Schools are about the future, learning skills and gaining knowledge to broaden our horizons. So you would think that this forward-looking perspective makes educational establishments a perfect place to study sustainability, which is all about protecting our environment for present and future generations.
You may think that schools would have sustainability high on their agenda, but Mark Orlowski found that this isn’t necessarily the case when he started examining how green and socially responsible college and universities are. He’s head of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, which issues an annual College Sustainability Report Card.
Listen to the full interview here which was broadcast on Sea Change Radio.
Co-Host Kelsey Flynn then chats with Josh Stoffel, the new Sustainability Coordinator at the University of Massachusetts, and Monty Archbald, chair of the Green Campus Committee at Greenfield Community College. And finally, Bill talks with Neil Drobny of the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University.
So if schools are preparing our children for the future is enough covered in the curriculum about protecting the future via sustainability? How far does your school/college support sustainability? What do your kids learn about this in their school/college?
January 23 celebrates National Handwriting Day. I admit my own handwriting has become worse as I have become more comfortable with a keyboard and screen than a pen and paper. But what about our kids? My own children prefer to type up their homework than write it. Is the art of handwriting to become a lost skill?
“Though computers and e-mail play an important role in our lives, nothing will ever replace the sincerity and individualism expressed through the handwritten word,” David H. Baker, WIMA’s Executive Director, is quoted as saying on the WIMA Web site.
Curtis Bonk, professor emeritus at Indiana University, focuses on the idea of technology as a way to have multiple perspectives on international matters and analyze data at a deeper level for school pupils. This short video discusses some ideas for using technology in the classroom to enhance a students understanding of a concept at a deeper and a global level. Transcript below.
Robin Good: I am receiving this idea that those kids and those pioneers among us pushing the envelope will be the models of this emerging revolution, but the resistance from the existing educational system is very strong.
Also what I noticed is that these so-called digital natives are not as schooled as they are painted to be. They are cool because they have those tools as natural tools in front of them, but most of the time they are clueless on the best use of these tools on themselves, out of the very easy superficial social tools that they start to learn right away.
Digital natives do not seem to get what are the possibilities in front of them because they do not really have models inside their educational institutions that help them think critically about the opportunities available to them. The education system also makes them think in ways quite opposite in the way of forming them as humans that can have value inside society, that are kind of opposite to the once being offered by those very technologies. I am having some conflicts with all that. Curtis Bonk: Let’s think about the Flat Classrooms Project.
The Flat Classrooms Project is the only one discussed in my book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat book, Don Tapscott’s WIKINOMICS book and Growing Up Digital.
What they do in the flat classrooms, in Digiteen Project, they take a book like mine, or whatever book they might have, my blended book or whatever they have got, and they analyze the book. And in this case, these kids in secondary schools, work with other kids around the world to understand the technologies that make learning open. This semester they are using my book actually, The World is Open book. It is making them aware of what are the technologies for learning. Last year they looked at Growing Up Digital, the book from Don Tapscott, and they analyzed it across the world.
You are right, kids today have pretty savvy skills for their mobile devices, they can use them for chats and all this. But they are not for learning.
How do we transform the mobile devices or these synchronous conferencing tools?
In the Flat Classrooms Project they use Ning to form groups with other kids around the world, wikis to summarize the book across cultures, video conferencing like this to discuss what they have learned and do peer interaction. They use other kinds of tools like Twitter, microblogging and blogs. How can that one-off project become the norm?
How can those synchronous as well as asynchronous collaborative technologies push all through all schools? This is the power of technology I have been talking about since 1987. I think that video conference like this can let kids stand in each others shoes. They can see perspectives. That to me can change the whole teaching and learning arena. We have to pushing the global head, international head for perspective taking.
So I understand people in Italy better, which I do not admittedly, or people in Pakistan or some other places around the world. To me this is the most powerful way to use technology. It is to do cross-cultural collaboration like the ePals projectsand others, there is something called the IEARN Project. That will get kids in K-12 schools thinking about collaboration, teaming, these digital skills that you are talking about to critically analyze data. Not just accept what they see, but to analyze it with their peer groups. When they see a group in Italy critiquing a document that they thought was great, they will see that they really were not thinking about the credibility of the sources, the quality of the resources.
