Facilitating Effective ICT-Pedagogy Integration Project

ICT remains abysmally under-used by students and teachers in classrooms, and ICT-enabled student-centred teaching and learning approach finds no ground of pervasiveness within school systems, especially for developing countries. Three obstacles still remain in the way of teachers’ using ICT to its full potential toward enhancing student learning and improving the quality of education: 1) the lack of policy encouragement (especially at the school level), 2) the lack of knowledge on new pedagogy and techniques of integrating ICT in student-centred teaching and learning activities, and 3) the lack of long-standing professional support which further leads to teachers’ lack of confidence.

In response to these, UNESCO Bangkok implemented the “Facilitating Effective ICTPedagogy Integration Project” from January 2010 to March 2013 with the goal of creating an enabling environment that facilitate students’ direct and effective use of ICT for more meaningful and productive learning activities, with a specific focus on project-based tele-collaboration.

Read

Escola sem salas, turmas ou séries

O Rio de Janeiro começa, nas próximas semanas, a experimentar um novo tipo de escola. Nada de séries, salas de aula com carteiras enfileiradas e crianças ordenadamente caminhando pelo espaço comum. A aposta para dar a 180 crianças e jovens da Rocinha uma educação mais alinhada com o século 21 é o Gente, acrônimo para Ginásio Experimental de Novas Tecnologias, na escola Municipal André Urani. O espaço, que acaba de ser totalmente reformulado para comportar a nova proposta, perdeu paredes, lousas, mesas individuais e professores tradicionais e ganhou grandes salões, tablets, “famílias”, times e mentores.

Ler

12 signos que estás en un aula del siglo XXI

Realmente en mis días de colegio e incluso universitarios, nunca experimenté un proyecto de aula como éste, pero quizás van siendo más comunes en los centros educativos de España gracias a metodologías educativas innovadoras que aprovechan las TIC.

Sin duda, lo realmente interesante de este proyecto va mucho más allá del uso de las TIC. Se transforma el concepto de educación. Se generan oportunidades para desarrollar, lo que considero, las habilidades críticas para tener éxito en cualquier profesión del futuro: comunicación oral y escrita, capacidad de análisis de información, pensamiento crítico, creatividad, trabajo en equipo, resolución de problemas y responsabilidad personal sobre el resultado. Como dije a Madre Montserrat, les estaré esperando cuando acaben para que vengan a trabajar y a colaborar conmigo. Sin duda, con estos inicios también aprenderé mucho de ellos.

Leer

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

Read

Hyperconnected Education – the human network

When people connect, they begin to share. This happens automatically, an expression of the instinctive human desire to communicate matters of importance. Sharing, driven by need, amplified by technology, reaches every one of us, through our network of connections. We both give and receive: from each according to their knowledge, to each, according to their need. Sharing has amplified the scope of our awareness. We can find and connect to others who share our interests, increasing our awareness of those interests.

We teach children to research, as if this were an activity distinct from the rest of our experience, when, in reality, research is the core activity of the 21st century. We need to think about the era, just a few years hence, when everyone has a very smart and very well connected mobile in hand from birth. We need to think about how that mobile becomes the lever which moves the child into knowledge. We need to think about our practice and how it is both undermined and amplified by the device and the network it represents.

Your students are not alone on their journey into knowledge and mastery. Beside them, educators blaze a new trail into a close connectivity, leveraging a depth of collective experience to accelerate the search for solutions. We must search and research and share and learn and put that learning into practice. We must do this continuously so we can stay in front of this transition, guiding it toward meaningful outcomes for both students and educators. We must reinvent education while hyperconnectivity reinvents us.

Read

Khan Academy

Read

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We’re a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

Students can make use of our extensive video library, practice exercises, and assessments from any computer with access to the web.

1. Complete custom self-paced learning tool
2. A dynamic system for getting help
3. A custom profile, points, and badges to measure progress

Coaches, parents, and teachers have unprecedented visibility into what their students are learning and doing on the Khan Academy.

1. Ability to see any student in detail
2. A real-time class report for all students
3. Better intelligence for doing targeted interventions

Electronic education: Flipping the classroom

Read

Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit.

TheE 12-year-olds filing into Courtney Cadwell’s classroom at Egan Junior High in Los Altos, a leafy suburb of Silicon Valley, each take a white MacBook from a trolley, log on to a website called KhanAcademy.org and begin doing maths exercises. They will not get a lecture from Ms Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home, various lectures as video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its founder). And Ms Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has watched which. This means that class time is now free for something else: one-on-one instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.

So Ms Cadwell, in her own web browser, pulls up a dashboard where KhanAcademy’s software presents, through the internet, the data the children are producing at that instant. She can view information for the entire class or any individual pupil. Just then she sees two fields, representing modules, turning from green to red, one for Andrea, the other for Asia. Ms Cadwell sees that Andrea is struggling with exponents, Asia with fractions. “Instead of having to guess where my students have gaps, I can see it, at that moment, and I walk over to that one student,” says Ms Cadwell, as she arrives at Asia’s chair.