This Parent’s Adventure In The “21st Century Kennedy School Classroom”

“Are you wondering how we use technology to improve your child’s learning in the classroom?”… 

This just in: Teachers are no longer teachers.

It revolves around how students should be prepared (as in taught to adapt, assimilate and use existing technological knowledge) for a very uncertain future:

“By one estimate, 65 percent of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.” – Cathy N. Davidson, professor at Duke University. 

Teachers have become facilitators, equipping kids with the skills necessary to prepare for jobs that don’t exist yet – rather than train them only in the specific skills required for the jobs that exist right now. It occurred to me that being able to use different kinds of tech based on what’s available today becomes something of a separate school subject, in addition to traditional reading, writing, arithmetic and art (in other words it doesn’t take away from traditional means of learning and stimulation, rather, it stands right next to them).

While “Chalk n talk” is now very outdated, we were told that the use of technology in ICT learning should not be a novelty. “New” technology coming in has to be efficient, engaging, meaningful, not because it’s the Next New Thing. This in particular jumps out at me though my analogy is obviously derivatives-based and not a perfect fit – see, one of the things I believed in about dealing/ investing in derivatives was the counter-intuitive position that one shouldn’t go for the Next New Hairy Thing (i.e. complicated product) just because it was there and new.

There’s a valid reason – often when an investment bank’s structuring team came up with a new-fangled complicated product that other teams hadn’t learned to mimic and price yet, there was a huge amount of spread built in. In other words, a lot of “meat”. Some of it necessary (a new product means less counterparts willing to square off with the trader handling the product, which means the trader also bears more risk, which he has to build into the price of the product), some of it simply to take a higher margin (well d-uh). You want a product that is priced “close to the bone” – lean – because then it moves dynamically and quickly with the market, moving “in the money” quickly to make you a profit. Such a product is therefore usually not the first Complicated Thing Out There – it’s the second. Second Complicated Thing Out There means more traders have had time to price it, they’ll have more counterparts among themselves to trade and square off market risk, AND they’ve got more pricing competition meaning they can’t erm, get away with just anything. I assume the techie version of that is they’ve worked out more bugs before you buy it. Or someone else has come up with a way to improve your original product. Or simply that it becomes cheaper to produce/ buy the same product (I like to wait for sales. 6 months, a year in tech terms is probably a lot. Also, an awesome iPhone 5S doesn’t stop being an awesome iPhone 5S just because the 6 is out. I hope there’s a better tech support and accessories version of this for little kiddie learning tech though, since if you go to the Uncle Disneyland Apple Store in IFC now they have practically ZERO iPhone 5S accessories available anymore.)

But back to Rockstar’s school classroom. Us parents got to spend some classroom time in a typical way our kids might, one evening. In year 2 (around 6 years old), the kids are taught to upload pictures or documents onto the school-monitored shared drives for reports, share their work with the teacher and each other in their groups, or simply with their friends…

Yes, tech has changed the way kids learn so much. Ever thought your 6 year old would be happily taking pics on any device and uploading them about? Exactly. I daresay I suspect the teachers on average had a harder time teaching us than our kids, to swing the class 😀 *cough-dinosaur-cough* (Certainly any “Chai-nese” teacher would, because I’ve found Rockstar learns the language, particularly the writing, much, much faster and more effectively than yours truly.)

But anyway. Here’s part of my classwork :D:

Best Attempt At Pop-art Selfie

(Fine, I did find the right filter, but I liked the first pic better)

We were supposed to take a selfie (how youngster-oriented is this?!) of ourselves using a specified app we had to locate on the standard-issue school iPads and find the most pop-art-y filter (think Warhol), for a theoretical learning unit (that is not tha-at theoretical, really – Rockstar had an exploration of shapes plus self-portrait back in Year 1 based on the art of Paul Klee, and if I recall correctly it was Kandinsky + music in Year 2 (someone please scream at me on email if I got that wrong) because I remember Rockstar describing somewhere that the circles reminded him of the pulsing of… Jazz music?) – then we had to upload it to our child’s own profile login and share amongst our group via the class standard-issue Macs (which btw I might add are in better condition than my own ole’ Mac-with-sentimental-value that I am blogging this on :))

We also chat realtime while sharing – to see our comments pop up on each others’ documents:

“…This is (child’s name)’s mum. Lovely work !

😀

 well done

Nice to meet everyone!

(Rockstar) is so going to laugh at me when he sees this 😛 *dinosaur*…”

So I come home and I tell him we were given our kids’ school logins for the class and he immediately goes to see what I’ve done. He is just sooo tickled by this exercise. Too. Tickled.

Me: Oh, then can I have the doc for my blog please?

Rockstar: Should I make it so you can actually change things on it or only let you view it? Oh, maybe I shouldn’t let you change anything, it’s your classwork.

Me: Excuse me??? (Like, major power trip or what?!)

Rockstar: <LAUGHS><forks over doc with a “Well done on your awesome picture” – condescending, much? Humph>

Oh, and I especially liked to see the warning I then got:

“Visits to this document are recorded by Kennedy School

– you are about to access a document administered by the Kennedy School domain. Your activity on that document will be logged and viewable to the Kennedy School administrator….”

Pretty cool right? Real-time-or-otherwise sharing includes detailed logs! The auditor in me is so turned on right now. (But also note to self: Remind the offspring not to make snarky  or say anything dumbb on his friend’s docs!)

Epilogue: I think the most vital skill Rockstar is being equipped with is how to go out there into that rapidly changing technology-driven world and… feed his thirst for knowledge. The most vital skill he’s learning in his 21st century classroom at his school is how to learn. How to use the new tools available, how to dynamically build on that to able to use even more tools that pop up in the future. And to enjoy it, every step of the way.

It’s the difference between giving the kids the fish and teaching them to fish.

And then taking a picture of said fish on the iPad, using say, the Pop-art (or other learning-unit-appropriate) filter, looking up the species (with the child-safe search engines that the school tells us nonetheless are often monitored by them), sharing it on the school Virtual Learning Environment, sharing and accessing each others’ notes and comments…

Ps: Oh, and it is now one minute into my other child’s birthday.

Happy 3rd Birthday, my darling, darling daughter. This is just so… you.