Future Schools

Transcript
I think the biggest challenges facing education today is to make sure that every child in Australia has an equal opportunity to develop their potential. How do we create people who can be in future workplaces?

The types of jobs that the big companies that they are looking for the more social skills, soft skills
the problem-solving skills. Who can manage change who can handle uncertainty who can think creatively. But most of all they’ll be human. They’ll be able to be creative and they come up with ideas that machines will never come up with.

The four C’s are collaborating, communication, critical thinking and creativity. The student of the future essentially is going to have to be really good at things that computers ain’t. These students who are graduating will be doing 17 jobs across five different fields. The student of the future will be very good at navigating the unknown. Technology now is vital it’s the way that students understand the world.

The role of technology in the future of education brings people together to solve complex problems both collaboratively and they need to be creative.

Joy and delight and curiosity are absolutely intrinsic to kids doing well at school. It’s love interpersonal
relationship, it’s that sense yeah I felt like I belonged in your class. Unless computers get pretty good pretty quickly I don’t see teachers going anywhere for a while.

Here it’s where we start the future it’s how we create the society that we’re all going to be living in. It’s not about bringing up ‘mini-mes’ it’s about actually bringing up individuals who realize who they are
you.

Transcript

Sarah: So what do you think about switching over to electronic textbooks in the classroom?

Peter: That’s a really good question, it’s one I’ve been debating myself for quite some time. I think I’m mostly for it because I think the textbooks tend to be quite heavy to carry around, students carry a lot, have to carry a lot of them around. And having it in a digital form is much easier for students to access, it’s very convenient. They can carry most of their textbooks in one kind of tablet or one on their phones and access it anywhere. And it’s easily … obviously easily transportable but also easily accessible wherever you are really. I think it’s also with technology improving, you can change the format of the reading that you’re doing in the textbook and the font sizes change and you can highlight and change text if you need to. I’ve also started using it myself and I think it’s become much easier taking notes, I just open up a document next to it and add notes as I read. Yeah, I’m mostly for it. What about you?

Sarah: I see the advantages for it as well but I also see many disadvantages. The first disadvantage I see is, students if it’s on an electronic device they’ll be more tempted to do other things other than what they’re supposed to be doing with their textbook. As well is I see as a problem for writing in the book as far as notes. Although you can write notes in there, it’s hard to reference back to them or hard to reference back certain pages, because I myself have used electronic textbook in the past and found that for regular books as far as reading, it’s great but textbooks it’s very difficult in the class if some people have regular textbooks and some people have electronic textbooks, trying to figure out what page everyone is on because if you have different text sizes then perhaps it’ll be different page numbers and it just makes it more difficult for trying to all be on the same page.

Peter: Yeah, I can kind of see your point. Although, what I do like about the electronic textbook so that they’ve got a lot of interactive material that you can directly link to the text that you’re using like any animated materials, videos, other online material that you can access immediately whereas if you have a book you don’t have that more interactive component. And as a teacher I think it’s easier for me to add anything as the lesson goes on or as the course proceeds to just add more things to it, whereas with a textbook you’re kind of more bound I guess, you have to stick to the text and the online experience just opens up many more possibilities, I think. And it’s all in the same medium so you know that I find really great.

Sarah: Yeah, I would agree with you and I think that’s the way the future is going, definitely for education is to go, they’re calling it paperless, I think. I know many schools in the U. are going paperless where they’re doing all electronic things in the classroom. They all have iPads so it’s very interesting.

Peter: Yeah, it is. The only concern that I haven’t really thought about carefully enough I guess before is that with just reading online and accessing things online, I think students don’t write – physically write things anymore. It’s all typing and looking or engaging with things in a different way than before where people use to take notes, actively think about things and write it down, making their own notes, which I think is a really useful skill to have. Like even if you type notes online it’s not the same as writing them out and keeping a diary as it were of your notes. What do you think about that?

Sarah: I would definitely agree with you, especially in language learning. It’s very important to have the skill of writing and if you’re not doing that in the classroom then chances are you’re probably not doing it on your own later either.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah.