Apple Orchard Thailand - November 1, 2013

 

This Friday, November 1st 2013, the Orchard Project Thailand group presented at the EARCOS Leadership Conference in Bangkok during the “Looking in on Learning: Live” session organised by Apple Education Development in South Asia. A total of 36 students from ISB, NIST, and Harrow worked together for five weeks to share their passions and the way in which they like to learn. The spaces were divided up and participants went around to watch student presentations and asked questions on the ways in which students want to learn. Sessions were based on digital video, video coaching, animation, digital photography, Minecraft, coding and programming. This isn’t technology for them, this is normal life. As educators, as people responsible for learning, it’s important that we understand what students are asking for.

The EARCOS Leadership Conference site presented Abdul Chohan’s Looking In On Learning: Live workshop 1 session on Friday (Apple presentations) with the following short description:

"What constitutes engaging, enabling and empowering learning spaces for both teacher-learners and learners? How do we untether, reposition and restructure perceptions about what authentic learning might look like? Engage with students and teachers in a technology-enabled learning ecosystem to better understand how we can move up the SAMR ladder from substitution to redefinition through "customised" (personalised) learning. Opportunities to discuss the impact of such learning spaces - from inception to implementation and population - with the following guests will be encouraged. Think different. Participants will leave Looking In On Learning: Live, with ideas and resources to help their schools remix a new vision for what technology-enabled learning should include and could look like." 

During his introductory presentation, before handing it over to the Orchard Project students, Abdul Chohan focused on the following aspects of personalization:  

"In education we’ve always talked about personalisation in a lot of detail. We’ve rarely been able to achieve that. Personalization is really right down to the individual, recognising that if you have 20 or 30 students in your class, each one is very different. We need to have the ability to meet their needs and provide a pathway to learn. Teachers can do that by allowing students to work at their own pace able to access content.

It’s not just about what are the great apps for science or what are the great apps for art and design. It’s a more holistic approach. It’s got to be cultural, sustainable, and we’ve got to build accountability into what we do. These are really core things, otherwise it just becomes just another technology project. It needs to have learning at it’s core.

Take something beyond just the teacher walking around and speaking to all of the students. This is where technology allows us to do something that wasn’t possible before. And it’s not simple translation. It’s not about a worksheet, and now that the same worksheet is on PowerPoint, and because it is coming through a projector, we call it using technology. We are talking about transformation where technology allows us to do things that simply were just not possible before.

So being able to Skype from a classroom to another classroom at a different part of the world. Being able to engage with people that actually live in Spain and speak Spanish, that’s transformational and technology allows that to happen. In the same way personalisation can be achieved. Teachers can create content, students can create content and be very personalised.

Finally, explore iTunesU as a platform for developing personalised learning. Certainly for schools it’s such a powerful environment. It removes the pain of LMSs, Virtual Learning Environments, usernames and passwords, and backend servers and all the other sort of things that make it really difficult. This really simplifies the pathway of learning from the teacher directly to the students and viceversa as well.  For schools that are looking at one to one deployment, schools that are looking at iPads, and are looking at how content can be created and shared, this is a really powerful platform that certainly can be shared. We talk about the use of technology and one of our big issues is teachers adopting technology. There is an inherent fear amongst teachers because we’ve always given them stuff that’s not simple and it’s not been reliable. These two ingredients are essential.” 

I have to congratulate all the students who took part in this project. They worked really hard to prepare themselves for this moment. They engaged their audience, spoke with a credible voice and managed to share their experiences in a natural way. In their own way. A huge thanks to all the leaders from NIST and Harrow who put up extra hours of work to make this happen. Finally, huge thanks to the Apple Team for their vision, guidance, and support. We know this is just the beginning and can grow to become a model for other schools to adopt.

Overall, it has been a rewarding experience. We definitely see great value and potential in documenting the Orchard Project process and have students tell their stories. This is on the radar and will start to become a reality in the first months of 2014.

Kudos to everyone who helped make this possible!