Last night Nathan and I attended a special parent info session at school, regarding their Technology Plan for the next school year. It was led by the Primary ICT Coach.
She was talking about the ICT standards and benchmarks that are in place, how they follow them. She explained how school is using, developing and extending the BYOD (=Bring Your Own Decive) classes and the 1:1 iPad classes for next year. Finally she was also talking about how they will be introducing Google Apps all across the G2-5 from next year, some pretty big changes.
It was quite an interesting talk and I'm really glad we went (as usual in any school, it seems to be the same parents that go to all of these kind of things...), but it was also quite scary.
Amongst all the other information, she showed us this video, called "Did you know?", which was full of true, interesting and quite frankly very scary facts about education, and about the world and the technology evolution in general.
Here's a few things I learned:
- China will very soon become the #1 English speaking country in the world.
- The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ, is greater than the whole population of the USA.
- The Top 10 in demand jobs of 2013, didn't even exist in 2004!
- If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world.
- The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years, four students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study...
- We are currently educating students for jobs that don't yet exist,
teaching them how to use technologies that haven't yet been invented -
in order to solve problems, we don't know are problems yet!
No wonder educating the children of our time, is such a challenge.
No comments:
Post a Comment