Wednesday 15 August 2012

Twitter School


Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend the free part of the Learning Without Frontiers festival and was even luckier to see the wonderful talks given by several inspirational twitter folk (@ohlottie@kvnmcl@ianaddison@ideas_factory@jodieworld@jacksloan @ebd35@davidErogers@drdennis@oliverquinlan) about what they are doing with technology in their schools right now.
Although I've heard about most of their projects already on twitter and through blogs, hearing the projects talked about in such an enthusiastic way really added another dimension to the ideas for me and it really left my head buzzing with possibilities.
However, it was a tweet put out by Ian Addison at the end and a question asked by another audience member that really got me thinking:
Tweet
Wouldn't that be fab? All these inspirational people in one place, learning, feeding ideas of each other and having a great time trying to change education. Working with people who work like you do. Where everyone is already into technology and open and willing to try new things. The school and the children in the school would be brilliant. I have no doubt about it.
BUT...
It would be brilliant for only those children and teachers who went to that school. Putting all the inspirational people from twitter in one school would take them away from all the other schools and teachers and children that we currently all work in. Although it's hard work at times (all the time for some of us!) trying to change people's opinions and attitudes towards technology at least we are all spread around the country trying to make that difference anyway. 
The question from the audience member was about whether what is going on in these twitter teachers' classrooms is the norm. Although I would agree that there are many teachers out there not on twitter trying some of this stuff I'm not sure (basing this on my own personal experience) that this is the average teacher, trying to innovate their teaching and learning. Another reason why we can't have a twitter school until we have made it the norm. We've got to keep fighting our corner in our own little way and one day we might manage to change the world ;-)

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