Doing great
Posted on: January 6, 2012
Quote from this video of Sir Ken Robinson:
…the technologies that we have available in schools don’t make for great education, but great educators can make something great of them.
He said this in the context of turning alternative education into mainstream education. The rationale? We have “alternative” forms of education because the one-size-fits-all model of mainstream education is either losing relevance or failing.
A key solution? Leveraging not just on technology but on “great educators (who) can make something great of them”.
How many of our teachers subscribe to this as a personal philosophy? I estimate that perhaps one in ten has this built-in drive when they are fresh recruits. By the time they complete their first year of teaching, I might be labelled optimistic if I said that one in a hundred still hung on to this ideal.
But I think there is a self-sorting, self-righting mechanism. As more of our student teachers go mobile, they see the relevance of their smart phones in their lives. There is no need to sell the idea of incorporating that technology. The trick is to get them to discover how these mobile devices are educationally relevant and powerful to their students!
