About
Here at UWS we pride ourselves on a distinctive brand of Teacher Education that is focused of the challenges and opportunities we are facing in today’s world. As society is constantly changing, so too it is vital that teaching practices constantly evolve to remain relevant and aligned with the needs of students, parents and the community. In this blog we feature some of the very latest research and emerging developments in 21st century learning, presented by our leading academics from the School of Education at UWS. Please feel free to join the discussion, leave a comment and link to any articles that catch your eye.
On 21st Century Learning we contribute an additional post each Sunday fortnight for 11 months of the year. We take a holiday each January (as many Australians do over the Christmas period!). 2011 was our second year, and saw an encouraging growth in our readership.
We would like to thank all of our followers, readers, and the contributors from our academic staff at the University of Western Sydney’s School of Education for their ongoing support. With more than 20,000 hits in 2011, we are encouraged that 21st Century Learning is a useful source of information, and an opportunity to comment on and discuss issues, for those interested in future directions of education and the key issues we confront in providing contemporary, relevant and engaging approaches to learning. I hope you agree! Steve Wilson, Editor 21C.
Good morning UWS bloggers
What a great idea to have a blog on the School of Education homepage – the wordpress platform is a very good one – quick and easy to use. Well done! I am new to academic teacher education staff at UWS, I have had a terrfic time settling in, attending orientation lectures and meeting new colleagues and students. Web 2.0 technologies are important in learning.I am not certain if many of you are aware but from early March all teachers and students in NSW public schools will be able to access the new Department of Education ‘blogging tool’ called blogED. Quite an undertaking to roll out something like this for 70,000+ teachers and >1.2 million + students. It’s been extensively trialled with groups of teachers and students. Teachers can elect to make their blogs “public” or “private”. Last year when doing some behind the scenes work in the Connected Classrooms Program I wrote up some case studies about how teachers are embedding blogs into units of work in their subject area or KLA – over the coming weeks I’d like to share some of those ‘short stories’ and ideas with you – you might like to use them in your own teaching and learning, or when you are out on prac experience in schools – anyway put on your ‘blogging shoes’ and have a go …
Thanks, Jane – it’s good to have you on board at UWS, particularly with your experience in working at the NSW DET in the technology area. How about we get you to post the next 21st Century Learning blog entry? What really interests me at this point is the way young people use technology in their social (outside of school) worlds, to both network and learn, and how different this is to the way they are asked to learn in classrooms. My feeling is that in 25 years, school education will not look like it does now, simply because of the way young people access and create new knowledge – they really don’t need teachers anymore (or so some would argue). The challenge for we in Education is, I think, to find different roles and forms of teaching for teachers in this new information environment. I am sure many teachers and young people already have ideas on what these new forms of learning and teaching might be!