Your comments are good but you lazily fall into the false dichotomy of hip new “engaging” teachers vs staid old “boring” teachers. While I love using technology in the classroom, and like getting students to use it where I can, I’d like to defend the honour of teachers who don’t like technology but still manage to engage their students through old-fashioned teaching skill, enthusiasm, etc. For students’ sake, I need to learn more from them about general teaching skill than they need to learn from me about technology.

Although I’m very digitally literate (I was a computer programmer before becoming a teacher), I think talk of 21st century literacy and new curriculum is overblown. Education has advanced quite well for hundreds of years by gradual evolution. The skills students need to learn are much broader than anything to do with technology. Yes, schools should teach students to use computers and the Internet effectively, and should acknowledge the new reality we find ourselves in with easy access to information. But that doesn’t mean “tech” stuff needs to be inseminated in everything we do.

Finally, “Classroom 2.0″ (whatever that is) and “Project Based Learning” are completely orthogonal. PBL has been around in various guises for ages, but only in isolated schools/classrooms where the educational will was there. PBL is an educational thing, not a technical thing. Good on you for championing innovative educational practices, but all such things are niche activities, and all the technology in the world won’t change that. Nor will all the tech-trained teachers in the world. Such teachers would still work within a system that typically demands a certain amount of content gets taught in a certain time.

So yes, let’s see changes to curriculum, but evolution not revolution please.

So 90% of their time they are stuck in the time-warp curriculum/assessment model. So while they may want a ‘better way’, they don’t see it as normal, and therefore don’t take it too seriously.

Until you get to a critical mass, then Classroom 2.0 won’t upset the incumbent curriculum model. Many teachers don’t want to be pioneers, with the endless set backs endured. Teachers are masters of procrastination and have a tried and tested discourse about lack of PD, time, facilities etc., so the pioneers (who know that it works better, takes less time and gets better results) simply have this wall of resistance to battle daily.

In my school, we went Classroom 2.0 in one year group through Project based learning. We are now in week 5. Students now complain that their ‘maths’ lessons are boring – they like the project based learning model that they are doing 90% of the time now. This obviously pressures Maths, at it opted out of the PBL model saying it was too hard to integrate.

To my mind, the only way at present to get the curriculum updated (or even have digital literacy on the agenda) is that get as many kids doing as much as they can in ways that baffle their regular teacher.

It is amazing to see in 5 weeks how student behaviour, effort and application has radically changed. Maybe it is the honeymoon period, but we are seeing new motivation and new creativity – which is leading them to question the validity of ‘traditional’ classrooms.

I have been advocating a formal whole school ‘digital literacy’ standard for a while. But the curriculum seems to be the holy grail of documents, and no one seems to want to start messing with the ‘mother of all documents’.

Its all good.

Brittney Ghezzi

That site and links like you have made here are bound to increase our audience and the amount of feedback that we get on it. Ultimately, we like what we are doing and would love to have it influence other schools, but also have people critical friend it.

The next step: how do we make it truly happen?

http://www.discoverychannel.com.au/iceberg_cowboys/index.shtml

I also remember learning about 1/3 in school as well. There you go, that’s what I get for relying on old information. My mistake and thanks for the learning opportunity.