Personalising the learning app

I think there's still a bit of confusion for some over the term "personalising" learning. 

“Make Learning Personal” (Bray & McClaskey, 2015) states that in a personalised learning environment, “Learning starts with the learner. Learners understand how they learn best so they can become active participants in designing their learning goals along with the teacher. Learners take responsibility for their learning, they are motivated and challenged as they learn so they work harder than their teacher.”

The challenge for us educators is to find how the system can fit the learner, rather than the other way around.

I've come to think of it like the Stuff App. Here I'm able to personalise my news feed and scroll past the stuff that's not relevant. I can change my view to compact or expanded and I can select local news or whatever category I wish to include. Some might take this for granted but when we think of how News has evolved over time, this app approach certainly allows for personalisation compared to the news on TV. 
When watching TV News, we have to wait for the parts we're really interested in and sit through all the irrelevant parts. Even in a newspaper i'm able to skim over the stuff I have no interest in - although I've had to pay for the whole paper!


I guess a lot more media is heading this way - how many under 20 year olds actually watch "free to air" TV? I'd suggest not many. They've become accustomed to viewing what they're interested in, be it on youtube, or paying for a TV series they can download and watch immediately, rather than waiting for it each week on TV.

So, how might this apply to education?

How might we enable students to pick and choose the parts they need and want rather than having to wait for the "newsreader" to get through all the boring bits or having to wait for the weekly instalment?

Why not let our students download what they want, when they want and have a more personalised experience?

What's the point of School?

Professor Guy Glaxton posed this question in the title of his 2008 book, "What's the point of School?" It's a punchy title that contains a huge question!

I've been writing a section for our school website called, "Our Future Direction" and I'm using this to ask largely rhetorical questions of the parent community at our school. I'm drawing attention to this via the school newsletter and am hopeful that people are considering the ideas ahead of some consultation that we will have about the future direction of our school.

I've come to this. What is the point of school? Things have got complicated. Really complicated. So, it's important to remind oneself of the moral purpose of what I'm doing. For me, and I hate to sound like a Miss World contestant here, but I do want to make the world a better place and to have world peace.

We need to consider what's really important here. What do we value most in education? In school? What are we all about? Why do we do what we do?

Watch the clip below and ask; why do we do what we do? What's the point of school?

Update on my thinking

Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a NZ perspective is challenging me and inspiring me. Authors Rachel Bolstad and Jane Gilbert published this in June 2012. A NZC update from Issue 26 in the Education Gazette does a 4 page summary of this too.

Ok, so we all know that something needs to change in education. In some cases possibly a lot needs to change. The success of this is hinged on my ability as a leader in my school to work out the process for this change. What experiences and learning might my staff need? What systemic changes might we need to make?

First question. Why change?
Basically I would challenge a lot of schools to identify at least 10 things that look different in their current classroom to a photo from the 1900s. Actually, we did this at the start of the year. Kind of like the "spot the differences" activities we did as children, but this time we tried looking a bit deeper. Yes, blackboards have changed to whiteboards/smartboards and the desks have changed a bit. Classes are generally smaller and the teacher looks a bit friendlier too. The biggest change we could see was the technology. Desktops, laptops, ipads. We still have 4 walls, one teacher and a certain number of students in there. Not a lot else seems to have changed. Why not?

I think we, and by we I mean schools, are kind of stuck. We think we have to keep on doing what we've always done because that's the best way. Obviously there are lots of exceptions. Some schools have been able to have modern learning environments (mles) built and I do believe that the physical environment effects the students and allows teachers to operate in non-traditional ways. So the challenge for schools, like mine that still have traditional classrooms, 4 walls etc, is to make changes in the physical set up that show the students that things aren't the same, that we won't be doing things how we always have.

So what type of teacher is needed? Clearly someone who can make a paradigm shift and operate their class in a non-traditional way. And that leads me on to Chapter 6 - "Changing the script": Rethinking learners' and teachers' roles.