21st Century Educator

A day in the gold coast hinterland

Originally uploaded by Brett Moller.

A day in the gold coast hinterland

I am interested in David Warlick’s latest blog about Hacking the system. He mentioned my recent decision to move away from the classroom to enter a different arena of education. I am grateful for his kind words on my ability as a classroom teacher and I am glad I was able to share insights to my classrooms with recordings of different lessons through my podcast show. However, I have been doing some thinking about why it was I felt I needed to leave the classroom. Obviously, I wrote a substantial amount a few weeks back with my blog entry “Crushing the passion.” I explained that there were aspects of the profession that were getting me down on a daily basis and any exceptional classroom practice was unrecognised or not given the time and attention it needed.

With further thought after looking at David’s blog I have come to the conclusion that disappointed classroom practitioners, such as myself, have a responsibility to gain the skills needed to be an instrument of change in schools for the future. I believe the deciding factor for me leaving the classroom, was that I knew I could gain skills in management and curriculum development much quicker outside of the classroom than I would have staying where I was. If I were to stay where I was much longer I think I would have left education all together. We only need to do a survey of any school and unfortunately we will find disgruntle and negative educators who have lost the desire that hopefully drove them to the classroom in the first place.

Sometimes I worry that I was simply after perfection and a place where everyone did it the way I thought was best. However, I still believe supportive, encouraging, relational and interested leaders and administrators make great classroom practitioners brilliant practitioners. I guess I would have loved to of heard from my leaders something along the lines of… “We can see your amazing abilities in Educational Technologies and that your students thrive on what you are doing, what can we do to see that go further and become even better? I can only begin to understand the pressures of administration, but I can see there is a great need for our time and energies to be spent helping them reassess what parts of their role in education are crucial to classroom success. I look at educators like Bob Sprankle and wonder how he did it and how he continues to stay so passionate in the classroom? It would be interesting to see how his school leaders support his teaching styles.

I guess this brings me to leadership models and what works best today and what may work best in the future?

Episode 14 - A Conversation with Steve Dembo!: Please add comments to the blog

Right click to download the podcast

Well this seems to be the topic floating around the blogasphere at the moment. So why not add my 2cents worth (sorry Dave). I think we need to take a careful look at a number of interesting factors that I believe will depict our learning spaces of the future….

1) Schools as institutions needing to survive
At the end of the day schools need to survive just as any business does. I don’t just mean from a pure financial perspective (while that is important), I mean more from how our schools market themselves to the community. The question to ask in 15 years time will be…. “Does our community value educational technology and if so to what extent?” My past school is doing very well at the moment with enrolments because the technology spending is matching the desires of the community. There is still a big “WOW” factor when perspective clients (parents) walk into our classrooms with interactive whiteboards, projectors, networked computers, and many other gizmos that look impressive. My point here is that I can see this declining in impact and therefore not becoming a priority for our school administrators. Some of you may remember the Mel Gibson film “What women want” where he suddenly becomes able to hear what exactly the opposite sex wants from men. This newfound ability gives him a way to give the opposite sex exactly what they are after. Well I see school administrators like this Mel in this film. They have many different ways to find exactly what clients (parents) want from a school. At present technology of all different types is the thing that impresses our clients. I have watched a group of parents on a tour of my past school and the jaws drop when they see the gizmos….. Do they actually know how or if it will help their student learn better? Probably not, but it works for now so school’s will stick to it.

My point being, that how our learning spaces look in the future will largely depend on what our community seems to hold as important for education.

2) The focus on teacher professional development:
I will never forgot a quote from a former colleague when she saw her new classroom fitted out with interactive whiteboards etc… she turned to me while I was “playing” with the new “toys” and asked “What is all of this worth in dollars?” When I gave her an estimate she replied…. “Umm, well how about we get rid of all this and spend the $8000 on readers for my 2nd graders!!” It sticks out so clearly because it demonstrates how poorly we sometimes jump into new technology. Sure it looks good and it is a great tool when used by an educator who knows what they are doing, however, someone who has little training or desire to use it is not going to prove to administrators and the community that it was a wise investment. I think that if the money is being spent now on new technologies and our teachers are not trained sufficiently, future spending will very quickly be cut. To the defence of my previous school, they did look at a lot of comments like these and see that PD was a big must. Unfortunately, I will not be around this year to find out if they follow through.

3) How our pre-service teachers are being trained:
I wonder if our teacher training institutions are thinking what may be expected of teachers in the future. I actually don’t think it is a matter of making sure there is a bench-mark of all teachers in IT proficiency, I actually think there is a need to have teachers able to see how this generation of students they will be teaching live. What technology do they use? How do they use it? What do they enjoy using? Etc etc….. I actually think all teachers should know about chat programs, mobile phone functionality etc…. There is so much more insight into how to best teach and provide effective learning spaces when we take some time to work out how our students of today live and learn. I have added a table from some notes I took at a conference last year…. Some interesting insight into our learners of today (Generation Y)

New Engagment and what works best today:

(Mark McCrindle: McCrindle Research)

These are just three areas that I think will determine our learning spaces of the future. I don’t prescribe to the idea that they will be like the classrooms of today with just a few changes. While this could be the case, I think it will more likely come down to how our schools and community changes in the coming 5 years. Some schools will get it right and some will probably miss the boat….

Just my little carry on for the day……

Cheers,

Brett

More mobile blogging

Originally uploaded by Brett Moller.

One thing I will miss not having my own class. This is a pic of the cake my class baked for my birthday. Apparently they used $40 worth of ingrediants… Mainly chocolate I guess!

——

Brett

This message was sent from my phone

Testing mobile blogging

Originally uploaded by Brett Moller.

I thought i would test mobile blogging while i had some time over the holidays. Basically i have emailed this picture from my phone and added the text. So many possibilities here that are very exciting! This is a picture of my brothers daughter attempting to get to my beer!!!! Very cute…..