Trends Influencing NZ and Internationally - Week 30
The responses to this have been among the more interesting reading. I have read a lot of frustration, intrepidation and anticipation from the “Mindlabbers” over this Trends in Education topic.
What is a trend?
A pattern of gradual change in a condition, output, or process, or an average or general tendency of a series of data points to move in a certain direction over time, represented by a line or curve on a graph. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/trend.html
Or a good old Google search reveals
The New Media Consortium short video from the class notes spouted a lot of the buzz words around 21st Century Learning and highlighted many key points about the changing face of learning worldwide. These stood out for me.
I’ve just had my appraisal meeting with my principal and he looked at my senior course outline (NCEA Lv1-3). He questioned if the reason my classes weren’t full of students was that the course content isn’t what students want to be doing. NCEA wants senior DTG students Web coding, Managing data, and Programming. Where I’m struggling is making this look like the fancy pictures on the internet and in the new Curriculum document. Who wouldn’t want to be in an Modern Learning environment where you put VR headsets on, 3D print your latest sculpture or play Twinkle Twinkle on your MakeyMakey banana keyboard. This isn’t the reality for the Senior DTG class. If it is, then I need some serious PLD in the requirements of NCEA and our school Senior Leadership Team needs to invest into future learning environments.
You might be surprised if you had time to look at the exemplars for Lv 1-3 DTG standards- for example one of the common assessment tasks for Level 2 Programming is to design a Pizza Ordering System for a business. This is usually completed in a scripting language such as Python. The task might sound an interesting one but it’s not as simple as saying to kids “Go make it” The marking schedule doesn’t allow for much deviation from the set answer. Student have to include common coding conventions to get the grades. Innovation is allowed but often confuses to assessment.
How is this relevant and how is this going to impact me and teaching across NZ? - What I think is that for the trend for cross-curricula, multi-skill learning to be successful it needs to be reflected in the assessment options for students. NCEA savvy students are reluctant to do tasks at school that are not indicative of the their NCEA assessments. I need to adapt and re-contextualise where I can. I need to provide the mechanisms for students to have hands on approaches and opportunities to their learning but not disadvantage them in our current assessment structure. The Ministry of Education want change and the new Curriculum document is a step towards addressing this, Mindlab are assisting with this by providing a vehicle for teachers to be exposed to future learning thinking. The Assessments for NCEA are being altered Level 1 is available now and lv2/3 are in trial but are still not able to keep pace with the ever increasing pace of international and local trends. Somewhere it will all magically come together.
What is a trend?
A pattern of gradual change in a condition, output, or process, or an average or general tendency of a series of data points to move in a certain direction over time, represented by a line or curve on a graph. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/trend.html
Or a good old Google search reveals
The New Media Consortium short video from the class notes spouted a lot of the buzz words around 21st Century Learning and highlighted many key points about the changing face of learning worldwide. These stood out for me.
- Identify successful, sustainable new models of learning
- Students are identifying and designing solutions to real world problems
- Makerspaces, modern active learning spaces that include computational thinking challenges, coding and robotics are providing opportunities to create and experiment
I’ve just had my appraisal meeting with my principal and he looked at my senior course outline (NCEA Lv1-3). He questioned if the reason my classes weren’t full of students was that the course content isn’t what students want to be doing. NCEA wants senior DTG students Web coding, Managing data, and Programming. Where I’m struggling is making this look like the fancy pictures on the internet and in the new Curriculum document. Who wouldn’t want to be in an Modern Learning environment where you put VR headsets on, 3D print your latest sculpture or play Twinkle Twinkle on your MakeyMakey banana keyboard. This isn’t the reality for the Senior DTG class. If it is, then I need some serious PLD in the requirements of NCEA and our school Senior Leadership Team needs to invest into future learning environments.
You might be surprised if you had time to look at the exemplars for Lv 1-3 DTG standards- for example one of the common assessment tasks for Level 2 Programming is to design a Pizza Ordering System for a business. This is usually completed in a scripting language such as Python. The task might sound an interesting one but it’s not as simple as saying to kids “Go make it” The marking schedule doesn’t allow for much deviation from the set answer. Student have to include common coding conventions to get the grades. Innovation is allowed but often confuses to assessment.
How is this relevant and how is this going to impact me and teaching across NZ? - What I think is that for the trend for cross-curricula, multi-skill learning to be successful it needs to be reflected in the assessment options for students. NCEA savvy students are reluctant to do tasks at school that are not indicative of the their NCEA assessments. I need to adapt and re-contextualise where I can. I need to provide the mechanisms for students to have hands on approaches and opportunities to their learning but not disadvantage them in our current assessment structure. The Ministry of Education want change and the new Curriculum document is a step towards addressing this, Mindlab are assisting with this by providing a vehicle for teachers to be exposed to future learning thinking. The Assessments for NCEA are being altered Level 1 is available now and lv2/3 are in trial but are still not able to keep pace with the ever increasing pace of international and local trends. Somewhere it will all magically come together.
Hi Alistair. The points you make are very pertinent. I've taken a huge risk this year with my Year 11 course and I am experimenting with group assessments, so this is going to be a watch this space. Being in the South Island you are not too far away from some amazing teachers - conversations with Rachel Chisnall @ipossum - a Science Teacher from the Dunedin area. I find her very inspiring on Twitter. Do you have opportunities for funding applications - these can be very helpful to increasing resources for our classes. My Year 13 course, I have thrown open this year, and they can choose their project, web, 3D or animation. This is proving to be very interesting.
ReplyDeleteHI there and thank you for your response. The kids love the 3D and Animation stuff and so do I but I struggle to see how to make a whole course out of that with the assessment standards. How do you do it? We have used Generic Tech standards in the past but it's a lot of paperwork when all the kids really want to do is create cool stuff.
DeleteExcited to be beginning my Year 10 3D Modelling Unit using Blender just before the holiday break. It's my favourite thing and group to explore it with as usually none of them have every done anything like this and once they "get it" I love the crazy learning stuff that then occurs.