Posts Tagged "Children"
Expectations…. Maybe I’m Dreaming….
I’m very proud of my Daughter. She has survived the first term of High School. And has done exceptionally well. Now I know I have a smart kid who loves to learn new things however I was concerned at how she would go when it came to the difference between primary school and high school. Surprisingly she jumped right in. After receiving her report card I couldn’t be happier but now I’m starting to wonder if the education system is failing her. Her best subject is Spanish in which she earned an A+. In talking with her Spanish teacher I inquired as to how we could extend her further as obviously this is something she is good at. The teacher’s response was to tell me I should ask for her to skip a grade as she felt that my daughter could be still achieving this result in Year 9. My daughter isn’t achieving the same results in her other subjects (similar but not the same), nor does she want to leave her friends and nor do I believe she is socially and emotionally equipt to skip a grade. This got me thinking about our education system. At the point where a student is receiving the highest possible result in the grading system whether this is a 5 point scale, a 7 point scale or a 50 point scale we are telling our students that there is no more to learn at this stage in your life. Why can’t students if they can achieve an “A+” in Year 7 subject not move on to the Year 8 subject? Why aren’t our high school classes based on levels rather than age? Once we leave school whether in the work place or in further study age is no longer a factor, ability is. While our classes have students in them that range from learning support to gifted we are failing our students. Now I need to make it clear I’m not necessarily an advocate for streamed classes as I do believe that mixed abilities in classes helps all students as there is plenty students can learn from each other with the different perspecitives students bring to the classroom.
But what are we doing to help our students who happen to excel in one area or struggle in another. I do think we need to rethink how our high school classes work. Whats stopping us from setting up a system of units where each subject has a selection of units at each level. Once you receive a passing grade in a unit you could select from the same list or from the next level of units. Take my hypothetical Economics Course below. You must start in Level 1 once you complete a single unit with a passing grade you can then move to Level 2. If for example the Globalisation and Trade unit needs the International Economics unit then it would be listed as a prerequisite.
I know this is potentially a complicated or messy system however its just a suggestion…
Please let me know some of your ideas of how to make our education system suit students of all ages and ability levels…
Related articles
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What Kind Of Grading System Should We Use? (Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo)
How Fast will the Future get Here???
I’ve had a number of interesting conversations lately about the past and the future. Usually stemming from something the people around me have read, seen or heard. As it was I recently read Maggie Hos-McGrane’s Blog Tech Transformation and the article about being Hyperconnected and Always On. Now I know that the post was more about the different generations and the different technology waves that have occurred however that is not what what I took from the post…
The post talked about the generations – silent, baby boomer, generation X, NetGeneration, iGeneration and Generation C and how they used to be 20 to 25 years each an now they are more like 10 years each. It went on to discuss the various waves…
The agricultural wave – it took 3,000 years for technology to be integrated into agriculture
The industrial wave - this took 300 years
The computer wave – this took 30 years
The informational wave - this took 3-5 years
The communication wave – this took 3-5 years
The biotechnology wave – we are about to enter this one
Looking at this I started to wonder if we are now down to 3 years a wave does that mean the next lot of waves are going to be more like 3 months….
I know that I feel like life is passing really quickly (whether that is my children or age I’m not sure) however if we are starting to create new things so fast what is it going to be like for our children and the children we teach.
I really feel for Generation AO – I’m not sure we as teachers from the Baby Boomers, Generation X, the NetGeneration are really going to be able to keep up with the iGeneration, Generation C and Generation AO. Perhaps its time to put educational policy in the hands of the students.
We have a lot to learn as educators…
Related articles
- Hyperconnected and Always On (maggiehosmcgrane.com)
- Letter to Baby Boomers (lifeaccordingtonat.wordpress.com)
- [STUDY] How Hyperconnectivity Affects Young People (readwriteweb.com)
- Hyperconnected Lives: Are They Good or Bad? (stealthmode.com)
- Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives (learningwithtechs.wordpress.com)
The Past or The Future…
My sister and I enjoy a long run every second weekend and afterwards we enjoy a good catchup over coffee and a walk. Today’s conversation was about how my children were going at school and we started talking about the assessment my daughter in Grade Seven is currently working on. The conversation then moved to our schooling and the things which we did at the same age. Now my sister and I are really NOT that old (we are in our early 30s). I know life after school has changed since the late 90s and the skills students need now and into the future have definetly changed. I mean when we were at school the internet was *new*. Both of us remember spending time in the State Library labouring over books to find the information we needed to complete the assignments that more often than not were hand written. And *THESE* days my daughter finds nearly all of her information on the NET. Now we both know that the skills involved in searching the internet compared with searching the library are completely different. And we realise that in the age of the Internet everyone is an expert in everything. Cause lets face it if you don’t know the answer you can look it up and become an expert yourself. Or find someone who can help.
