Well we started with the fun stuff tonight and got straight into working with robots! I was really excited to give this a try. Robots are a natural extension to coding, they're a great way to use those skills in a more practical way. Awesome for logic and sequential thinking too - as we discovered in this session! Programming can be quite complicated, but using the programme mBlock is a great way to go. It looks like Scratch and works in the same way, and is a free download - check it out here mBlock.
Getting stuck in with an actual robot was great fun, but hugely frustrating at the same time! It really highlighted some of the valuable skills that can come from these activities - we had to do lots of problem solving and collaboration and we needed a whole lot of resilience! We were asked to do the simple task of programming the robot to move when on white, and stop when it reached the black line (using its infrared sensors). Turns out this was not as straightforward as it seemed, especially when we discovered after about 40 minutes that we'd been given some back to front instructions! But we got there in the end and were very proud to have our group's robot as the one to finally stop when it was supposed to. You can witness our jubilant moment below!
After the fun and games we got into a discussion around the large question of 'How do we ensure education evolves to reflect the needs of today and tomorrow?'
We kicked this off by looking at some of the videos off the portal for this week. Our group had a chat about this one, which is well worth a look (aah having trouble loading it as a video but click the link!)
It has some really thought provoking arguments about the way education is heading and the inevitability of change. A central idea we discussed was the fact that we as educators don't have to change, but if we don't we will become obsolete. Simple as that!
Leading Change
The second part of the session this week focused on the idea of leading change. An early comment was that as participants in this course we need to be 'thought leaders', and that if we graduate from this and go away and don't lead change then the course hasn't achieved what it set out to.
I hadn't really thought about this side of it before, but on reflection I suppose it is true. I knew I would want to share my new ideas, but I hadn't really considered the fact that this goes hand in hand with needing to lead the process of putting these ideas in place. A small example for me in the last couple of weeks has been roping my lovely teaching team into trying some video making for our inquiry projects (which turned out great - thank you for your support ladies!). I guess this is also highlighted by the fact that many of us are now working in collaborative teams - if you want to put something new into action you have no choice but to lead others along with you!
The point was also made that change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that we don't always have the freedom of change - we have to work within a context.
For the activity part of this discussion we looked at a terrible (fictional) example of a principal's email to initiate BYOD, then reworked this into a more appropriate letter to the community. We used a document that has been put out by the PPTA about managing change within a school. This can be found at the link below and is a very valuable tool. Well worth a look!
One final comment, my Twitter addiction is growing all the time and I've had a couple of bleary eyed mornings after staying up too late engaged in awesome chats with other educators. This has been one of the best discoveries of my study so far and I cannot emphasise enough what a fantastic tool it is! Go forth and tweet folks!
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