We recently attended an ELT Consultants Conference on a Broad General Education. There were some interesting and very thought provoking presentations from a variety of speakers and we particularly enjoyed the opening keynote from Keir Bloomer.
Of course we attended the technology workshop that was run by friend of Do-Be Ollie Bray. Ollie’s presentation was on what skills do young people need to access a broad general education.
Here are some of the thing he said:
1) A broad general education needs to include modern contemporary skills that will continue to evolve over time. For example, why are many schools still teaching kids how to write cheques in financial education classes but make no reference at all to on-line banking and some of the security issues that surround this area.
He also made an interesting point about money. Arguing that it will be increasing difficult to get young people to understand money as we are ‘physically’ handling less and less of it due to the rise of digital transactions.
2) On-line learning will become increasing more important particularly if we want to give young people a range of subjects to study in the senior phase. However, it is actually very difficult to learn formally on-line. This is one of the reasons that on-line courses have quite high drop out rates, particularly for younger people.
Ollie argued that as part of a broad general education, we need to make sure we are preparing young people with how to learn on-line in the senior phase.
3) As you might imagine Digital Literacy got a big mention throughout the presentation and the need to make sure that young people are able to recognise persuasion, assess the reliability of information and understand the credibility and value of digital resources. He stressed that this should not just be digital text but also extend to being able to critically analyse images, video and mashed up information sources.
4) We need to teach young people (and teachers) how to search the Internet correctly. This includes the use of the main search engines such as Google and Bing but also emerging search engines that may be appropriate for other types of work such as Quintura (visual search), DogPile (search aggregation) and InfoMine (deep search).
The demonstration on how to use Google to search by reading level was also particularly interesting.
5) Linked to this was the requirements that young people should have a better understanding of copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property. Again a number of tools were used to showcase this including:
The (on-line) plagiarism checker.
TinEye – a reverse image search to see where images have been copied and duplicated online.
An understanding of Creative Commons – including Xpert from Nottingham Trent University.
6) Finally the need for us to be doing more in schools to help children and young people develop thinking skills, agility and resilience.
Overall a very interesting day with lots of things to think about for the future.
Tags: CPD, digital literacy, digital numeracy, digital safety, Education
