Book Creator | The BIG Picture - A short guide to using Book Creator in education

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PROF. MICHAEL FULLAN

6Cs OF EDUCATION

These skills are slowly replacing rote learning

But there’s still a long way to go before the education landscape can fully adapt to these 6Cs. Teachers would love to change the way they teach to give students freedom to practice these skills, but on the whole, the reality is that the curriculum is still geared to measuring success through testing. And there is so much pressure on teachers to get “good results”, that there is little time or energy left to promote creativity.

Further reading: The State of Creativity in America's Schools by Dr. Beth Holland (Dec 2019)

How
do you measure creativity?

It is tempting to turn to technology to help facilitate this shift in education

Since 2010,

when Apple introduced the iPad to schools, and more recently with the proliferation of G Suite for Education edtech has provided teachers with all manner of apps and tools to modernise learning.

However, even in the edtech sphere it’s taken a while to learn some important lessons about turning to technology in the classroom

There needs to be an emphasis on creativity over consumption

The best apps allow students (and teachers) the freedom to build, write, code, draw, and combine many multimedia elements to differentiate the experience for the student and allow curiosity and creativity to be fostered.

The worst apps are no better than filling out a worksheet, only via a touchscreen instead.

Teachers have narrowed down the apps they use to a select few that they know work for them

The temptation in the early days was to load the device with every free app they could find.

Thankfully, there is more education and advice for teachers now to guide them to the best apps for their situation. What we still need is a commitment from districts to supply the budget to support teachers not only with devices, but with the apps to make those devices useful in the classroom.

In many cases, you get what you pay for with free apps. That said, we are now seeing giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Adobe develop a long-term strategy to make high quality educational software free, to build a user base for the future. Whether this is good for education or not is a separate discussion.

And perhaps most importantly,

relying solely on apps does not equate to good learning

There is, and will always be, a need for high quality teaching, otherwise the technology is redundant