Time's are changing

Today CTYI held a Technology Day for parents, a way for us to share some of the techie things we and our tutors use on a fairly regular basis. We had a good crowd for the day somewhere around 150 attendees in total. There were a few really cool topics covered, my slides centered on the general things available to folks on the web, a quick explanation of open source and creative commons and some bits and pieces I think were important for parents to know about, really I guess it was mostly context for how CTYI uses these things in our courses and content. Slides are embedded below and you can see my speaker notes if you click the gear icon.

My talk was followed by four other, a fantastic Multimedia tools talk that covered GIMP, Pixlr, Sculptris and some other really cool stuff; a talk on App Development and Coding that covered some of my personal favourites such as MIT App Builder, Scratch and general introductions to coding for parents; a talk about a great new web app and soon to be iOS app called Symmetry School made by Spraoi School; and a quick talk about the Gifted and Talented Network Ireland, a support group and community of parents of gifted kids.

All of the other talks were great, really interesting and I came away with some great ideas for some of our correspondence courses and some other cool projects. Overall the whole experience left me with lots of ideas. The idea that's rolling around in my head right now is how the internet has so fundamentally changed what is available to education, things like YouTube offer a wealth of information for students and teachers, Khan Academy provide lots of cool lesson that are pretty entrenched in the flipped classroom and gamification ideals and the likes of edX are making learning available for free to anyone with a connection. That's a far cry from just reading texts and cramming the facts in.

I feel the internet is offering so many ways for us to learn, not just kids, and especially for everyone to create things that help themselves and others learn. So many different ideas are available in creative commons and open source licenses, coding is becoming an essential skill for almost any endeavour,  it's more and more important that people are able to create things for the web to show their portfolios or what have you.

As a teacher, especially in mainstream schools with national curricula and everything that comes with that it must be absolutely daunting. I'm lucky in that I get to use or do just about anything I want when I teach and I'm not bound by many restrictions thanks to our place as an educational enrichment programme. I get to test out all the cool toys and see what combinations work best, I even get to do a whole doctorate on it!

I'm a pretty lucky guy.