Week 3

I was unable to participate in the tutorial today so I do not as yet have information regarding the topics covered by group members.


I looked at the Horizon Report which was to be studied as one of the readings for the week and have summarised it as follows:

• Horizon.K12 is a project that applies the process developed for the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project to the identification of trends and challenges relevant to elementary and secondary learning institutions, and to clarifying key emerging technologies that are sure to impact the sector.

 Key Trends:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
• As IT support becomes more and more decentralized, the technologies we use are increasingly based not on school servers, but in the cloud.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
• The perceived value of innovation and creativity is increasing.
• Technology continues to profoundly affect the way we work, collaborate, communicate and succeed.

Significant Challenges:

• The demand for personalised learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices.
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of schools.
• A key challenge is the fundamental structure of the K-12 education establishment- aka “the system”.
• Many activities related to learning and education take place outside the walls of the classroom and thus are not part of our learning metrics. 

Also I know that a guest speaker was to be present at the tutorial, Amanda Marrinan. Amanda is a Year 2 teacher who encourages her students each year to continue the tradition of blogging about their daily experiences in the classroom through the use of a blog which was created by a Year 1 class back in 2007. Amanda uses the blog as a way of communicating with the parents of the students regarding what they are learning each week and important dates to remember. Each of the students have their own blog which they can share their ideas about what they have learnt in class.