Tuesday, 15 September 2015

How a Changing Education Landscape is Affecting Me and My Teaching Practice

 
The Changing Education Landscape is giving me an opportunity to explore various ways of teaching so as to make a greater contribution to the education of my learners.  First of all, the education system has been so static that it has failed to address the problems of society, and yet so many cultural and social changes have taken place since the designing of that system. The system is so boring to the students, places the children of given ages at the same level and subjects them to standardized testing. This is wrong since children have differing abilities and interests.  The Changing Education Landscape is meant to address such issues and has awakened me to the fact that there is need to think differently about human capacity.  I have learnt that in order for effective learning to take place, children should be allowed to mix according to their interests, and they should be allowed to explore, and that learning is more effective when there is collaboration involved as Sir Ken  says; 

"Most learning happens in groups" and that "Collaboration is the stuff of growth".

Separating the learners and judging them separately is not the best way to educate. The Changing Education Landscape promotes Information revolution. As people comment on a given topic, more about that topic is likely to come up through investigations and research. As users of digital technology, we are still failing to differentiate between its intended use especially the students who engage in watching porn movies and entertainment mostly.    

With digital technology and literacy we agree that as teachers the process of dictating notes to students cannot be part of this program instead we should give them room to find out things for themselves. At the same time there is need to give them a conducive environment that would enable them to carry out their own research and to learn. Allow them to curate the relevant sites for learning. Encourage and give them room to freely explore and just watch them being captivated by their discoveries. Through collaboration, research and investigation the learners can get more informed about a topic or issue. Learners can make their own choice of their publishing platform since there are a number of them available already, and they can also use technology to create anything beautiful like a wordle.

However, all this is not without challenges. First and foremost, the learners may end up more knowledgeable than the teacher and this is embarrassing the more reason why teachers need to be on board. Secondly, the time allocated for the subject on the time table may hinder rather than promote progress in cases of face to face programs. Thirdly, some of the students come from poor families and may end up left behind because they lack the tools. Also, there is a danger of the learners being misinformed in case the sites have not been properly evaluated since this is a platform where everybody is free to post anything.  Lastly, the students can easily divert to irrelevant and destructive sites especially when they are working on their own or away from everybody else.

 View my wordle. 

13 comments:

  1. Margaret thanks for the post. Its is true that students have varying abilities and interests. We need to capitalize on the in our teaching.

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  2. Good ideas Marg. Very well articulated. I keep wondering about the set backs: What can be done in order to overcome these?

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    1. My sister, this is where we come together to find a solution. Alone, I cannot achieve it. Thanks.

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  3. Very true Margaret, we should not lag behind ,we need to be informed all the time to avoid embarrassments.

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    1. True Julius. No one likes to be embarrassed.

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  5. Thanks Maggie. Enforcing collaboration will immensely benefit our learners. If you can learn so much from your CCTI group members, so as our learners can learn from one another if allowed to work collaboratively with the help of technological tools some of which they are already familiar with.

    Your wordle link wants me to sign in to Adobe. Try saving your wordle as a picture for this purpose, then go to your blog post, click edit. Top right of your edit window, you will see "insert image" icon. You will then insert your wordle image into your blog.

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  6. Indeed Maggie, the changing educational landscapes is giving us alternatives to the traditional way of teaching and learning which is better and enables us to move with the times.

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  7. Good piece Margaret. The setbacks are outweighed by the advantages and I think they will fade as we get acclimatized to digital literacy. Even the learners will be more knowledgeable about the consequences of abusing it.

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  8. True Patricia. The advantages outweigh the set backs and that is what is giving me the drive to learn all I can so as to be in position to help my learners.

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