking at how the integration of ICT affects the culture of educational institutions, and why the promises of ICT haven’t become reality yet.
A lot of what I’m reading – a lot more than I would have imagined – predicts the death of the school as we know it as a result of technology. This has been going on, of course, since Ivan Illich’s classic Deschooling Society in the 1970s, but even more modern writers seem to see the future, if not in revolutionary terms, as being an evolution towards a radical different model. For example, Seymour Papert in The Children’s Machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer (London, 1993) states:
The institution of school, with its daily lesson plan, fixed curriculum, standardized tests, and other such paraphernalia, tends constantly to reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of a technician.
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The Guardian reports today on the findings of an ESRC report into the cognitive and conceptual development of Year 7 pupils. They claim to find that children are “now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago”. :s
This makes me laugh. Read the rest of this entry »
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I’ve written in an earlier post about the potential for ‘wikis‘ – collaborative, organic, growing repositories of information – in education. I intended to use one with my AS History group as a way of recording and collaborating on information related to their module on the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, but never really got round to it. *-)
Listening to EdTechTalk at the weekend continue their discussion on the potential of ‘wiki textbooks’ (or ‘wikitexts’ as one contributor insists they should be called) stimulated me into thinking about the potential of wikis again. Read the rest of this entry »
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As we move further into the digital information era, it is not knowledge and information which will be a commodity, but attention. The question is how do we get more of it from our students? In the past, extrinsic motivational factors, mainly based around the ‘carrot and stick’ technique have served education. You pay attention because of some kind of fear (e.g. of the cane, of being shouted at, of failing a test) and/or an expectation of some kind of reward. We are in the business of creating independent, flexible learners, able to approach situations from a number of angles. How do we create intrinsic motivation – the desire to learn? :|
One way is by ‘problematizing’ learning, or as it is more often called, by employing Problem-Based Learning (PBL). Read the rest of this entry »
