PierreAntoine Ullmo

Tag: student

  • Technology in the classroom: lessons learnt from a mountain bike ride

    laptop
    Technology in the classroom.

    What is the relationship between a marathon mountain bike ride and a classroom experience?

    Last weekend, I spent the whole day mountain biking in the country side near Barcelona. For 120 km, our group of 14 bikers rode through small trails, many of them hard to find, and we came back at night using headlamps to find our way through the woods. Another rider and I had brought a GPS. We started following our tracks, sharing indications that appeared on our screens, looking for consensus each time we had doubts or different interpretations. Following GPS indications is not as simple as it may seem, especially in a group. It requires technology understanding, interpretation skills and consensus. Working with technology in the classroom requires the same ingredients, and consensus is hard to reach. Students using tablets in the classroom may be tempted to “follow their own track”, i.e. make individual use of technology. The teacher in the classroom is, like any GPS holder, challenged by another GPS holder to find the right trail.

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  • Open education: “c’est du bricolage”

      Teachers’ workshop, Hanoch Piven

    Last week, I was invited to a vision workshop where experts gathered from all over Europe, organised by the European Commission’s prospective think tank – Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. It addressed the issue of school education and Open Education Resources (OER) at the horizon of 2030.

    One of the participants – Alex Beard – argued in his intervention that “teachers will be bricoleurs” and that by 2030 “adaptations, mash-ups and bricolages will be the norm”. It helped me to understand OER in a different way than its usual technology-oriented definition. I was challenged by Alex’s description of the teachers-bricoleurs “continuously using, adding to or adapting new resources for new learning needs, inviting peer-review and providing evidence of learning results”.

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