I had the absolute privilege of being asked by students to talk with them about my views on education. Recently I spoke at TechHui in Wellington - a conference by students, for students.  It was videoed so I will post that when it becomes available.  However, in the meantime here is the Prezi I spoke to.

I had a student contact me recently to ask me a few questions about my thoughts on education.  I thought I would post them here.  He is making a documentary about using mobile phones in the classroom.  I hope he makes his documentary available - perhaps on YouTube and if he does I will link it here.  Meanwhile, here are my responses to his questions:
1. What do you believe are the benefits of using mobile devices in the classroom?
There are a couple of reasons using mobile devices in the classroom …

I think that the web offers a wide-range of wonderful learning opportunities for ESOL or NESB students.  It is really important that teachers know their students well enough and understand their needs, but also that teachers know the range of technologies that they have available to them to best support their students’ learning.
When we look at online learning opportunities, these range from applications that can be completely open - viewed and contributed to by anyone in the world, right through to applications that are very closed - only certain people …

I question why finding information needs to be difficult or time-consuming in order to make the learning happen. ie. I use wikipedia all the time as a starting place if I want to find information on a new topic - particularly if I know very little about that topic.

I recently wrote this article for the Education Review. It is a very concise summary of my thinking 6 months after completion of my research. “It seems somewhat ironic that while schools try to find extra funding to increase student and teacher access to ICT, the tool that many students already have in their pockets is overlooked and its use actively denied through restrictive school policy…”