Government E-learning Objective
The Government’s e-strategy (March 2005) clearly sets out what their strategic approach to ICT in the 14-19 curriculum. The report states that the Government “wants every child to achieve their full potential by ensuring that every school in England makes full use of ICT for learning and teaching, to improve standards across the board”. By having a strategic approach the government believes it can achieve four main objectives, two of which are related to the use of ICT: -
1. Build an open accessible system, with more information and services online for parents and carers, children, young people, adult learners and employers; and more cross-organisation collaboration to improve personalized support and choice
2. Achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness, with online research, access to shared ideas and lessons plans, improved systems and processes in children’s services, shared procurement and easier administration.” (DFES March 2005)
For these goals to be realised at KS4 it is important that pupils, parents and teachers engage with these systems at every stage within the school.
Personalised Learning through mobile technologies
Personalised learning includes ‘high expectations of every child, given practical form by high quality teaching based on a sound knowledge and understanding of each child’ Milliband, D (MP) (2004). This is a new and different perspective on the way teachers have been teaching in the United Kingdom. Personalised learning has started a debate about how we teach recognising that it will require not just organisational changes, but changes to the way that teachers teach.
Personalised learning became a major feature of the public policy debate during the autumn of 2003. A series of speeches by the Prime Minister and David Milliband, the Minister of State at the DfES, emphasised its status.
The title of the conference where David Milliband gave his speech (choice and voice in personalised learning) was ‘Personalising Education: the Future of Public Sector Reform’. Milliband explained that the reforms are not just happening to education but throughout the public sector, a point that was reinforced by the Prime Minister who said ‘that our entire welfare system has been designed to fit people to a system and what he’s challenging us to do is to fit the system to people’.
‘Personalised learning is not a matter of tailoring curriculum, teaching and assessment to ‘fit’ the individual, but is a question of developing social practices that enables people to become all that they are capable of becoming.’ Pollard A and James M, (2004)
In the 21st century educational imaginary there will be a new emphasis on customisation. Schools will move away from the ‘Henry Ford’ model (you can have any colour as long as it’s black) to a ‘Toyota’ model where students are offered a customised package of activities and programmes to meet their individual needs. Hargreaves sees personalising learning as:
• A version of customisation in education
• The core of educational transformation
• Involving incremental and radical innovation
• Demanding a new approach to development and research. Hargreaves (2004)
As we all know Hargreves suggests that the personalisation of teaching and learning is realised through nine interconnected gateways. He continues by saying that these nine gateways demand leadership from teachers and leaders at all levels.
Hargreaves acknowledges that no one school is excellent in all 9 areas and that possibly the curriculum gateway is the easiest of the nine gateways to personalise learning.
In both examples the interpretation of the government’s five key components of personalised learning put that the centre and provide a clear indication of the issues. That educators should be working on to successfully implement personalised learning. To do this Hargreaves suggests that new technologies play an essential role. Mobile learning devices such as Ultra Mobile PC or tablets are excellent tools for facilitating personalised learning if used effectively.
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Add comment October 28th, 2007
Tags: Mobile Devices and E-learning
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