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Unread 16-12-2006, 19:24
Conor Ryan Conor Ryan is offline
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Re: TIME: How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century

I'm a big fan of TIME, it was an interesting article to read (could of used a cooler cover though)
  1. What do you think is a global student (after reading the article)?
    • I attended an International Elementary School in England for 3 years (it's not as different as they say) other than that, I'm involved with FIRST, I worked in a Science Lab, I Science and Technology classes are my best subjects, I am a global student. I am awful when it comes to languages, but you can blame the school system with not introducing it early enough (it didn't start seriously for me until 7th grade).
  2. What do you agree with in the article?
    • The idea of Portable Skills - learning skills that can be applied in so many different ways, than again there is nothing new about it, people are always doing it.
    • ETS's idea of a technology/communication skills standardized test, lets hope they get it right and college's then demand it. Technology/Communication capability is as much of a skill as being able to comprehend Shakespeare, understand Fermat's last theorem, know what the Bergeron effect is. The SAT's or ACT's don't test that, I think it should.
  3. What do you disagree with?
    • The idea that people read differently now than they did before, they are over analyzing the situation here, every generation has faced the problem of irrelevant information, we just happen to have a lot more of it than our parents did.
    • Math and Reading classes are needed, no more or no less than they currently are, however classes like Technical Writing/Reading, or Applied Mathematics may make more sense at higher levels.
  4. What does your school do to make you a 21st century student?
    • People are scared of change, the idea of a "Learning 2.0" system scares the pants off of any Board of Education, what they need is development. Get it down to a science, and gradually grow it. Hopefully it'll evolve.
    • A few years ago we had a major initiative to give every student a laptop, they didn't market the idea as well as they could of, and in the end voters were too scared of it (mostly because they didn't realize how cheap it really was, less than 1% of the proposed budget)
    • Schools need more software on the computers they already have so they can stop students from exploiting the ability of the Internet to not learn what they should be learning.
    • Some genius kids are gonna get together and put all the answers to any open-source education worksheets online somewhere, it's gonna be a problem (see above comment).
  5. My teacher decided today that we would turn this idea into a project, and propose ideas to make our school more 21st-century. We're going to work on them occasionally throughout the year, and then at the end of the year, she wants to present them to the administration. What would you guys do to improve your school?
    • Ok, so everyone in school has heard about bringing technology into the classroom, as students you and I know where teachers tend to go wrong with bringing it into the classroom, do something about it.
    • Try to get more options of languages to younger kids, all elementary students in my school take Spanish and English, but what about French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Portuguese these are all languages that are in the world in major proportions, what about them too? Tomorrow's world will have the same problem we face, we don't speak enough of the same languages.
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