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Schools of the Future

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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.

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