When I have done any international collaboration with my students, with my teachers, they see that once we go to Finland, Peru or Korea, those students are analyzing the data in a different way, and they are opened up to the fact that they are really not going as in-depth as they need to go. I really think that international collaboration pushes us up to ego-centric points of view to multiple perspectives. That is one way of using technology that can help with this digital teen issue.
What a simple concepts for using technology in a way that opens children up to the powerful way in which these technologies can be used for collaborative learning at a global level.
The report published by Cranfield School of Management (UK) concludes that technology addiction amongst teenagers is having a disruptive effect on their learning.
The study of 267 pupils aged 11 to 18 found 63% felt addicted to the internet and 53% to their mobile phones.
They found 62% first used or owned a computer before the age of eight, 80% first used the internet between the ages of five and 10, 58% first used a mobile phone between the ages of eight and 10 and 58% have had access to a social networking sites between the ages of eleven and 13.
Over half (53.2%) indicated they spent up to around 30 minutes a day on their mobile, while 17% said they spent at least three hours on their mobile.
Over 30% reported spending between one to two hours a day using the internet and 26% said they spent up to six or more hours a day.
Over a third (39%) admitted that text shortcuts damaged the quality of their written English, particularly when it came to spelling.
And 84% openly admitted copying chunks of information from the internet into their homework or projects on a number of occasions. Pupils said the internet was by far the largest source of information for such work, with over 90% saying they used it compared with 43% who said books.
Their report concluded that modern gadgets worsened pupils’ spelling and concentration, encouraged plagiarism and disrupted lessons.
Yet nothing was reported about the positive impact of living in a highly connected, information rich world. It is easy for us to take this research and harp back to a time gone by, but is it really a bad thing that children today can readily access vast amounts of information? Shouldn’t education be about how to use this information and the technological tools available to enhance their learning? We have to find out what motivates the learner, provide meaningful content in “their world” and help them to use all technology available to them.
For me, literacy is a concept that is not easy to define in the 21st Century. At a basic level, it could be defined as the ability to read and write. Reading and writing used to be a relatively privileged activity not that long ago. Yet we expect, and indeed should expect, that today every child should be able to read and write. But is that enough in the 21st Century to be really literate?
Massive advancements in technology have led to the need for new and different type of literacy skills. How are we helping children to keep up with this? Is it by chance or design?
At the click of a mouse, it is possible to retrieve information on the World-wide web, connect with people across the globe, research, investigate, comment and contribute on an extraordinary range of sources from all over the world. Are our children in danger of growing up in a world of information overload?
They will need the ability to access, process, filter, evaluate, combine and use the information to their advantage which depends on a different set of skills. These include using different technology mediums, keeping up-to-date with ever increasing new technologies, exploring new ways of working, assessing vast amounts of information and screening it quickly to assess its relevance, interacting with new communication technologies and styles, or networking in a virtual world. How are we preparing our children with these skills?
The UNESCO definition of literacy is: “Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.”
Does this definition go far enough to ensure our children are literate for the future? E-literacy starts with the basics of being able to read and write. Without this the information available is inaccessible. However are there other skills we should be teaching alongside the basics? And when does this become a standard part of the curriculum?
An attention grabbing headline taken from the conclusions in a recent report produced for US Department of Education. The analysis found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
The study looked at online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 yet there were too few studies to warrant statistical significance. However, Picciano and Seaman (2009) estimated that more than a million K–12 students took online courses in school year 2007–2008 and interest in hybrid approaches that blend in-class and online activities is increasing.
Yet although online learning appeared to be well researched as an effective option for undergraduates, graduate students and professionals in a wide range of academic and professional studies, the number of K–12 studies is too small to warrant much confidence in the mean effect estimate for this learner group.
It strikes me as an interesting paradox when demand is increasing that the research which would support the increased use is not available. Online or digital learning can be a great resource to engage learners using a different medium. However, until the research catches up we would be wise to ensure that online learning activities should be an enhancement to more traditional forms of education rather than a replacement.
We all know that children have a huge array of technological solutions available to them. They have a vast amount of knowledge and information available literally at their finger tips. In a recent report by OFCOM they researched how children in the UK are using technology. available here
There is no doubt that technology is a part of children’s everyday lives. Is it the responsibility of the parent or the school to support our children in learning how to use the technology effectively?