This led to our thoughts of what education is going to be like when our youngest children (who are currently 2) get there… Maybe exams will be a thing of the past… Or maybe more will be open book… Maybe students will make their own curriculum… Or maybe the government will still decide when and where student learn…
Skills change over time… I’m not sure where education is heading… All I hope is that students in the future learn the skills they need to be successful in life.
Education needs to make sure it keeps up…
If I See Another PowerPoint Presentation I’m going to screammmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Image by Clover_1 via Flickr
This is a very dear subject to my heart. As a business and economics teacher I really do hate seeing 28 presentations on a topic which all say the same thing and all look the same. Recently I presented at the Qsite Conference and I was extremely surprised at the number of people who hadn’t really thought about this. I get bored easily. I want to see students put their own personalities into their work. If I want to see the same 28 presentations I could just watch my own over and over and over again.
Why do teachers find it so hard to let students use their imaginations? I have seen some amazing examples of letting students go nuts with their imagination and a multi-modal piece of assessment. Radio interviews with Mother Nature to explain Global Warming, Students bringing in Row Boats to explain the concept of Imports and Exports, Websites, Trade Displays, Role Plays, Sock Puppets…
The best part is the learning which takes place without theme even realising it!
Here are my presentations from the conference on the Multi-Modal Assessment. I have had to remove the student examples due to privacy. Happy to discuss this further…
Multi-Modal Assessment Presentation
Multi-Modal Assessment Handout
Related articles
- Practice what you Teach (saskateacher.wordpress.com)
- Technology Integration – Presentations (tracyfeltonbportfolio.wordpress.com)
- No PowerPoint (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
Proud as Punch (Both as a Mum and an Educator)
Image via Wikipedia
The last term has been a busy one. Not only as an educator but as a Mum as well. You see the last term has been dedicated to our Year 6 Exhibition. My beautiful children attend the school where I work and as my daughter is in Year 6 she has been part of the teaching and learning experiences which I have been offering the Year 6 students. Over the course of the term I offered several workshops on Poster Making (digital and manual), time management skills, use of digital peripherals (cameras, video cameras, sound recorders etc) and OneNote.
The journey the students (including my daughter) is an impressive one. Under the umbrella of a topic (Peace and Conflict Resolution) the student select a question or statement they wish to investigate. They then go on to present it using five components (Creative, Interactive, Written, Oral and Action). My daughter choose to investigate whether “Year 6 Students Behave Better than Politicians in Parliament”. When she initially came up with this topic I was a little bit concerned at how it would all come together and how my daughter was going to find her research. Well I really had nothing to worry about. You see she contacted by email as many politicians as she could think of in our local area, state and country. What amazed me was they responded and were willing to be interview by her either over the phone or in person. The final product she produced was amazing she filmed every interview and put them together as a documentary (oral/creative), prepared a speech on her findings (oral), created an essential agreement for the politicians (written/action), prepared a PowerPoint showing the information she had investigated on parliamentary privilege (written), provided a vote (interactive) along with a poster with sayings of both year 6 students and politicians showing good and bad behaviours (interactive/creative).
I was impressed by the many topics that our year 6 students chose. Some were really personal (leaving to go to another school) right through to topics which interested students (conflict in computer games).
It is events like this which showcase student learning which make me proud to be an educator and in this case proud as punch to be a Mum to an extremely intelligent daughter.
Related articles
- What does learning feel like? (whatedsaid.wordpress.com)
- Opportunities for creativity… (whatedsaid.wordpress.com)
We Still Block Content in Schools?
I’ve been spending my summer break catching up on my favourite PodCast Classroom Geeks and even though the episodes I was listening to were from way back in 2009 it was interesting to note that there were discussions occurring about blocked content in schools. When I was next close to my twitter feed I noticed a number of articles come through about websites which should be white-listed on school content filters. I have to ask what exactly is content blocking teaching kids?
