Twitter to be taught at Schools

The Daily Mail is alight today with a story that “Ed Balls will today defend plans to teach primary school children about Twitter and Wikipedia while slimming down content in key subjects.

The earlier children learn about the internet and new technology the better, the Schools Secretary will say, or they will remain in the ‘technological dark ages’.

History and geography will be named ‘historical, geographical and social understanding’ in a new primary school curriculum.

Leaked draft plans, drawn up by former Ofsted chief Sir Jim Rose, show that primary teachers will no longer be required to cover the Romans, Vikings or Tudors in history and could drop both the Victorians and the Second World War.

However, the draft syllabus for English stipulates that ‘media texts’ and ’social and collaborative forms of communication’ should be covered alongside traditional works of literature.

These should include ‘emails, messaging, wikis and twitters’.

Wikis, as in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, are sites that can be altered by users.

Twitter is the social networking phenomenon that requires users to post ‘ microblogs’ just 140 characters long.

Mr Balls will tell the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ conference in Liverpool it would be ‘ nonsense’ to suggest children would learn about Twitter instead of the Tudors and that good teachers can ensure children learn about history and new technology.

‘Of course children should also learn about new technology. In my experience, the earlier they do so, the better,’ he will say.

‘In the same way we have a duty to ensure our children learn about history, we also have a duty to make sure they are not left in the technological dark ages – I believe good teachers are more than capable of ensuring the two things run alongside each other.

‘The modern world and the way in which we learn and absorb knowledge has changed radically and I suspect it will continue to do so.

‘We need to prepare our children and young people not just with knowledge but also with the skills to find information.’

But critics warned against draining lessons of academic content and said most children were accustomed to using modern media at home and needed no encouragement at school.

In his speech to ATL’s annual conference in Liverpool, Mr Balls will say children will be taught ‘a broad chronology’ of historical events such as the War of the Roses and industrial revolution, as well as making in-depth studies.”

Although the tradaitionalists may jump on the bandwagon, this is about more than simply “teaching twitter”.  Social Media networks are the communication method of the futre.  Schools have always been there to teach children the skills that they need to cope with life in the world, in the past this meant learning facts and information, but for the 21st century we have to ask ourselves why we need to “learn” the facts and information when we have permant access to a whole plethora of information on any particular topic.  Not simply the text book facts, the history of WW1 condensed into a simple list of battles and generals, but instead personal accounts and stories, maps, photosgraphs, images, the stories from the other side too, not simply the world according to UK historians.

It has been said many times here and elsewhere, that the challenge for teaching in the 21st century will be teaching children how to sort, sift and rate information.  What is fact, what is opinion, what are ravings by a madman with a grudge?  What is authority and what is unreliable.

We cannot assume that children will “abosrb” this information simply by using PCs at home.  Anyone with teenagers will know that some of the television soaps  almost become a living part of teenagers lives.  We see that reality TV has blurred the lines totally between fact and entertainment.  A new tv/film genre has been created, the docufiction.

20 years ago there was a similar outrage, as maths teachers decided to teach children how to use calculators.  Stating that yes, in reality, as soon as children had left school they would never use a slide rule, or long division, but that those academic principles should still be taught.

Frankly, I personally don’t feel that the world is a poorer place because children now work out Pie using a calculator.

Teaching social media isn’t about switching on, logging in an typing.  Its about teaching the awareness, of communication styles and skills, about gathering  and assessing information.

After all, isn’t the Social Media simply the debating societies of old?  And where as the debating societies were restricted to the priviledge few at universities and private schools, and also with the confidence and skill to talk in them, social media is open to all.

And that, we feel, is no bad thing.

My Space stamps down on Inappropriate Use by sex offenders

MySpace bans 90,000 users after sex offender search reports James Quilter, Brand Republic

“MySpace has banned 90,000 registered sex offenders and paedophiles following an investigation by online security experts. New York-based internet security consultancy Sentinel used a database containing the details of more than 700,000 registered sex offenders to target and remove relevant individuals.

The move is part of an initiative to make the site safer for consumers. Other features will include more sophisticated ways of verifying age and limiting the ability of adults to view the details of under-18s.”

Although sites such as Myspace and Facebook are supposed to be restricted to over 14’s, in reality, many younger people register.  It is virtually impossible for My Space to strictly enforce it’s age limits.  Young people, in particular teenagers, have a certain naivety about them which leaves them vulnerable on websites.  Older users are more aware of the “signals” that what they write, and the images they show, on their profiles, and the messages that these are sending out to other webusers.

