In the video Kids can teach themselves: the hole in the Wall Project, Mishra shares the project he had initiated in India where computers were introduced and the students were able to figure out of themselves how to use the internet and the computer once the access was given. I have learned about the similar concept through One Laptop Per Child in my Technology and Innovation Course while at Penn GSE. And I do applaud the efforts of OLPC and the groups that they have implemented these projects worldwide, but as someone who has seen education projects being implemented in the developing contexts, where in many cases, the failure of the continuation of the projects were due to failures and malfunctioning with the computers even if they were presented due to frequent power outages and hence the local contexts and the adaptability of these local projects to developing contexts should be taken into consideration.
In Do Schools Kill Creativity, Ken Robinson shares how students’ creativity and their risk-taking nature trigger greater learning for these students. First of all I was reminded of my high school teacher who would always be encouraging us to think beyond the box and who showed us his video during our history class in 9th grade. He was the one who I ended up writing about in my college essay as having been the teacher who had greatly influenced my life as a learner and student, and I believe there are students who have different areas of intelligence as Howard Gardner puts and it is our obligation as equipped teachers to be catering to the different skill sets and intelligence that different students might be expressing in different ways as Ken Robinson seem to be suggesting. I would like to show Sir Ken Robinson’s tedtalk during class and promote discussion like my high school teacher had done in his classroom.
In Future Learning, there are various speakers who address the importance issues of education in the modern era. Sal Khan has been effective in developing video lectures on math from arithmetic to calculus and is hence well known for his founding the internet platform Khan Academy. There is a Korean version of Khan Academy for Korean university entrance exam for English and video lectures have been effective tools of pedagogy for learning that I would like to be incorporating in my classes.
Ntiedo Etuk talks about the importance of video gaming in incorporating fun activities within classroom contexts. And students these days with short attention time span due to their exposure to media could benefit from these fast-moving video games. And I have actually encountered students using video games called Blitzlearning in a hagwon, or academy in South Korea where they were using these programs to learn SAT words at a rapid and efficient manner.
Catherine Lucey argues in the video that in an era where the technology has become so prevalent, the role of teachers would be to guide them in navigating the different piece of information made available to the students. An example given would be to research about the anatomy of the human body through iPad, and I remember my sixth grade Science Fair where my friends and I came together to work on my Human Body Science Fair Project where we made all organs out of clay we had bought and made the board for the fair using different materials we had brought together, putting together all the different information we had researched off the internet, and hence would be an effective way to be promoting learning among students.
David Merrill expresses how there should be little distinction made between learning and play, and such was the technique used by our college professor, Pooja Rangan when she taught the course Voice and Documentary where she invited us to various screenings where we were to sit and relax and watch the documentaries which we will later return to our dorms to write annotations on. Such could be effective modes of pedagogy for classroom teaching.
Richard Lang talks about the importance of collaboration in classrooms and from personal experiences, the science fair projects, and history group presentations (presentations about China, India), drama projects (9th grade drama class) have been examples of how collaboration was effectively promoted in classroom contexts.
Richard Baraniuk talks about notion of how obsolete data and facts in science have to be updated by newly found discoveries and findings in our textbooks (which often require quite some time for editions to be made), and Wikipedia would be a good example of a platform where new information is constantly being updated at a rapid pace (though a weakness in the system could be that references should be sorted out and double checked for accuracy of the information)
Seth Weinberger talks about how if students were to educated in ways where they are more self-driven and active in their own education, they would be more prepared to form a diverse cohort in the university systems, and I believe such is the ideals of liberal arts education that many of the colleges in US are aspiring for – to select students who would be making best use of all the resources including the faculty, fellow students, and all the other university resources made available to them.
In RSA Animate: How to Help Every Child Fulfill their Potential, the video talks about the importance of praising students for their progress more so than their achievement to promote stigma-free learning and to promote risk-taking and real learning among students. At an era where achievement is greatly valued and promoted, praising efforts and progress as much as the achievement would be essential in rearing resilient students who are willing to take risks in order to learn new materials, and would not give up and try multiple times to get to their destinations even if they were to make mistakes along the way. Such were the pedagogy used by my high school teacher and I believe such efforts have been effective in bringing about intellectual, curious problem solvers who are pursuing their own ambitions in their respective fields still today.
The video This Will Revolutionize Education points out the fallacy that those factors that have been believed will transform the world of education have in fact failed to do so. And one of the examples given were the prediction that motion picture would make obsolete textbooks but they are being readily used in classrooms today. And the other examples given were iPads and computers, and at an era where we are becoming more and more conscious of the role that Artificial Intelligence will have in our lives, we have to wonder whether classrooms and traditional modes of teaching would be transformed completely by the introduction of AI. And Mishra in Future Learning seems to be making a crucial point that perhaps the critical role that the teachers should be playing in this new era would be helping students develop their belief mechanisms, how they form different beliefs and how they evaluate and form new belief systems. Perhaps this would be an area of teaching and learning that would be irreplaceable by the AI, and hence helping them with the process of evaluation and form of belief mechanisms as Mishra puts would be essential role that the teachers should be playing in the new era.
And similar implications could apply for the report, Life-Ready Skills for Class for 2030 where due to introduction of AIs, the role of traditional teachers would be redefined and the social-emotional learning could be one aspect that could be harder to replace by the AIs in classroom contexts. And technology and AI could be implemented in classrooms, but teachers would be not eradicated but their role redefined to meet the needs of students as suggested in this report to be rearing for social-emotional learning and skills for students in the 2030.
EduContents 