Category Archives: Contemporary issues

Upstart?

On the 26th January I went to a talk about a campaign called Upstart. I wasn’t very sure what the talk was going to be about but I thought that I would be able to see what is happening in Scotland with regards to education. I found the talk interesting and it brought up ideas which had never crossed my mind. It challenged ideas that I didn’t think needed challenging, like the age we start school.

Upstart’s aim is to introduce a play based kindergarten stage until the age of 7.  Sue Palmer explained to us that the view of society nowadays is to have children reading and writing by a certain age. However she explains that it isn’t a race and therefore is creating more pressure on children. So she explains that play is the element needed.

Scotland’s starting age for school is 4/5 and this is one of the earliest starting ages in the world. What they have found is that in the education ranking of western nations, the countries which started their children at 7 are more likely to gain better grades. This research and others carried out shows there is little to gain from an early start.

One of the audience members suggested that the starting them earlier makes them ‘burn’ out in their teens. This therefore makes them not want to go to school and they aren’t bothered about attaining. I think this is what I saw when I was at school as no one wanted to be there anymore.

Suzanne Zeedyk said that free play influences these qualities:

  • sensory development
  • creativity
  • emotional experiences
  • thinking ability
  • friendships
  • motoric development
  • sense of self
  • curiosity

She explained that these are what we want children to become with curriculum for excellence. Her thoughts suggested this could be done through play rather than needing to read or write really young.

One of the main points that stood out from me however from Suzanne’s talk was that Patrick Geddes designed kindergartens for children to be out in the garden. A quote from him we were told was ‘By creating we think, by living we learn.’

Although this talk was very thought through and had many reasons for starting at 7, I don’t think I could make a decision just based on that talk, as I would need to consider all possibilities. However I could see the benefits and it definitely gave me a different look out to how children should be taught at certain ages and what would be most beneficial to them. I hope to look into this at a later date so I can see the pros and cons for starting children’s education later.

On this link here is a radio show and at 52 minutes, Sue Palmer talks about the campaign.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vmzhg

 

 

 

 

What challenges/ opportunities you may be faced with when marrying the personal vs the professional presence on social media?

Should we just have one account? Or two accounts one for personal aspects and the other for professional side?

The GTCS states that you shouldn’t share any information with a student unless it would be shared in a school setting. This therefore makes you consider who you accept to be friends with online and what information you let everyone see. This might make you contemplate having an account for professional use and one for personal use however if you don’t have the correct privacy settings on,  if a student just typed your name in a search engine they would probably be able to find your personal one too. If you left your privacy settings so that everyone could see what you put on then everyone anywhere can see what you have put on. If there was things that you wouldn’t wish your students or colleagues to see that may call your professionalism into question. Therefore you want to make sure the correct procedures are in place.

When online you could appear to be vulnerable. One reason this could be is because if parents have a complaint and they message you on a social networking site then they could get aggressive and you would have to be careful when replying to the parent so that you reply remembering that you are a professional. If this doesn’t happen then your fitness to teach may come into question. When replying to a parent or anyone related within teaching you should reply with a formal and professional tone as this way the boundaries are maintained and therefore you can’t be accused of anything. Another way could be to make sure you are using an official channel of communication such as work email address, this way it seems more formal and you are more likely to keep the formal, professional tone when speaking to them. To stop parents sending you messages via social messaging you may consider not to add them as friends on your social networking sites. This way if they have to contact you in a professional manner then they may keep to the professional tone that you start contacting them with.

I think that depending on what is on your personal account may depend on whether you want two accounts or just one. If your personal account has lots of pictures of things you do outside of school, which may make your professionalism be questioned, then I would consider either turning off the tags in the photos so that if someone does find you they won’t find the inappropriate pictures or you could also make sure your privacy settings are on so that only some people can find you rather than everyone. However if you kept the one account you would have to be careful with what you put on the site.

Is using social media in the classroom a positive or negative idea?

Using social media in classroom can be very useful as this is what children are used to in day to day life. Therefore I think that it could be seen as a powerful thing to use as technology is likely to keep developing throughout their lifetime so making them literate in the technology they will be using, will be a beneficial for them to possibly to succeed in life.

However there may be problems such as it may become a distraction if they started using the social media for something else than the work. Therefore they may have to have a school account as then there isn’t a distraction between their social life and actual work. Some people may argue that less human interaction occurs however I think that pupils are more likely to interact with each other and ask whether they have seen something on the social media as they could be excited over the process.

Overall I think that using social media in the classroom is a good idea as students are used to using technology outside of school so we should not go back in time when they enter school life. I also think that because it seems exciting as they aren’t just sat writing they are more likely to be enthusiastic and be more involved in the subject.

How gender affected my education?

When I was at primary school I don’t remember any differences between how the girls and boys were treated differently. In our play time I remember not wanting to play imaginative games with the girls and would rather of ran round playing football with the boys so that is what I did. However the boys didn’t see a problem with this and neither did the teachers however the girls in my class used to be strange about the idea. I presume this was because they saw the rest of their gender doing one thing and I was doing something different. However I remember there being a football club and those girls who found it strange for me to play at play times used to come.

The divide between boys and girls I first saw was when I went to secondary school and when we were picking sports in P.E. to do, some sports girls weren’t allowed to do like rugby and the boys were rarely seen playing netball. Some pupils felt very out of place and argued to be able to play the same as the other gender as that’s what they would have preferred and it could be said it stopped them from developing a liking for that sport.

When I was at school I don’t remember there being a difference between how behaviour was dealt with as lessons didn’t have more disturbances from one gender than the other. However there was one teacher who preferred girls to boys and would offer to do lots of work for the girls to get there projects completed.