NKNE 2008 – 6th Edition - (Page 13)

new KNOWLEDGE for a new economy NETWORKING Penny Milton, CEO, Canadian Education Association KIDS, COMPUTERS AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION uring four days in August Grade 7 students from a public school in Hong Kong and Grade 4 students from a Quebec school worked together in Toronto on research questions about the ecosystem health of two ponds, one in a city park and another at the zoo. They sampled water, measured air and water temperatures, turbidity, pH, oxygen levels and conductivity and made careful observations about the plant and animal life in and around the ponds. They developed hypotheses to explain the differences between the two ponds supplementing their Cantonese, French and English with gestures and drawings when understanding each other was difficult. Education’s emerge Wireless Learning Project was initiated in response to a growing trend toward one-to-one mobile computing in school. Two big questions challenge education decision-makers. What difference does one-to-one mobile computing make to learning? Does that difference merit the large initial and ongoing financial investment in the technology? The second of these questions is probably the easier to answer. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization is shipping machines to developing nations at a unit cost of $188 with the aim of creating educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with “a rugged, lowcost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.” Intel intends to make its Classmate PC, a competitor to OPLC’s XO machine, available in North America and Europe for under $300 and other manufacturers are expected to follow suit. The annual average cost of educating each public school student in Canada is almost $10,000. It may not be cost that bucks the trend towards radically new learning environments for children and youth. But it could be a lack of vision. Whether or not the trend to 1:1 computing in schools is worthwhile will depend not on the technology itself but on what teachers and students do in these new learning environments. THEY ARE COLLABORATING ACROSS CULTURES AND NEGOTIATING UNDERSTANDING ACROSS LANGUAGE BARRIERS. The Chinese students explained that their outstanding fluency in English had a lot to do with collaborative work with Spanishspeaking students in Mexico using online connections and video conferencing during the school year. The much younger French-speaking students gained new enthusiasm for their English studies. These children are ‘knowledge builders’. Not only are they learning science by improving their understanding of natural and man-made environmental phenomena, they are collaborating across cultures and negotiating understanding across language barriers. Social networking is growing among classes in different parts of Canada and with schools in many different countries. Kids are creating websites, blogs, wikis and podcasts. They are using YouTube, MySpace, cell phones, notebooks and laptops. They create and publish their ideas and they build on each other’s work. Of course, there are dangers to children on the Internet but there is also a vast wealth of valuable information and resources, experts to contact and worthwhile communities to join or create. Schools that embrace social networking teach students how to use it responsibly and safely. All Canadian schools have Internet access although some still wait for the broadband high-speed capacity that those in the south take for granted. All have computers. In a select few, every student has a laptop. Maine became the first US state to provide every middle school student with an iBook. The Eastern Townships School Board in Quebec was the first school district in Canada to provide all students in Grades 711 with laptops. New Brunswick recently completed a research project to find out the impact of providing dedicated access to a notebook for each student in Grades 7 and 8. Alberta IT MAY NOT BE COST THAT BUCKS THE TREND TOWARDS RADICALLY NEW LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH. BUT IT COULD BE A LACK OF VISION. Standardized test scores often don’t change much in 1:1 learning environments possibly because they measure so little of what students are actually learning. Evaluations of oneto-one mobile computing projects do report that students consistently demonstrate effective research, analytical and evaluative skills; they write more producing work of greater length and higher quality than previously; motivation and persistence levels are higher; students with special needs increase their confidence and quality of work and students become better learners and more responsible for the quality of the work they produce. They become literate in the technologies that have changed the nature of business, politics and the ways most of us find information. As Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OPLC tells us, computers for kids is “an education project, not a laptop project.” Equipping teachers with the new models of professional practice and the skills essential to fulfilling that promise maybe the most important investment we make in learning in the 21st century.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NKNE 2008 – 6th Edition

NKNE 2008 – 6th Edition
Canada's Future
The Role for Canada's Research Universities
The Life Changers
Kids, Computers and The Social Networking Revolution

NKNE 2008 – 6th Edition

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