Week 18 - REFLECTIVE BLOG – Emerging principles for 21st Century Education.


I will use the Gibbs reflective cycle to reflect on subtheme 1: The role of current and emerging technologies in supporting future orientated learning and teaching.

DESCRIPTION
The context I will reflect on is my own experience over the past 6 months where at our school we have starting a transformation to using the G suite for education platform as a base for ICT within our school. This was introduced towards the end of 2017 and began with making Chromebooks compulsory for the 2018 intake of year 9 students.

FEELINGS
Initially this came as a shock to me as we had not really been part of any talk around this concept as a staff and while we lacked direction in this space the decision made to go down this path was made by a small group within the school. Once I had my head around the ideas I could see that it was a great opportunity to learn new skills, change my teaching practise and try a different approach. I felt quite excited about the opportunities it presented and this influenced my decision to study with the Mindlab.
I felt that our school needed to make a shift in one direction with ICT as we had been drifting along with many teachers trying many different approaches without anyone co-ordinating this. I could see this must have been a little confusing for students and that hopefully this would help us to all move together in one direction. So I felt this was a positive move.
I decided to challenge myself and my colleagues to embrace this change and together we came up with some changes we could make initially to start our journey. We started with a small project that allowed the students to work collaboratively using their Chrome books and the google platform.

EVALUATION
My students reacted positively. They have enjoyed using the technology, it has allowed them to work more collaboratively. The students have been engaged and it has challenged them to learn new skills. I have enjoyed working closely with my colleagues to implement change and learn new skills myself and improve my teaching practise. A negative is that it has been time consuming to implement and there have been problems within the school with the IT infrastructure which has been challenging.

ANALYSIS
 I begin my analysis with a quote take from the report. “the rapid development and ubiquity of ICT are resetting the boundaries of educational possibilities. Yet, significant investments in digital resources have not revolutionised learning environments; to understand how they might requires attention to the nature of learning.” (Bolstad et al 2012)

I think this is very true and resonates with my experience. While we now have a direction in our school and we have the tools to transform learning, this is not enough to revolutionise what we are doing. The process will be slow but I feel there needs to be more sharing of ideas throughout the school and professional development needs to be ongoing.
Figure 6 below sums this up nicely. It shows the links that need to occur for ICT to be a truly transformational tool in our school.


Pg 56 (Bolstad et al 2012)
The other model that I belief is important is the SAMR model. We need to be using ICT tools to take our learning above the line to Modification or redefinition if we are truly using it to engage in 21st century learning.

 
CONCLUSION
While I have begun the journey I still have a long way to go. I need to continue to change my teaching practise, engage in ongoing professional development and try new teaching strategies that can engage my students in 21st century education. This forms the basis for my action plan going forward.

REFERENCES
Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching — a New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306


Comments

  1. Unknown7 April 2018 at 17:04

    I feel the same way Melanie about realizing and grabbing the opportunities to develop yourself as a teacher. New pedagogies should be embraced but unfortunately there are those that 'run in the opposite direction' when this is mentioned. As leaders we need to be developing ways to help these teachers become involved and support them through this. With the introduction of technology we have no choice but to get on board, we owe this to our students. You are not the only teacher who feels they have a long way to go with learning new techniques to incorporate into the learning environment, and I do believe this will be an on-going, never ending road we are on as technology is changing rapidly and just when we think we have got it we find out about something else.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WEEK 19 - Reflective blog.

ACTIVITY 3 : CONTRIBUTION OF TEACHER INQUIRY TOPICS TO MY COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE The two inquiry topics I will consider are: ·          Followership ·          Implementing Technology innovation in the classroom. DESCRIPTIIVE Wenger defines a community of practice as “a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion on about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott&Synder,2002,p4) If we are to grow as teachers we need to be part of a community of practice. For me I am part of a department within my school which forms my strongest COP. I also work with other teachers in schools in the Bay of plenty who teach the same subject. This forms my second COP. How these fit the three elements of COP: ·          Joint enterprise – We all wor...
Read more

Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness. Reflective blog week 31

Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness. Reflective blog week 31 My understanding of indigenous knowledge is that it is the local knowledge that is unique to a culture or society. In a school where we have a variety of different cultures. It is important that we do not use only our own cultural identity to guide our teaching but that we acknowledge that in our classrooms there are a variety of different cultures.   They will all be bringing with them their own indigenous knowledge. If we first acknowledge this, it will become the starting point for us as teachers to be able to achieve culturally responsive pedagogy. Gay defined this as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences and perspectives as conduits for effective teaching” (gay 2001, p.106) The two areas that I will focus on are the core values of the school I teach at and learning activities that I incorporate in my own classroom. Below I have included the core values of our school. They are Respect...
Read more

Week 30 The impact of Global Trends On Education.

WEEK 30 THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL TRENDS ON EDUCATION A current trend that is impacting on education is the impact of digital learning in education. We have students hitting our classes who are digital natives. They have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives and the reality is that it will only become a bigger part of our society as time goes by. As educators we are challenged with the job of using the technology to best serve our students to help educate them and make them ready for either further education when they leave school or for future jobs and the workforce. We are challenged to keep up with the technology ourselves and assess how best to use it to allow for the best outcomes for our students. There is an increased trend for the use of technology but we can question how effectively are we doing this? Every teachers skill set are different and the access to digital technologies in schools is different. Beyond school you do not need to go far to see ...
Read more