Leadership for Technology in Schools

Reflections based on M.Ed. course “Leadership for Technology in Schools” (end of course)

Recommendation for students taking this course

I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in being a leader for the development of technology in schools.

Having to do a variety of assignments in different formats is an excellent way of avoiding limitations for the learning outcome, encouraging participants to learn more.

Keeping all assignments in a digital portfolio is an excellent way to show work, results and to collaborate with peers, learning even more in the process. It is also a very good way to share this with others outside the course, enhancing the benefits further.

Challenges faced during the course

This course has made me work very hard, but much of the work I have done was extra. It helps to have a course leader whose motivation is contagious.

One of the examples of this is this very same blog. Many of the articles I have posted here are not required by the course, and many of the articles did not have to be that long. But this is what intrinsic motivation is about, isn’t it? 

I would recommend participants whose time is limited to keep up with the workflow as scheduled and leave the assignments they want to spend more time for the end. In my case it was doing the reflections on different articles and videos that I invested the most time, but it was also then when I learned the most.

Learnings from the course

Working beyond the tasks driven by rewards (obtaining good scores) or punishment (obtaining low grades) involves more than intrinsic motivation. It is under these stress-free circumstances that most ideas are generated. It is under these circumstances that I have had a few “aha” moments.

This course has made me think to expand the publication of educational articles beyond this blog.

I am now planning to publish a series of documentaries under the name “Educational Paths around the World”.

Educational Paths around the world is a tour with the proximity of local people and their culture. From August 2013 to May 2014 I am going to travel around the world and, though a series of 13 documentaries, help viewers discover experiences that will enhance their self-development

You can follow Educational Paths around the world here:

http://www.educationalpaths.com/en/educationalpathsaroundtheworld.htm

I am also planning to do a PhD using some of the data collected along the educational paths above to explore ways in which teachers can successfully collaborate with others sharing their resources, multiplying their benefits while dividing their time invested.

Since course participants might want to participate in this project, I would like them to read more information about this project here:

http://www.wiki-school.org/en/wiki-school.html

I will not let exam results decide my fate

Reflections from video “ I will not let exam results decide my fate”. By Sully Breaks.

The educational system was designed to allow a certain group develop certain skills in a very specific industrial system (Serra, 2013).

Many years later we are using a very similar system for everyone (compulsory education) in a world with very different needs. The responsibility to change this, in my opinion does not fall on teachers or even schools. If falls on the whole educational system.

Educational ministers and exam board directors should, in my opinion, design curriculums, which offer a wider variety of subjects and learning objectives. Darwin’s idea of evolution in nature starts with variety and then selection in different contexts. We have a selection process that does not have much freedom for variety. We have many types of intelligences (Gardner, 1999), yet in the current school system we are mainly filtering through one.

Teachers and schools should, in my opinion, offer a wider variety of subjects (possible within the limits set as per above), and assessments (not just traditional exams but also projects in which students have access to anything they want, possibly even their peer’s ideas).

Students and their families, in my opinion, should see that there are many opportunities in life, and that having a university degree is not the only door open to success. An exam result should never decide anyone’s fate. At the end our happiness depends only 10% on external stimuli and 90% on how we interpret it (Covey, 1997).

Bibliography.

Covey, S. R. (1997). The 7 habits of highly effective families. Golden Books.

Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century. Basic Books (AZ).

Serra, A. (2013) Reflections on Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?”) Retrieved from http://leadership-technology.blogspot.ch/2013/03/do-schools-kill-creativity.html

Final Project

Technology has improved education, increasing the number of activities and resources. Many are the educational networks which provide online acess to some of these activites. However, none of them is set up so that users and ealisy and quickly find activities on a wide range of topics, levels, curriculum objectives and languages. In this way, the author points out some theoretical references and projects to mention the need for a project of this type. This project explores ways in which teachers can successfully collaborate with others sharing their resources, multiplying their benefits while dividing their time invested.

This final project  consists of:

1. This Article: Planning the use of ICT to enhance global collaboration in education.
2. This Website: www.Wiki-School.org
3. The questionnaires / databases embedded in the website .
4. This video: Introduction to Wiki-School.org
5. The following social networks associated with the website:

I need your ideas!!!

My final project in Leadership for Technology in Schools involves ways of finding resources online efficiently. 

I have been working on it for a few weeks..... and only managed to scratch the tip of the iceberg. This is the project that I am going to use for my PhD!!!

I would love to have your ideas about it. These 3 steps can make us all benefit from technology very soon:

1- http://www.wiki-school.org/en/wiki-school.html to find more about this project.

2- http://www.wiki-school.org/en/participate.html to find ways to participate. PLEASE FILL IN THE FORM AT THE BOTTOM.

3- Friend us on https://www.facebook.com/wiki.school.org and share it on your wall, so that your friends and colleagues can be amongst the first to benefit from the project. 

Thank you very much,

Alvaro

Technology...yesterday, today and tomorrow.

 Reflections from TED talk

 The thrilling potential of Sixth Sense technology by Pranav Mistry.

Watching Pranav Mistry play with his gadgets makes us wonder about what technology could do… if we gave a bit of freedom to our imagination. I think 6^th sense technology owes its success to the imagination of its creator, rather than his obvious electronic skills. 

Pranav Mistry is thinking out of the box when he designs gadgets that work by interacting with our world directly. Transforming his hand to a smart phone or a piece of paper into a computer pad are the proof that often innovation is very close to our reach. We just have to stretch more.

Personally I think that in the near future technology is not going to need our hand or a piece of paper as a screen. I think there will be no need for screens at all!

At the end of the day all that screens do is reflecting light to our eyes, right? So why not project these images to our eyes directly? And what will happen the next century? We’ll probably get computers “talk” to our brains directly, very necessary when our eyes get too tired of staring to electronic images.

Does this look like impossible to you? I understand your feelings. I would have never thought that my teachers could publish all their homework assignments in a way that my parents and me could check it out using a device from our pockets. But that was last century. This century we can do much more with our students. Internet has changed the way I work in my role of a Mathematics teacher. I don’t think I could be so creative otherwise. Technology motivates me to work longer hours, allowing me to be more creative and enjoy my work more.

Computational Thinking in schools.

Reflections based on article “Computational Thinking Manifesto” by Jeannette M. Wing.

Computational Thinking can be applied, practiced and enhanced in the educational world.

Students need to benefit from the virtues of technology but at the same time avoid its dangers:

• Students should benefit from being able to find information online, but need to be told how to reference it so that it is not considered plagiarism. Every course I teach I find an “innocent” cheater, a student who is guilty of plagiarism, but is so naïve, careless or unknowledgeable that shows traces of his copying so clearly that gets caught easily.
•  Students should benefit from collaborating and publishing online, but need to be aware of malware, social ethics and other dangers. In my lessons I use collaborating tools such as google documents, which several students can modify online. My students find it useful but at the same time encounter often inconvenience such as the lack of total control over the work produced.
•  Students should benefit from being able to store all their work in their pockets, but need to be aware that technology is often subject to failure. I encourage my students to backup their work using an external drive (usb or cloud-based) a copy in a DVD, but I find that they rarely do that. Sometimes I have to “force” them to have a backup copy by asking them to duplicate their work online and share it with me or simply by sending themselves an email with the file.
•  Students should be aware of the benefits of using technology but also be aware of its limitations and how our human brains can often do things faster and better than computers. In my mathematics courses I often hear from students that since their Graphic Display Calculators can do any mathematical calculation they don’t really need to study mathematics.