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.

Four things every student in a school should learn

Reflections based on article “Four things every student in a school should learn but not every school is teaching” by Dennis Pierce.

One of the reasons why I enjoy teaching is that can enhance the learning of the four points that Alan November suggested the Net Generation should learn:

1.     Global Empathy. Students need to be sensitive to the needs of people from other countries. In one of my lessons on statistics I show students about the differences between central tendency and spread indicators. I give them the example of how two countries might have an equal income per capita (mean), but the differences between social classes can be measured by the standard deviation. I explain them how technology can enable us to gather this data easily and how their mathematic skills can help them understand how people in other countries live, and hence what their needs are.

2.     Ethical responsibility on the web. I agree with November that schools blocking social networks might have less positive influence on their use. I believe that when teachers use social networks in their lessons in a way that enhances education, this benefits the students from three perspectives: they are more motivated, they learn more and they see how social networks can be used in other contexts. This last perspective can help their ethical responsibility on the web by example and by practice.

3.     Permanence of information posted online… and in their computers and in shared computers. I think that often students need the idea that anything they type into their computers could be used against them...or in their benefit. This is why I often have my students create an online portfolio showing the skills they have learned in my class and encourage them to expand to other topics/subjects.

4.     Critical thinking about the information found online. Search engine ranking is indeed, as November suggests, a popularity context, and the most popular might not be the best. Being able to search for the best information is a skill very important. Sometimes instead of giving the formulae required to work on a problem in class, I ask my students to do some research. They invest more time in this task thank they would normally, but they improve their searching skills. As I tell my students, it will be impossible for them to learn everything they need to know in school, so they need to learn how to find whatever is needed.

Do we need an alternative school system?

Reflections from TED talk

 Hackschooling Makes Me Happy by Logan LaPlante

Watching this video I confirmed the following:

·       We adults can learn a lot from kids. They have a lot to offer as they can more easily think outside the box. A box they have not yet entered. Sometimes I feel we are wasting their resources. A few centuries ago we only made them use their muscles to work. Now we make them use their brains while they don’t work. Shouldn’t we make their brains work? As a secondary school teacher I often try to provide open-ended activities so that students can use their creativity. Sometimes they surprise me with alternatives I had not thought about.

·       We all have different values in life, but since many of us wants to be happy, should we not provide an education system that enhances that? As I secondary school teacher I try to remind myself that most students just want to be happy. However, I often find it difficult to plan activities that combine a progress in the curriculum and their desire to be happy.

·       Many Schools and teachers have used the benefits from innovation, but this has not reached public knowledge. The reason Mrs. LaPlante took Logan away from school is simply because she could not find a suitable school for him. I agree that Logan is not the type of kid that would like to sit and do as told, but many of us teachers don’t make kids do that, or at least not the whole time. Logan has interests which differ from the regular curriculum designed to help him “find a good job”, but his idea of a good job is very different to that of some politicians’ (deciding the curricula to be followed) or the parents (choosing school). In my experience as an international schoolteacher I have come across many students who could do much better if they/their parents had chosen a different educational path, more appropriate for them. Higher education is not always the best option.

·       Many parents remove their children from schools… instead of finding a better school. Logan seems to be succeeding in his education. But this is not a surprise as he has in his educational pot all the best ingredients: motivation to succeed in his goals, intelligence (logical, emotional and social), supportive parents (with plenty of dedicated time form him) and resources (his educational path seems to be quite expensive). Any school with these ingredients AND a flexible curriculum not limited by the sole objective of finding a job with a high salary could have helped him in a more socially-rich environment. The interaction between students that I often see in my classes makes me believe that schools can enhance education, especially for creative children like Logan.

·       Kids are different. Following Logan’s analogy of using different paths when skiing, I would like to say that in the schools that I have worked, I have found many kids who want to go off-piste, but others just want to be driven along the main routes sometimes. I have many students who complain that I don’t lecture them enough. They often get tired of the guided freedom I give them to explore some of the educational paths available, but they just want to be told what to do. They have no interest in “hacking” through their education, even thought that they are given plenty of opportunities. There are so many schools around. Shouldn’t we try to make them all different so that they can cater for different learning styles?