Thursday 25 June 2015

Contemporary Issues in Education [Activity 6]

Elaborate in your own words how you would address those issues or trends in your context within your learning community or professional context.
Below I have identified three contemporary issues that are influencing Education in New Zealand.

Trend 1: Learning Agency
Derek Wenmoth discusses student agency and mentions that learning requires the initiative and actions of the learners more than the input from teachers (Edtalks.org, 2014). This active progres is what can be considered as Agency.  He also mentions that it is not as simple as handing the learning over to the students, but requires the teachers setting up the students for this process or agency.  I am currently looking further into flipped lessons and trialling these in class.  I have completed a LEAN Canvas on this (submitted as one of my assignments) and hope to implement these lessons in Maths by the end of Term 3.  I would hope that this would provide opportunities to scaffold my students towards developing their own learning agency and giving them the 'power to act' (Core-Ed, 2015).

Trend 2: Digital Convergence
Digital convergence refers to the heavy influence technology has on our everyday lives (Core-Ed, 2015).  Each day I rely on my smartphone to tell me the time, weather, contact friends, check emails and Facebook.  Once upon a time, I used my laptop to do that.  Later I came across a Chromebook which only took 7 seconds to start, so I started to use that.  Now I have a smartphone, I no longer need the other two.  This is what I do in my personal everyday life.  A question I ask myself is: How am I preparing my learners for this growing trend?

My learners work 1:1 with Chromebooks and have access the internet during school hours.  They no longer use paper back Thesauruses or Dictionaries, instead they have bookmarked a digital copy of these.  I hope to continue addressing this trend by ensuring my learners understand how Digital technology can effect our everyday lives and how they can use it to benefit themselves and their learning.

Trend 3: Global Connectedness
Penpals are almost a thing of the past, now you can communicate with people from all over the global at the click of a mouse via email, blogs, Twitter, YouTube etc.  My job is to make sure that my learners are prepared for this and are able to question, investigate and act as global citizens (Core-Ed, 2015).  For example, Wikipedia isn't always right.

The way I can address this trend in my classroom is integrating initiatives such as LEARNZ field trips, using a class Twitter account and starting individual blogs for my learners (Core-Ed, 2015).


References

Core-ed.org. (2015). Ten Trend Categories. CORE Education. Retrieved from http://www.core-ed.org/thought-leadership/ten-trends/ten-trends-2015/digital-convergence on 24 June 2015.

Edtalks.org. (2014). Ten Trends 2014: Agency [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.edtalks.org/ video/ten-trends-2014-agency on 24 June 2015.

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