Apologies for the rather UK-centric nature of this post and the fact that I’ve ripped it from TechCrunch, but it appears the British government is proposing that Twitter be taught in primary schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. It is to include blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia as well, alongside the traditional Maths, English and Science curricula.
The draft plans were due to be published next month, but have been leaked to The Guardian. It’s worth a read as it hints at a much more comprehensive overhaul of the primary curriculum than just getting kids to tweet. I look forward to the official report.
To all music teachers and musicians out there. Would you or your students like to be part of the world’s first online orchestra?
YouTube are inviting musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. “Your video entries will be combined into the first ever collaborative virtual performance, and the world will select the best of you to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.”
A fascinating development. If there is a school district or authority out there that is still preventing access to this extraordinary site, send them the link.
…And if that wasn’t enough, Google have just launched an audio indexing engine for YouTube. Now you can search a video according to what is said within it and not just on the tags, keywords or title describing it.
It’s in beta at the moment, but will graduate into a fully supported technology soon, I’m sure.
Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”
Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.
For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:
Berkeley University, in California, have recently launched a series of recorded lectures on their own YouTube channel. You can find the current catalogue here: Berkeley University on YouTube. It clearly mirrors MIT’s Opencourseware initiative, started in 2001.
It raises the question yet again of where the real value in school- and university-based education lies: in the teacher delivering the content or the collaborative working and investigation by students around it.
Clearly, Berkeley and MIT believe it is in the latter, otherwise they wouldn’t be distributing this content for free. It is the formal accreditation and recognition that surrounds it, which they then charge (huge sums) for.
The trend towards deconstructing territories of learning (a phrase I’ve borrowed from a colleague referring to the classroom rather than a geographical region) continues and I look forward to its development.
In the meantime, have a look at this lecture on atoms and heat:
We knew it would only be a matter of time before the IB learning community began to inhabit media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Here are two examples we’ve come across recently - both from YouTube.
The first is a PYP exhibition sample, contributed by students and teachers at the International School of Tianjin, China.
The second example is from a TOK student in the Diploma Programme. We don’t know who he is or where he’s from, as there are no end credits, but we think you’ll enjoy it nevertheless:
With either video, we make no claims as to their adherence to programme requirements. What we do want to do, though, is use them to highlight a number of important issues.
The first is that they’re two examples of students using new technologies to get a message across and show evidence of learning. This is something we will need to come to terms with as a curriculum and assessment authority, and particularly as an awarding body, in the future. Recognising student learning, when evidence of it is so dispersed on the web, will be a real challenge for us in the years ahead.
The second is that they’re both examples of resources which can help teachers in furthering their understanding of the programmes. Discussions around what’s good, and not so good, about them are invaluable for teachers as they attempt to come to terms with programme requirements and continuously improve their practice.
Thirdly, and as a corollary of the above two points, where these examples are located will increasingly be irrelevant. What is important is how we describe them (ie what metadata will we need to establish and use in order to tag these resources?) and how we link to them (ie how can we make use of the semantic web to go beyond a closed teacher resource exchange, such as that on the OCC?)
