Skip to main content

Schools of the Future

By

The Schools of the Future conference was a venue for educators around the state as well as some from the mainland to share their research, programs, successes and challenges with other educators. A few that I attended included:

Teaching Toward Global Competence
This presentation focused on why teaching global competence is so important. A few important take a ways included:
  • We live in an every changing world which demands us to continually learn new skills
  • The global economy we live in means new ways of working 
  • Global issues require local solutions 
  • Discussing world events are an important part of global competency, but only 37% of high school students say world events were discussed regularly in their classes. 
  • Global Competency Matrix is a tool that can help students develop global competency 
  • We help students: Investigate the World, Recognize Perspectives, Communicate ideas and Take Action. 
  • Global Competency Matrices can be used when teaching all subjects


Design Thinking – Creating a Swimming Pool

This presentation shared the design and critical thinking process middle school students learned when designing a swimming pool for a fictitious client. The students went through the design thinking process that included:

Coming up with the question
  •  Fresh or salt water pool? 
  • What activities are going to happen in the pool?
  • Is the pool heated or not? 
  • How big is the house? 
Brainstorming
  • Students used this step as an opportunity to dream big.
Bucketing
  • Group, organize, refine and delete ideas
  • Done through Post-It notes
Prototyping
  • Students built their ideas utilizing CAD software
Storytelling
  • Students sharing out their experiences

This conference was also a venue for the Project 2 team including Kimble, Yuki, Malia and myself to share our experiences developing, implementing and evaluating the blended Human Anatomy & Physiology course. The session titled “New Directions in Blended Learning” was an interactive session that encouraged the audience to share their own experiences with blended and online learning as we shared our perspectives, solutions and lesson learned as project manager, teachers and evaluators. The audience consisted of administrators and teachers many of whom shared similar challenges in their own blended and online courses. At the end, most agreed that despite the challenges, blended and online learning is an area worth investing in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

By
This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event. When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future . Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts , there are online classes everywhere. The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge. **Note:  All icons link to the affiliated website.  Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list
Post a Comment
Read more

Geotagging

By
A "wouldn't it be nice" idea that's been around a while is the ability to tag a map with images that are linked to more information about the site. Kelly C suggested it as a way for students to share knowledge about a cultural/historic site or the geographic area they live in with classmates. (right, no addresses!) There are now cameras and even storage media that embed latitude and longitude into images as they are shot. But you don't need fancy new toys to do this. I tried Flickr's geotagging map and it's fun and supereasy. Want to try it? Log in to Flickr http://www.flickr.com Sign in as " techedine " password " wist101 " yea, corny. Click the " You " tab then the " Your Photostream > Map " or Organize > Your Map links. Click the Satellite link in the upper right. Cool view! (you may need Google Satellite downloaded). Images along the bottom of the screen with colored dots have already been droppe
6 comments
Read more

Zoho Creator

By
I thought I’d share this web application I came across in my quest to find a relatively simple app to help us manage our mentoring data in the DL Orientation. Our specific needs were that it be a free online database, password protected, had the capability of rapid form development without too much programming knowledge and was easy for the end user to use. The application that met these requirements was Zoho Creator ( http://www.zohocreator.com/ ) a part of a suite of online applications including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, wikis, organizers and more. What’s great about Zoho Creator is that they have an online repository of applications already developed that you can download to your account and use for free. Initially, I tried some of these applications, but it was overkill for our needs. Zoho Creator can do a lot if you know programming and they have a pay model where it allows you more flexibility and features. I think Zoho Creator would be a useful tool for both
6 comments
Read more