Week 27 Activity 3The NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in schools.
THe NMC Horizon report 2015 K-12 was steered by four main questions:
What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide?
Which trends and technologies will drive educational change?
What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome?
How can we strategize effective solutions?
The emerging trends that are discussed in the report are divided into those with short, medium and long term impact. All of the these trends resonate with me when I consider what is happening at our school. However two in particular stand out for me as we begin to move towards establishing our vision.
Long term Impact - Rethinking How Schools Work
Rethinking how school works is one of the long term impact trends that is outlined in the Horizon report. What does it mean to rethink how school works?
Johnson, Adams Becker, Estrada, & Freeman (2015) state that this trend is driven by the influence of innovative learning approaches. Schools need to change the traditional approach to learning to meet the needs of the students they are catering for and to create opportunities for deeper learning. In schools that are based on this traditional approach students are more consumers of technology not creators. Changing this needs to involve increasing student voice or student agency. Asking the students what, where, and how they would like to learn and responding to these answers may mean that the school day needs to be restructured and that teachers may need to approach the delivery of the curriculum with a different mindset.
2. Mid term Impact - Shift from Students as Consumers to Creators
As more and more teachers come on board in regard to trialling innovative approaches to teaching and learning the traditional approaches will be challenged. This has to happen for our students to be able to become creators of content rather than consumers of technology. In New Zealand at present in many teachers, while welcoming of technology, use it as a substitute for paper and pen rather than allowing students to become creators of content. Allowing our students to be more creative, to learn to code, to show their mastery of a topic in some creative way rather than a test or work sample is really important.
Innovative approaches to learning are being trialled in many schools. Getting students to work more collaboratively finding answers to driving questions about authentic problems ensures that students become more engaged in their learning
Because we have been investigating Project Based Learning (PBL) for our Mindlab assignments I have become very interested in this approach in particular. At first I was unable to determine the difference between Genius Hour, Passion Projects, 20% Time and PBL. I struggled with the question of how we would “cover” the curriculum when students were always able to follow their passions but the more I delved in the more hooked I have become. PBL gives the opportunity for teachers and students to set driving questions within a single curriculum area or an integrated approach - it is essentially a framework for deeper learning to occur, a framework where we can encourage students to become creators rather than consumers.
At St Francis of Assisi Catholic School (opened Feb 2016) we have been given a fantastic opportunity to rethink how school can work. We want to reimagine the traditional approach to school and provide what is needed for the 21st Century learner - we want our learners to be banging down the walls to come into our place of learning and we want our community to be assured that these students are being prepared for the world they will be working in.
I am keen to trial moving to a PBL approach in all curriculum areas. I don’t have a clear picture of what this could look like yet - that’s a little uncomfortable for me at the moment - but actually I am becoming more comfortable feeling like this.
