Digital Education Revolution – provide your feedback!
In Australia we have the Australian Government Quality Teacher Program (AGQTP), which includes teacher quality and their impact on student outcomes. Considerable funding has been directed towards this. Rolling out a range of workshops in regional areas, as well as activities with professional associations. Also considering subject-specific standards and on-line professional learning resources.
Suggestions from the floor:
Portfolio of examplars at the national level. Podcasts as resource tools. Fund technology coaches for schools. Consideration for remote areas of Australia – and how to transfer information to regional and remote areas. Collaboration between various sectors. Use technology to assess literacy standards in national testing programs.
Responses to questions from the sessions:
If teachers don’t have time to do it all! Yet we are re-tooling our whole processes of education – the exploration is going to take time – and will make us more efficient and integrated in the end. Any organisation that is going through the process of transformation, will required us to commit. Our pedagogical knowledge has to change – technology can solve the pedagogical issues if we want it to. So bottom line – buy time to learn!
The key issue remains the need to establish collaborative environments. We have more knowledge than we can share with old technologies. Sessions like this symposium should be streamed, so that educators can talk in the ‘back channell’ promoting the conversation.
Assessment should be a trust relationship between the educator and the student. It’s a true social network in the making – information should be exposed and developed, and made transparent. We need to focus on the social networking of education.
The 21st century classroom is a state of mind. It’s a set of relationships between someone who wants to learn and someone who wants to teach. The relationship is around the transfer of learning. Education is dead: long live learning!
Photo: Listening to the Stars
judyoconnell.com 
Hi. Thought you might be interested to check out the forum I have just created for teachers to discuss the uses, shortcomings, lesson ideas, etc of the NSW DER Laptops. Click on my name to visit the forum and please pass the details on to other teachers.
Hi Judy,
I attended the education.au event and have just gotten around to reading your blog; linked to it via Technorati and all that. I am having a more determined – umpteenth – attempt at blogging:
http://darcymoore.wordpress.com/
Any advice welcome.
One of the best things about our Skoolaborate project is the sharing of ideas. At today’s meeting we started an impromptu discussion around ‘teaching to the test’ Because we had five countries present we were able to get 5 real views on how it affects what teachers do. Before the conversation I thought Australia was heading down a pretty bad road but the restrictions that are placed on other countries that result in completely squashing flexibility and creativity are astounding. The learning was sensational, the more we engage in these conversation the more we will all learn.
Judy,
I have enjoyed reading your blog for the past number of months but this is the first time I have written a comment. While not necessarily brand new to blogging, it has taken me a while to make the step from just reading to also having the confidence to respond on someone else’s blog.
The last paragraph of this blog set off a lot of bells and whistles in my mind as you so clearly stated what has been swirling in my mind and yet I have been unable to put it in words. The closest I had come so far to expressing my thoughts was using the overused words, lifelong learner or master learner. I have found that those words don’t mean anything to someone who hasn’t begun the journey towards 21st century literacy.
As I work in Beijing it was also great to read those words from someone who is close to my time zone. 🙂 I find communicating and learning in many instances difficult, especially in Second Life, because of the time difference.
Again, thanks for giving me a bit more of a framework to hang my thoughts on.
Heather
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