 My space is seen as the venue for the older teens, those that have outgrown Bebo, but don’t really suit facebook.  And as such My Space can be misused by sex offenders.  It is reassuring for everybody involved with education and young internet users to see My Space taking such steps.

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Business Education Needs to be More Inspiring

An Offsted report published this month describes “too much” of secondary school business education as “uninspiring”

Offsted based their report on the inspection of 118 secondary schools between 2004 and 2007.    The report shows that there are widely different methods used for teaching economics and business studies, and that these achieved widely differing results.

Characteristics of the weaker lessons included too much talk by teachers, closed questions and the overdependence on worksheets.  An recurring theme throughout the report was that there was too much emphasis on the descriptive work, and not enough on evaluation and analysis.

The report also raises the issue that students are sometimes disappointed by the lack of pratical aspects to the courses, and specifically mention not enough, if any, time spent with local employers and businesses.

We, at Fantasy Couriers,  believe that Economics and Business studies has the potential to be one of the most engaging and interesting methods of teaching students.  Business studies courses and activities give students the opportunity to take skills that they have learnt from other subjects and to apply them in a practical environment.

For example, algebra and equations make for some pretty dry maths lessons. Students are frequently unable to properly grap the principles behind algebra because its a concept.

But if you take that concept, and drop into an environment that the student can understand and internalise, then suddenly principles stop being concepts and start becoming tools.

For example get students to apply the concepts of algebra to work out a cost price for a product, or a break even sales level.  How many units do you need to sell at what price….., is a much better springboard for discussion, involvement and understanding than “if a+b=c and d+e=f , then….”

 

Finance and Business is the most common post school application of maths and numeracy for most people, with the exception obviously of those who develop the skills further into higher education, and the sciences.    So why wait until children leave school for them to discover this, lets teach them to apply their knowledge, and how to use it everyday in a practical way.

Discussions here centre on the use of Maths, but this could be equally applied to many other cirriculumn areas.  For example Art & Design, there are a small percentage of people that are able to use their Art & Design skills to build careers in Art, Architecture, Fashion and the literay world.  But a far larger percentage will use their Art & Design skills in a busines environment.  Designing websites, advertising & marketing materials, business documentation, manuals etc.

We at Fantasy Couriers believe that we should not think of Business Studies as a subject on the curriculum, it is instead a vehicle which can take the theoretical learnings of other subjects and show how these subjects have a real practical and modern relevance to everyday society, and our economy and world as a whole.

Business is the thing that keeps the world turning, and the current economic crisis has demonstrated clearly to everyone that business in America affects household happiness in the UK, and it is vital that we teach our young people to understand this.

A full version of the Offsted report can be found here.

Digital Information will need a revolution in the classrooms

Microsoft commonly quote that “By 2010 the amount of digital information in the world is set to double every 72 hours.”

Blogging has now become mainstream with virtually all business having a blog with their website, and social networking means that pretty much everybody has at least 2 or 3 profiles.

The skills that we will need to cope with the mass of digital information are very different from the skills that anyone older than current school age will have been taught.  Traditional education centres around teaching information, and the student learns that information, and carries it around in their head.  Over time, recall of the precise detail of the information weakens, but the student still “knows” enough about it to go and refresh their knowledge through google, the web, or even still books.

In the future, the skills required will be centred around retreiving & gathering information rather than learning it.  And most importantly, about filtering information.

A google search on a general subject matter such as “Gordon Brown” currently returns about 15 million matches.  If we follow the logic we will soon have 30m matches, and then 60m…..etc etc. 

So how do we know which ones are right and which ones are wrong, which are fact and which are fiction, which are opinion and which are source documents.

When you can carry around the whole internet in your pocket, accessing it all in a second off your phone, or ipod or ultra portable laptop you don’t need to be able to remember vast quantities of facts and dates. 

Our mainstream schools currently teach ICT as a module, a specific subject taught in a classroom, learning word processing, spreadsheets, a bit of access, a bit of basic code, and if you are very lucky, photo and video editing etc.  Fundamentally, ICT lessons are not that different to those taught 10 or even 15 years ago.

ICT needs to disappear from the curriculum, and just be taken into every lesson in the same way that “writing” is.  Be viewed as a tool rather than a subject matter.  We teach our children how to hold pencils, and how to form their letters, how to read from left to right.  We now need to extend that approach to digital skills.

Will future educators teach children how to touchtype (will they even need to be able to type), how to form searches, how to skim read vast quanties of data and extract the one relevant bit.  How will the examination process work, what use in the digital world is an qualification about recalling information?

One thing is certain, the debate on education in the digital future is just starting.