The research shows 39% of 5 -7 year olds, in the UK, use the internet everyday, rising to 49% for kids aged 8 -11 and a whopping 78% for 12 – 15 year olds. That is a lot of children online!
Parents tend to trust their children online [78% of them agreeing that they think their child uses the internet safely] and see the internet as a positive addition to their child’s life with 64% of parents with children aged 5-15 agreeing with the statement “the benefits of the internet for my child outweigh any risks”.
However 50% of parents agreed that “my child knows more about the internet than I do”.
With the growth in technology and knowledge available expanding at an exponential rate can we leave it to parents to guide their kids? What role do schools have in teaching how to use technology and how are we measuring their effectiveness?
I was recently reading a report by Ofsted [an independent education review body in the UK] about literacy trends in schools.
The report is available here.
“The gap between schools in their understanding of the uses of new technology partly reflected the very differing views that schools held about English, the changing nature of communication and pupils’ literacy needs in the 21st century. The most effective schools understood that ‘ICT has fundamentally altered… how we think about reading and writing’. As technology has changed, so the literacy needs of pupils change. This always involves adding new skills rather than simply replacing old ones.”
This is fundamental. We need to view the use of technology as beneficial to engaging students as well as adding to the skill set that they will require in the future. The skills required to read and enjoy a novel are different to those needed to skim emails, or text messages or extract pertinent data from an electronic report. However we cannot forget the basics. Reading and writing are skills, in my view, that need to remain no matter what technological advancements are made.
If the changes in education over the last 100 years had been as dramatic as the changes in medicine or industry over that time, what would our schools look like today?
What a great question and it certainly got me thinking.
The education system hasn’t really changed that much since the 1800’s. Yet advances in knowledge, technology and access to information has seen exponential growth. Our children are growing up in this environment. They are learning to access and use knowledge when and where they need it. Learning is not limited to learning within the boundaries of classrooms and school buildings, it is available 24/7.
Our current model of schooling is to bring the learner to the knowledge contained within the walls of the school building where experts tell and share information. The schools of tomorrow need to bring the knowledge to the learner. And that is not constrained by a location or building.
Do I think that schools will become a thing of the past and children will learn in isolated pods? Absolutely not. The true value of schools is that they support a community of learners, not only in their knowledge but in their social development too. So going to school won’t change, but how we educate our learners should harness the technological advancements available. So teachers can be a guide to learning, supporting enquiring minds, inspiring and working with the children to solve problems. The true beauty of a school community is that young minds can question, challenge and discuss to develop their knowledge further.
We cannot guess at how much the world will change in their lifetimes, as change is an exponential graph, but we can make sure that our education is preparing children for this change.
I was recently reading a book about what affects literacy skills in young children and I thought I’d share some of the key research findings I came across.
The critical point that was made was that learning to read and write begins long before the school years. Research shows that the attitudes of adults who interact regularly with children have a huge influence the attitude of children learning to read (DeBaryshe, 1995; Baker et al., 1995; Spiegel, 1994). A number of factors affect these interactions, including the parents’ own attitudes towards reading, the children’s motivation for reading, the opportunities parents provide their children and how they behave, as well as the parents’ own reading and literacy ability levels.
So what does the research say? Here are a few excerpts.
Parents who believe that reading is a source of entertainment have children with a more positive view about reading than do parents who emphasize the skills aspect of reading development (Baker et al., 1997).
Children who view school learning as irrelevant to life outside school are less motivated to invest time and effort in learning to read (Purcell-Gates, 1994; Stipek et al., 1995).
When parents are responsive and ”chatty” during shared reading, improvements in their children’s skills have been recorded (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1994).
Parents who believe their children are interested in reading are more likely to provide reading activities than parents who do not see such interest (Hiebert, 1981).
Enthusiasm about reading is suggested by many researchers as a route to development of the child’s active engagement in reading (Snow and Tabors, 1996; Baker et al., 1995).
Activities such as family storybook reading promote positive feelings about books and literacy (Taylor and Strickland, 1986).
Mealtime conversation helps children acquire knowledge about narratives when family members recount the day’s activities, giving children an experience of value in learning about language and communication (Snow and Tabors, 1993).
So some simple steps can promote reading skills in your children:
• talk to your children,
• share books,
• be enthusiastic about reading,
• chat about the books they are reading,
• be seen to enjoying reading yourself.
