UK to shake up primary education?
Posted by: ashleytan on: March 26, 2009
How could I not blog about something that three Tweeters I am following mentioned?
If you visited The Guardian, you might have come across this headline: Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up. Of course the headline was sensationalistic, but it was quite accurate too.
I think that the bottom line was not so much that primary school kids in the UK might embrace more technology in school. The fact is that they will be using more RELEVANT technologies in their schools. This will force teachers to update their pedagogies because if they don’t they will soon discover that old methods do not necessarily allow new or better forms of learning to take place.
And of course various stakeholders feel threatened. There’s not enough coverage of history or the learning of drama for example. But at the end of the day we should not be looking at what is important to us in the short term, but what is important to the kids for the long term. We should be preparing them for their future, not our past.
Am I going to wait for the Singapore educational system to play catch up? Obviously not. I am preparing preservice teachers under my care to think and teach progressively. Time will tell if I am right.
4 Responses to "UK to shake up primary education?"
[...] Global Warming added an interesting post today on UK to shake up primary education?Here’s a small reading…primary school kids in the UK might embrace more technology in school. … There’s not enough coverage of history or the learning of drama for [...]
3 | ashleytan
March 26, 2009 at 8:09 pm
@Wei Na: Yes, I read your blog entry about it.
I think that it will be more of the latter. The tools will be means to educational ends, not ends in themselves. But some tools like Wikipedia could be “taught” just like Googling strategies might be taught.
Another main point obscured by the title of the article is the fact that they want teachers to re-professionalise themselves by deciding what should be taught. And content delivery seems to be reduced to reinforce the idea that thinking skills and content creation by users should be more prominent.
Even if there was a technology-focus, the skills learned there and the value system would transfer to newer technologies. I think of it this way: If you are pro-technology, you will tend to try to stay in the know. That sort of practice and belief is something that drives lifelong learning.
4 | Miriam
March 27, 2009 at 5:49 pm
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Miriam
March 26, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I saw this in my techcrunch RSS feed! But my question here would be, are teachers going to teach the students “how to use” these tools, or are they going to be making use of these tools to engage the primary school students in learning?
It wasn’t exactly clear in the article about which approach are they going to take, but I was under the impression that they were going about it the first way – would we then face a problem of certain tools being a fad and becoming irrelevant in future?