change education

I can see some results from my blog in action:

http://educatedeviate.wordpress.com

It took me awhile to come to terms with the reality that I would major in education; that I would teach. I’ve spent my 30 years on the planet advocating a good education for every person, and complaining about the ability of obtaining one in some parts of the world, including this, the United States. I bit the bullet, decided I would work for a very low salary because I would love what I was doing as a teacher. I will start changing education within my own circle of students, such that it becomes the socially desirable thing to learn more and more. I may not change the whole world, but I will try.

i would love to help teachers get an insight into things they can do differently especially by using technology in the classroom in a very substantive way. The other thing I would love to see is the realization that if No Child Left Behind is truly going to work, then all students must take the same standardized exams in all 50 states. However, that does not mean that teachers must teach the same way. I trust teachers to know what works best and to seek out good formulas that work with their students. yes, I know that there are the minority of those who don’t do much and want it easy, but there are a good number who are hard working, creative individuals who I trust as professionals to seek out the best methods and practices to use in their classrooms. And yes, I would like to see educators treated as professionals.

One of the first things anyone can do to change education is to increase awareness of the issues surrounding education.

I had planned to start a project called Brick In The Wall, a series of projects & activities based on increasing awareness of alternative education in Malaysia. It’s kind of dormant at the moment, but one thing I’ve been doing to support that is to start a blog about it: EducateDeviate , which talks about alternative educational opportunities in Malaysia.

I would like to hear what other people are doing with regards to education in their countries. Share your ideas!

Although most of us believe that communication skills and the ability to solve problems are the main goals of education, I believe that most schools still aim to teach facts.

The connectedness of things (flickr, 43 things). The finding of solutions (google searches). The growth from feedback (amazon, ebay). The scaffolding of knowledge (sourceforge). The warp and the weave of a fabulous education seems to be more like the newest wave of internet apps than a traditional classroom.

I believe in sitting in circles with my students and talking about books, and characters, and ideas, but when it comes time for us to WORK on our own, I think we need different tools. I also think we need to knock down the classroom walls. As a teacher, I don’t expect to have my best ideas in the 50 minutes I meet wih a class. Schools need tools where people learn all of the time and their ideas are all fed back into their own education rss.

My biggest chance to change education is to combine technologies like this site with the fabulous open source platform, Moodle (http://moodle.org).