Edu Gridlock Part 1:

I enjoyed hearing Seán Ó Grádaigh’s (@SeanOGraTek) presentation at the 2016 uLead conference.  In his presentation, Sean shares the journey of preparing pre service teachers for experiences in schools with 1:1 iPad programs.

Throughout the journey, information was gathered about individual technology skills (quite varied), attitudes towards using technology with students, building skills and capacity to use the technology more effectively and changes within these areas. Evidence collected showed significant growth in each of these area.

The interesting twist in the story was the shift to extending the use of the technology to something transformative – tools to capture and document their own (pre service teacher) lessons, experiences and reflections.  With intentional development of new ideas, the students used a variety of tools including facetime, audio (GarageBand), video (iMovie) and writing tools to capture their learnings and reflections in different formats.  iTunes U was used as a platform to share and comment within the class group.

In follow up correspondence, Seán has shared these 2 books which outline  practice:

I was impressed that the journey ended with improved skills in using technology to enable better teaching and learning, that attitudes changed and that personal, and professional reflective practice was established in this manner.

In reflection, I note that the use of the Apple environment allows for seamless flow in the process of learning, documenting and sharing.  The notion of using a system that is easy to use, reliable, and has high compatibility is an important consideration in the planning and that there are other ‘device agnostic’ platforms that could accomplish this.

I wonder, what would education look like if this happened in all preservice teacher programs?  Would you change your practice and help move the mountain?

~Mark