This is what you get when you have plenty of other stuff to do. Oh it must be milestone time of the year again. My RSS feed from Sue Tapp in Aussie turned up this link to Yearbook Yourself. You upload a photo and scroll through the decades.
Sue asks how do we measure our change as teachers. I look back on the sorts of things I used to do with my class years ago that I thought were good. I reflect on them now and cringe- how teaching ‘fads’ come and go- what was good practice back then is no longer thought to be acceptable practice.
Looking back twenty years from now what will our students think of the sorts of things we are doing at the beginning of the 21st century. Will our education system still reflect the 20th century? Will we spend our days testing in order to improve student learning outcomes as they do in America. I hope not. (I’m pleased I teach in a high decile school if league tables become the norm in NZ).
This quote from the National Party Education Policy has me concerned as to what it really means.
“We will launch a Crusade for Literacy and Numeracy. And because parents want to know how their child is doing, we’ll introduce national education standards to help identify those pupils who are falling behind, and provide targeted funding to help them catch up.”
National Party Education Policy 2008
In saying that I would love to see more support for Te Kotahitanga that Professor Russell Bishop spoke about at ULearn07. Inspirational stuff.
The trouble is that if you were to travel through my family photo albums you would find some photos that look scarily like these.
I look back at how naive I was when I first started teaching and I’m so embarrassed. It is amazing how different my views are now that I’m older, more experienced, had my own family, and learned more about life myself. I am glad that I learned new things and moved in the right direction. When teachers stop learning, I believe we make ourselves obsolete.
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Allanah those pics of you are PRICELESS! I love em. Jaimee also loves em.
Hey just a thought but wouldn’t it be good if we could put our finger NOW on the things we would call fads in 20 years. What do you think is a fad today?
Part of me wonders if some of the types of blogging we do today will be a fad in the future…well I’m thinking out loud now and would predict that blogging will have likely morphed into some other form of collaborative/reflective/communicative tool and therefore considered out-of-date.
I think in the very near future speech to text software may well start making inroads into the way we input data onto a computing type device which will probably be touch screen and multi-functional.
I like the new Adobe CS4 which is able to identify voice from audio and make it into text so when you go to edit a movie you just click on the words you want to delete or select and the section is found in the movie.
Incredible stuff for me. The future is here!
Your comment about National’s education policy does smell of UK OFSTED and league tables to me.
Beaufiful pictures btw.