Change is occurring in teaching that will revolutionise the way education is delivered . Universities, schools and organisations like TEDed are giving access to the best teachers, content and curriculum available online and for free. Youtube has videos online on subjects from how to pick a lock to Financial Accounting. What is changing is the quality of the content and the quality of the courses.
When I was at school I was lucky because most of my science teachers were pretty good, however they were not great and probably a long way from being the amazing. Now, how much would it cost to write, video, illustrate and edit "the best" science lesson on something like the structure of the atom. Great content is out there. The BBC produced "Chemistry a Volatile History" which was brilliant, and Adam Savage produced a wonderful piece for TEDed on the history of scientific discovery. The two works I cite are examples of professionally scripted, shot and edited videos which in my opinion set the bar in terms of quality.
However as I said all you need to do is a quick search on Youtube and you will find a video on just about any topic you could think of. I worked with a chap called Mark Ransby who quit working in IT to become a secondary school math teacher. Mark told me a story about his year 9 math class who used to mess about and not settle into the lesson. This went on for months and months until Mark decided he would video a lesson at home on frequency distribution and post it on Youtube. Next day he played the lesson in class to silence. The class sat quietly and watched the video and paid attention. They would not settle to Mark in person but happily watched him on Youtube give exactly the same lesson he would have live. He ended up filming a whole series of lessons at home. You have to ask-and Mark did, why would the class pay attention to him on video and not live in person?
So, how much would it cost to create not just the best single chemistry lesson but how much would it cost to produce the best chemistry course. If we were to take the British GCSE or European Baccalaureate curriculum for Chemistry would it cost 1 million?10 million? 20 million? Imagine getting the best most inspiring teachers, the best animators and illustrators out of Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney, filmed and edited by professional cinematographers.
In part this has already started with the initiative by TEDed earlier this year. What is missing from TED is the structure of a course. The individual videos are inspiring and wonderfully made but they are currently only snapshots into single topics of much broader subjects.
How will this change the classroom? and how will it change teachers? Will teachers continue to try and teach classes the way they have always done. Should lesson plans be revised, Internet connections upgraded. Will classroom teachers be needed? replaced with teaching assistants would make sure the kids show up and don't hurt themselves. Or maybe we would need to reassess the entire role of the teacher. Instead of being responsible for the teaching they become responsible for the learning, able to spend more time checking that children have learned what they were supposed to or maybe learning something completely different because they were curious about it and they wanted to.
When I was at school I was lucky because most of my science teachers were pretty good, however they were not great and probably a long way from being the amazing. Now, how much would it cost to write, video, illustrate and edit "the best" science lesson on something like the structure of the atom. Great content is out there. The BBC produced "Chemistry a Volatile History" which was brilliant, and Adam Savage produced a wonderful piece for TEDed on the history of scientific discovery. The two works I cite are examples of professionally scripted, shot and edited videos which in my opinion set the bar in terms of quality.
However as I said all you need to do is a quick search on Youtube and you will find a video on just about any topic you could think of. I worked with a chap called Mark Ransby who quit working in IT to become a secondary school math teacher. Mark told me a story about his year 9 math class who used to mess about and not settle into the lesson. This went on for months and months until Mark decided he would video a lesson at home on frequency distribution and post it on Youtube. Next day he played the lesson in class to silence. The class sat quietly and watched the video and paid attention. They would not settle to Mark in person but happily watched him on Youtube give exactly the same lesson he would have live. He ended up filming a whole series of lessons at home. You have to ask-and Mark did, why would the class pay attention to him on video and not live in person?
So, how much would it cost to create not just the best single chemistry lesson but how much would it cost to produce the best chemistry course. If we were to take the British GCSE or European Baccalaureate curriculum for Chemistry would it cost 1 million?10 million? 20 million? Imagine getting the best most inspiring teachers, the best animators and illustrators out of Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney, filmed and edited by professional cinematographers.
In part this has already started with the initiative by TEDed earlier this year. What is missing from TED is the structure of a course. The individual videos are inspiring and wonderfully made but they are currently only snapshots into single topics of much broader subjects.
How will this change the classroom? and how will it change teachers? Will teachers continue to try and teach classes the way they have always done. Should lesson plans be revised, Internet connections upgraded. Will classroom teachers be needed? replaced with teaching assistants would make sure the kids show up and don't hurt themselves. Or maybe we would need to reassess the entire role of the teacher. Instead of being responsible for the teaching they become responsible for the learning, able to spend more time checking that children have learned what they were supposed to or maybe learning something completely different because they were curious about it and they wanted to.
1 comment:
So what do you think about Khan Academy? We love the virtual learning and the story of its genesis is fascinating.
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