The International Baccalaureate has from the beginning of this year scaled up its online workshops offerings for IB teachers. There are currently in excess of 400 teachers and IB coordinators taking part in 25 online workshops from the Middle Years Programme through to subject specific workshops in the Diploma Programme.
To find out more about workshops that are currently available please take time to visit our Online Professional Development Workshop site. These workshops also appear on the IB’s public website and on the OCC and IBNET.
While planning to have further iterations of the current workshop programme in September and October, we are currently developing new workshops in order to give a greater amount of choice to IB teachers around the world. Online workshops to look out for later in 2008 will be PYP assessment, subject specific MYP workshops and Theory of Knowledge (in both Spanish and English).
Just a quick note to tell you - in case you haven’t spotted it yet - that we have added a universal navigation bar to most of the IB sites that are public.
I’m sure it will help with general navigation across the IB’s web presence. Let us know what you think.
Towards the end of last month, I accompanied representatives from the Aga Khan Academies group on a visit to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Seattle. Our purpose - to explore possibilities for collaboration and knowledge exchange on the development of an e-learning strategy for the academies’ network.
We had a very productive day, and it was rounded off by a tour of Microsoft’s Home of the Future - a prototype of what our living spaces might look like 10 years from now. Housed in their executive briefing centre, it was conceived using the notions of discoverability, place and participation. From their website:
Place. A series of demonstrations showcase how software, services and devices can combine to deliver timely, relevant information to people based on their location, whether inside the home or nearby. One example is display technology shown in the neighborhood bus stop that provides continuous updates of route and arrival information, and is used to demonstrate how location services can automatically notify people about services near them or even when someone they know arrives at the bus stop.
Participation. Reflecting consumers’ widespread desire to more directly shape their sources of information and entertainment — through blogs, social networking Web sites, wikis and the like — the Microsoft Home features several emerging technologies designed to extend people’s self-expression. For instance, a teenager’s bedroom in the facility portrays what it would be like to have addressable wallpaper that employs organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology to display a variety of content such as artwork, video clips and Web pages.
Discovery. Technology systems throughout the Microsoft Home demonstrate innovative ways of prioritizing the huge volumes of information, media and content choices to which consumers will have access in the future. These systems can filter through myriad content sources — from thousands of TV channels, news reports, e-mail messages and electronic documents to music files, on-demand videos and blog entries — to intelligently bring people the content they care about most and at the time when they’re in the mood to enjoy it.
I enjoyed the tour, but what struck me most was the ubiquitous nature of the technology and how possibly intrusive it might become. Voice recognition was used throughout (the main computer was called Grace) and it reminded me very much of Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey.
I was intrigued, though, by the notion of watching web content virtually with a friend and having conversations in real-time via VOIP - the move towards shared reality continues unabated.
I was not allowed to take any photos or video footage, so the next best thing? I had a quick look on YouTube, once I got home, and found this:
It doesn’t cover everything, but gives you an idea of what it was like.
I often turn to Stephen Heppell when considering next steps and looking for help in making sense of this new world we’re living in. Recently I came across this. I shan’t try and paraphrase this time, but let his own words speak to you.
“Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to “deliver” the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses, they produce architectural fly-throughs of incredible buildings without any drafting or 2D skills, they make stop frame animations with their plasticine models, they edit and finesse their poetry, they explore surfaces on their visual calculators, swap ideas with scientists on-line about volcanic activity, follow webcam images of Ospreys hatching, track weather by live satellite images, control the robots they have built and generally push rapidly at the boundaries of what might be possible, indeed what was formerly possible, at any age.
Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago although the many projects emanating from Ultralab over that decade offered clear enough indicators of what might be possible. The challenge here is to criterion referencing. So often the cry of the teacher “that work is better than my degree exhibition piece!” reflects a substantial step change in both the age at which a creative act can be enjoyed and the quality of the tools supporting that creativity.”
So, if you want some guidance on what we might do as educators to evaluate some of this, have a look at what he has to say here.
Set up to discuss and share good practice around the PYP exhibition, it’s a wonderful use of Ning’s social networking capabilities, and I encourage any PYP teachers among you to drop by some time.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a smart video goggle system that records everything the wearer looks at, recognizes and assigns names to objects that appear in the video, and creates an easily searchable database of the recorded footage.
It can function as a memory aid for the elderly, or search through hours of video footage to find particular images. Wonderful possibilities for the classroom too.
- that we have added a universal navigation bar to most of the IB sites that are public.
