CUE Day 2: Key Note Sugata Mitra

The paradigm of our world and the jobs for tomorrow are radically different than they were 100 years ago. However, when you look into the walls of our classrooms, not much has changed. After teaching for 13 years you KNOW the moments when really thinking and learning is happening. I can tell you that it is not when students are seated in rows and perfectly ordered. Real learning can be messy!

Sugata Mitri, TED talk winner, makes the claim that, “Learning as an emergent phenomenon in a self organizing educational system.” Basically, that learning happens when we are at the edge of chaos. But are we as teachers willing to take that risk? Can we allow students to self organize? What does that even look like?

He says that learning is about intellectual adventures with mediators (that’s us!) asking questions. It all comes down to asking and framing just the RIGHT QUESTION. This is a recurring theme in EVERY professional development I have attended in the last 5 years!

So here is his question for you to consider…How would allowing the internet into the testing environment change they way you teach?

If you want more information about his work visit School in the Cloud or Self Organized Learning (SOLE)

Reflection 1: CUE conference…Robots and Augmented Reality

At a conference there are a lot of bells and whistles today, for me, it was ROBOTS and AUGMENTED REALITY. I am intentionally attending sessions I have no idea what they are talking about or ideas that stretch my thinking in ways I would have never considered using technology in my classroom. From this I have learned my first lesson:

Just because it is REALLY COOL doesn’t make it an AMAZING TEACHING TOOL. What makes these tools amazing is what the teachers are doing with the curriculum. I sometimes fear that we get a little ahead of ourselves when we think about the TOOL first instead of the THINKING. Robots can be an amazing motivator to get kids coding, but we would have to be intentional about our learning objectives to really make the most out of this tool. Augmented Reality (check this out if you don’t know what it is) could be amazingly motivating, but is the time spent worth the learning achieved. One presenter shared, “When they see something this amazing and unbelievable happen in front of their eyes, I ask them to consider what amazing and unbelievable solutions they might bring to solve some of the problems in our world.” To me that is where all the learning would take place!! When students can create and see innovation, that opens their eyes and allows them to imagine so much more.

I hope that as the education world takes this giant leap with technology we will still keep central to the focus of creating spaces where, “thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted.(Ron Ritchhart)