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Highly trained, respected and free: why Finland's teachers are different. In a quiet classroom adorned with the joyful creations of small children, Ville Sallinen is learning what makes Finland’s schools the envy of the world. Sallinen, 22, is teaching a handful of eight-year-olds how to read. He is nearing the end of a short placement in the school during his five-year master’s degree in primary school teaching. Viikki teacher training school in eastern Helsinki describes itself as a laboratory for student teachers. Here, Sallinen can try out the theories he has learned at the university to which the school is affiliated. It’s the equivalent of university teaching hospitals for medical students. The school’s principal, Kimmo Koskinen, says: “This is one of the ways we show how much we respect teaching.

Welcome to a country where teaching is a highly prized profession. Finland is going through a deep economic crisis, and there are financial pressures on schools, just as there are on the rest of the public sector. “We want to produce cognitive dissonance. Cg455hapde8qim0hp5uvrse14q4?utm_content=buffer0ea5a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter. Life w/o eMail - Episode III - What's Wrong with eMail? by Paul Jones #noemail - Google+ The History of the Future of Education. 6 min read (This was delivered at Ryerson University's ChangSchoolTalks.) It's a refrain throughout my work: we are suffering from an amnesia of sorts, whereby we seem to have forgotten much of the history of technology. As such, we now tell these stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge from Silicon Valley, all innovations are recent innovations, and there is no force for change other than entrepreneurial genius and/or the inevitability of "disruptive innovation.

" This amnesia seeps from technology into education and education technology. The rich and fascinating past of education is forgotten and erased in an attempt to tell a story about the future of education that emphasizes products not processes, the private not the public, "skills" not inquiry.

I've been working on a book for a while now called Teaching Machines that explores the history of education technology in the twentieth century. Image credits I’m fond of the flying firefighters. Radio. Paul Simbeck-Hampson sur Twitter : "Rethinking #Education. Cool cartoon strip that adapts one of Sir Ken Robinson's stories. 162. SIR KEN ROBINSON: Full body education. Sir Ken Robinson is a leading authority on education and creativity.

A former professor of education, he now advises governments and businesses around the world and is one of the most sought-after speakers on education. The quotes used in the comic are taken from Robinson’s now-famous 2006 TED talk How schools kill creativity. It is the most viewed TED talk ever, and also one of the funniest in my opinion (gotta love that dry British humour). If you haven’t seen it, then stop what you’re doing and go watch it. Robinson explains that the school system was invented in the 19th century to meet the needs of rapid industrialisation and is extremely outdated, focusing way too much on left-brain academic learning. “If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. In his best-selling book The Element, Robinson gives many more examples of how famous artists found their life’s calling (or ‘element’ as Robinson calls it).

Plus.google. Simbeckhampson : Adding an artistic twist to ... Plus.google. Education - Cause Analytics | Explore student and teacher performance visually. Intervene earlier. Squeeze more value out of your academic budget. See trends in student and teacher performance visually. Get a complete view of the performance of students, departments, courses, enrolments, study groups and tutors. Operations, finances, student recruitment, and planned giving represent arenas where business intelligence techniques are starting to be used with greater frequency.

Integrate student information data from different, disconnected systems. Create an early warning system to identify at-risk students. Why Education Is The Most Important Revolution Of Our Time : NPR Ed. Hide captionEverything I needed to know about learning, I learned in preschool? John W. Poole/NPR Everything I needed to know about learning, I learned in preschool? Learning is something people, like other animals, do whenever our eyes are open. By some accounts, education is a $7 trillion global industry ripe for disruption. No matter what you think you know about education, what's clear right now is that the old blueprints are out the window. Education has to become something more than regurgitating the past. That's what we'll be exploring at NPR Ed. The stakes are high, and so are our ambitions. So NPR Ed is not just for wonks. What Can You Expect? We're inspired by teachers like Nikki Jones, who leads a preschool class in Tulsa, Okla.

If we're doing our job, reading this blog should take you back to being 4 years old again, in the best way possible. Who Are We? To do all this, we'll need your help. Education - Cause Analytics | Explore student and teacher performance visually. Intervene earlier. Feature: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn | Features. Could England force a similar reversal? Howard Hotson asks Source: Getty England has the most extravagant provision of elite private schooling and some of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world During the past eight years, university tuition fees were introduced into most west German federal states. Yet in a few months, every single state will have abolished them. These facts raise a series of topical questions that cast current English higher education policy in a fresh and revealing light.

Why did Germany introduce tuition fees in the first place? Seven out of 10 states in west Germany introduced fees in 2006 or 2007; an eighth, Bremen, was prevented from doing so by a lawsuit. If such unanimity had been maintained, policymakers would now be declaring these changes inevitable. This raises a second and more interesting question: what immovable object blocked this seemingly irresistible force? Click to rate 0 out of 5 stars. TguBUrxY6Tg?utm_content=bufferc3b41&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.

What Is The (Underlying) Purpose of Education? Five years after this film was made it's interesting to review again in light of where the Education system is today. It certainly raised quite a number of questions in my mind: 1. How much can gun crimes, mobbing, drug abuse and ADHD, in schools, be related to the environmental conditions children have to endure? 2. [ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting 5-10% of school-aged children; more than 5 million U.S. children, or 9.5%, have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2007, according to the U.S. 3. From Wikipedia: "The War on Kids is a 2009 documentary film about the American school system. Note of interest: Named the best educational documentary by the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.

Also read this interview by Cevin Soling, director of the War On Kids. Interviewer: "What can kids do to improve the state of their schools and education? Schools should create an environment that nurtures learning. Paul Simbeck-Hampson - Google+ - What Is The (Underlying) Purpose of Education? Five years… Welcome to Forbes. The Purpose of Education. I set out to discover the purpose of ‘education’ after hearing about the purposed campaign. After reviewing some quotes from influential scholars and some definitions on the web, a four-sided picture of education’s purpose came to mind. I began with the Wikipedia definition of education. Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual.

In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. ~ Wikipedia The words ‘act’ and ‘experience’ jumped out at me as those formative effects that can happen everywhere and any time throughout our lives. This brought me to the first ‘purpose of education’ ; to negotiate a balance of push and pull between learners and their sources. Sometimes learners need permission to pull from their own set of sources. To answer that we must look within. Assessment in MOOCs. I was asked: "I was wondering how they might work with the Humanities, as I teach Seventeenth-Century Literature, Shakespeare and other related subjects, which require research papers and final examinations.

I can see using MOOCs for people who simply have a (non-credit) interest in these subjects, but I can't see myself marking 5,000 term papers, and a similar number of exams. Multiple-choice evaluation, as in science, is easily taken care of electronically, but not in humanities. I am sure this looks like a naive question, but I think MOOCs are a wonderful idea for people who simply wish to enrich their knowledge, and would like to know a little more about them. " First of all, the MOOCs I have worked on have not focused on assessment - they have been courses, yes, with a small number (20 or so) taking them for credit, but the vast majority of participants auditing. So the question of marking term papers never came up.

The problem with Klout is that it is simplistic and easily gamed.