Spent a day communing with educators at the ACER (DEEWR) Digital Education Revolution seminar on Tuesday 3rd (it was subtitled: Realising the possibilities, Managing the realities).
Keynote was by Mark Pesce (he’s kindly made his talk & video available) who gave us a great overview of where our school kids are with respect to their hyper-connectivity and challenged us to think about how we might continue to engage them in ‘doing school’.
We had a few concurrent strands to attend and saw some of the work being done in schools through integrating technology into the curriculum and exploiting the kid’s ICT literacy.
More presentations and records of the seminars (being held nationally) will be available from education.au after 13th june. Knock yourself out.
The question remains, (and was raised by some teachers at the forum), while it’s OK for the federal government to allocate funding to increase the level of technology in schools (and probably a good thing to do), what about the change in culture that’s required to make effective use of the technology. Who is going to pay for that? How does school leadership, and the teacher in the classroom, make sense of the rapid shift in connectedness that kids embrace everyday? How do we bridge the divide between what it means to use these tools socially, and using the tools pedagogically?