NSW LearnScope Blog & Podcast

Tucked away over in one of Sue Water’s blog posts I found this question posed which cries out for a response….

“My kids definitely are not using podcasts, wikis or blogs at their schools. Are your kid’s schools? Why are our kids missing out of this part of their education? “

There are loads of examples of social software use in primary school settings.
Dave Warlick often makes comment and is a good one to watch on the associated opportunities and issues.

A 5 minute trawl in Google yielded these examples:

Sandaig Primary School - Scotland

Orange Grove Primary School - WA

Apollo Parkways Primary School

Ringwood North Primary School - Victoria

Learning2Go - Wolverhampton City Learning Centre, UK

Inchinnan Primary School - UK

and also this cool little site for supporting it.
Espousing the virtues of Web2, for any educational sector, is starting to feel a little tedious but here we go again….Without access contemporary primary schoolers are missing out on:

• relevancy
• exposure to a global audience for their thoughts, writing and work - it’s well known that by providing a real audience the quality of work increases
• having a voice as an individual; having a say
• developing contemporary literacy skills in an authentic context
• connecting with others around the world, receiving feedback and comment, gaining exposure to differing cultures, values, ideas, ideals
• developing a wide range of multimedia and ICT skills via project based learning

and so on and so forth, the list goes on.

I think a far more important question is why these exemplars are tucked away in pockets of action and not more wide-spread. A couple of weeks ago in my post following the Catholic education conference I alluded to the notion that innovation rarely spreads upwards (although sometimes slowly sideways) from the point of contact. The beauty of what is happening in the Catholic Education system here in NSW it would appear, is that contemporary e-learning practices have support (and even expectation) from the top down.

I suspect in many schools there are individual teachers doing great stuff with their class behind closed doors - talking to the world in a vacuum - connecting globally but unsupported locally. Until there is policy and senior management support this is where it will remain - in isolated pockets.

But we also need young GenY+ teachers rolling out of Higher Education who not only have the confidence and culture, and the policy support as above, but also skills and understandings around contemporary e-learning pedagogy - what is useful in educational settings? why? and how they can be used effectively to enrich teaching practice and meet learners needs? Being a GenY teacher is a good start but it’s not enough; our teacher education programs must be up-to-date.

Finally, parents need to be vocal and demanding. If I was a parent of primary school aged children I’d be asking how new and emerging technologies were used in the school curriculum, and what the school’s notion of ‘literacy’ was and how they supported the development of contemporary literacies.

[image: shapeshift]