Week 27: Broader Professional Context

This week we have been looking at global trends that are influencing/impacting education, suggesting how we might address these trends/issues within our learning community.

In exploring these ‘trends’ The NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition addresses the following questions:

What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide?
Which trends and technologies will drive educational change?
What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions?



Original Source:http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2015-nmc-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf

Two key trends jumped out as areas that we are well aware of in our school learning community and actively addressing;

• Shift from Students as Consumers to Creators
• Shift to Deeper Learning approaches

Shift from Students as Consumers to Creators

The Horizon Report asserts that “a shift is taking place in schools all over the world as learners are exploring subject matter through the act of creation rather than the consumption of content. A vast array of digital tools are available to support this transformation in K-12 education; indeed, the growing accessibility of mobile technologies is giving rise to a whole new level of comfort with producing media and prototypes” (p.14)

At our school we see this shift as a great opportunity to empower our students and build independent, innovative and highly resourceful learners. We are working towards our children having 1:1 access to iPads and are utilising them in ways that encourage them to design, creative, innovate and share their creations globally.

For example:

• Media team who use iMovie to produce a weekly news broadcast (student-led) via YouTube channel
• Interest Projects where students have the opportunity to share their learning using multimedia (Green Screening, Movies, Slideshows, Prezis, iBooks, Animations) and publish to a wider audience through reflective blogs
• Junior students are creating digital artifacts to communicate their learning with their parents viz the Seesaw app
• Our writers have the opportunity to publish their writing in the form of multi-touch digital books and potentially publish to iTunes Bookstore.

These are exciting opportunities for our students, made possible through the use of evolving technologies. We see it as important to expose our students to these opportunities, build their tool kit and most importantly develop the learner dispositions (Key Competencies) that will arm them for success in the future.

Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches

The Horizon report also highlights the importance of deeper learning approaches and teaching complex thinking. They state that "teaching coding in schools is a way to instill this kind of thinking in student as it combines deep Computer Science knowledge with creativity and problem solving” (p.32).

This year our school have taken the plunge and decided to explore the opportunities that ‘coding’ opens up for our students in terms of addressing the key competencies:

• Using Language, Symbols and Text
• Thinking - Creative, Critical, Reflective
• Relating to Others
• Participating and Contributing 
• Managing Self

Using www.code.org as our starting point, we established a ‘Coding Club’ - a group of Year 5-6 students who meet once a week to develop their coding skills and utilise a range of resources.

Although we have only been up and running for a few months, we are thrilled with how this group have developed in terms of their confidence, problem solving abilities, creative thinking and most of all excitement for learning!!

In terms of the development of complex thinking, we have discovered some fantastic resources made freely available to us online that have really helped us with our journey. An example is our use of the Pixel Floors resources that guided us through a Design Thinking approach to game design. Here is a short video clip of our students sharing that process:

The area of computer science and coding is still very new to us, but an area that we are keen to pursue further after seeing the impact it is having on our students!

References:

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.