Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Day 2 of conference

My 2 days at the Future Forward Schools Conference have sadly come to an end. Today was just as inspiring as yesterday, yet less confronting! The activities today were more focussed on thinking about our actual school and putting some initial thoughts into how we could begin our future forward plans.

Some interesting links referred to today include a fantastic youtube video of Ken Robinson talking about his thoughts around creativity and the fostering of the creative arts as being equally, if not more, important to the children of tomorrow than literacy and numeracy. His style of presenting is very amusing so if you can get hold of it, I highly recommend it.

In addition to this, we viewed a youtube video of the English X Factor winner from 2008, Paul Potts, talking about how he didn't fit in at school and was bullied, however his salvation was his amazing voice - which no one ever knew about. Watching his X Factor performances is highly emotional and makes you very mindful of students just like him that we may be coming across all the time.

I'll post some more about today's content later! :)

Monday, March 9, 2009

Future Forward Schools

I am currently attending a 2 day seminar about Future Forward Schools. So far I am finding the idea and philosophy incredibly inspiring and it has really ignited something in me! If you are interested in finding out more about what I have found out so far, visit http://www.teachingaustralia.edu.au/ta/go

You can download the booklet we are using in the course which presents 4 fictitious (?) scenarios that could be facing schools in 2030. It was very interesting exploring the scenarios today, taking on the various roles of teacher, principal, student, parent. It quickly emerged that the worst scenario on paper has a lot of relevance to the climate we are living in today!! And the nicest sounding scenario on paper had some interesting revelations from the perspective of the teacher....it seems in some regards, not a lot will change for the role of the teacher by 2030...or will it??????