Teachers must leverage the tools and technologies that children are using in their personal lives to engage pupils and prepare them with the research and presentation skills they will need in the workplaces of the future. Anna Mitchell learns this is generating an ever-increasing role for classroom technologies.
When you are teaching a generation of students that can access more information from an iPod Touch than is contained in an entire library you need to rethink teaching practices that assume learning is merely the transfer of facts and figures. Classrooms around the world are busy creating the workforce that will shape our planet for the next 50 years. These future employees and employers need to learn how to access, analyse, use and share the abundance of information that is literally at their fingertips. Furthermore, teachers are increasingly finding their pupils comfortable with technologies to access and share technology; using a wide variety of interfaces including touch and gesture control. When you can take a video of your friends on your mobile phone, edit it on a tablet, upload it to YouTube and share it with your ready made social network why would you expect anything less from a school project? In ‘Creating the future’ heads of learning, AV integrators and training managers divulge their experiences in the market and explore technologies that will facilitate education in a changing world. Source: InAVate