Granted the educational institution I work for also filters content (though the restrictions are not too bad we do have access to facebook, twitter, and YouTube). I do want to know what are we teaching kids if we don’t let them access the big bad world. I have three children and at home we do not filter the Internet. Instead we teach our children what to do instead and trust that they know how to handle it. Ms 10 certainly does a number of times she has come to us about questionable content her friends have sent her or she has stumbled across and we have the appropriate conversation and alert who we feel needs to be alerted. I don’t think we need to shelther her from it. Perhaps educational institutions need to take the cotton wool off their eyes and have a good look at their content policies. I guess the problem is there is always someone who objects and makes waves. And schools need to protect themselves from this. I guess this goes back to my earlier post Time to Pop the Bubble Wrap We need to teach the kids cyber safety.
Read MoreMcDonalds and Culture in the Same Sentence?
Our Year 6′s are about to study a unit on Culture and among discussions during planning the conversation moved towards what definition or concept of culture were the students going to look at. Being an inquiry based unit the decision was to go with what ever definition the student decided to go with would then lend the student to creating their own assessment piece. One of the more interesting or open definitions of Culture is
Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. -http://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html
This led to an intersting conversation which ultimately ended with the idea that McDonalds in itself is a culture. I decided to investigate this further during my Spring Break. So here is my interpretation of “The Culture of McDonalds”. Would love to see or hear yours!
Please feel free to use this as stimulus in your classroom.
Read MoreWhat Exactly is the Purpose of Education?
This week I have spent my time in primary school planning meetings. Each of these has started the same way with the teachers being given a copy of the draft National Australian Curriculum. Each of these meetings has then gone in a very different direction depending on the combination of teachers. One thing that did stand out is that the teaching staff got caught up with the content of the Australian Curriculum and how the content was different from what they currently taught.
Something which has stood out to me is the severe lack of skills being taught in the National Australian Curriculum. And the swift way in which teachers (myself included) seemed to throw the thought of teaching students skills out the window.
I was reading Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum tonight and it got me thinking about what exactly the purpose of school and education is? What do we take from school into the big bad world when we leave the gate at the end of year 12? What do we take from school into university? And then our degrees into our job? So as I always do when I start thinking I ask Twitterland!
What is your clearest memory of primary school? High school? University?
My clearest memory of primary school was as a whole class (year 3) being praised for being proactive and going into the classroom after first break everyday and reading while we waited for the teachers to return from their morning tea meeting. Then on the sixth day of doing this scoring a lunchtime rubbish clean up (the whole class did) for going into a classroom without a staff member.
For High School the memory is of me making a fool of myself dancing to Rip Rip Woodchip by John Williamson in Year 8 to explain the meaning of logging. (I doubt I got the meaning across but it was fun even if it was embarrassing!)
Meanwhile in University my memories are of me trying to get my readings complete with one or two children hanging off me.
None of this was about the content or even the skills I learnt at school.
So I asked my twitter friends. And their responses were the same. They were about fights, arguments, results, excursions, bullying, parties, punishments and handing the last piece of assessment in. Nothing about content or skills.
So WHY as teachers do we get so hung up on the content? Reality is none of us really remember it later in life.
We should be teaching skills. Lets throw the content out that window instead.
Who’s joining me?
Read MoreTime to Pop the Bubble Wrap
I was reading a blog post tonight about what is the best age to teach Social Networking. Royan makes many good points. The main one I agree with is
Everywhere I turn I see a lot of time and money being consumed warning parents, children, and teachers about the dangers on the Internet. It’s getting to the point of absurdity. The problem with most of these initiatives and campaigns is they usually implicitly suggest that proverbial abstinence is the best policy. -The Spicy Learning Blog
I think that cybersafety has finally gone too far. Blocking kids from the Internet, chat, social networking and web 2.0 does not help them later in life from the big bad world. We need to teach kids to be smart from the start. Teach them how to protect their privacy. Teach them to talk to you as a parent or teacher. Teach them to make their own mind up about right and wrong. Encourage kids to use technology in open areas.
We used to teach kids (when I was a kid!) about stranger danger, we offered safe houses for kids walking home from school. Perhaps we should transfer this to the Internet.
Lets stop wrapping our children up in bubble wrap and teach them to be safe.
Read MoreJoin the Group
