Preparing teachers for 21st century challenges

Preparing teachers for 21st century challenges

Valuing our Teachers and Raising their Status

How Communities Can Help

This report shows how education systems can support teachers to meet these new demands and encourage a paradigm shift on what teaching and learning are about and how they should happen. Education systems need to create the conditions that encourage and enable innovation. They need to promote best practice through policies focused on professionalism, efficacy and effectiveness in order to help build teachers’ capacity for adopting new pedagogies. Due attention should also be paid to teachers’ sense of well-being so that classroom learning environments remain conducive to students’ own well-being and development.

Enabling pedagogies for the future

THE FUTURE OF FAMILIES TO 2030

(..)Taking stock of today’s situation in statistical terms is a useful step before looking ahead. The averag household size in OECD countries fell from 2.8 persons in the mid-1980s to 2.6 in the mid-2000s. Today, there are no children in over half of the households in almost all OECD countries. Over the same period, marriage rates fell from over eight marriages per 1000 people in 1970 to five in 2009, and the average divorce rate doubled to 2.4 divorces per 1000 people. The number of children born outside marriage tripled, from 11% in 1980 to almost 33% in 2007. Almost 10% of all children now live in reconstituted households, and nearly 15% in single-parent households. One in 15 children live with their grandparents.



(..)Differences across OECD countries really stand out in another area, that of the labour market participation of the over-65s. while in most European countries and Canada job market participation rates are quite low for this age group, they are considerably higher in the US, Japan and Korea. Looking forward to 2030, these countries will also experience different degrees of ageing, with different implications for labour market adjustment.




La familia al 2030

Teaching 2030

Books and bits: What Will School Look Like in 10 Years?

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores.



The future of technology in the classroom, visit the Bits blog
Mr. Cuban believes that change in education will not come as quickly as many predict. He noted that some reformers have been attempting to end summer vacation for decades. “Summer is still here,” he said.





The classrooms that used the laptops the most often were not necessarily the most successful.As schools rely more on laptops and mobile devices, it is crucial to determine when students benefit from the presence of the computers and when teachers should put them away, he said.

Strategic recommendations:
Focus on learning with technology, not about technology.
Emphasize content and pedagogy, and not just hardware.
Give special attention to professional development.
Engage in realistic budgeting.
Ensure equitable, universal access.
Initiate a major program of experimental research.

3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once

FUTURE IS HERE
Through a 3-D avatar, you could always appear awake.
By JOHN TIERNEY

If Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson are right, here is what’s in store for you and your avatar very soon, probably within the next five years:

1) Without leaving your living room or office, you’ll sit at three-dimensional virtual meetings and classes, looking around the table or the lecture hall at your colleagues’ avatars.

2) Your avatar will be programmed to make a better impression than you could ever manage.

3) While your avatar sits there at the conference table gazing alertly and taking notes, you can do something more important: SLEEP.

(..)These moving and talking avatars would be computer-generated, and in that sense they’d be less photo-realistic than the images from Webcams that are already available on phone calls and teleconferences through services like Skype.

In “Infinite Reality,” they imagine a slacker named Dave who sleeps in while his avatar attends an 8 a.m. corporate meeting.

“Dressed impeccably in a digital Italian suit, the avatar was programmed to be a perfect participant,” they write. “It laughed at jokes (taking cues from voice inflection changes of the other avatars), nodded in all the right places, and dutifully recorded the details of the discussion.”

Read the Introduction Chapter excerpt from Infinite Reality

The new MATRIX AWAKE-SLEEPER

The future of capitalism: Building a sustainable energy future

As global climate talks get underway in Copenhagen, questions of a sustainable energy future will come to the fore as participants discuss the challenges from rising demand, affordability, and energy security. Should we focus on energy efficiency solutions? Where should we place our innovation bets? How can we align public policy to match our energy goals?

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon concurs: “Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear – that climate is changing much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause,”

Science and Politics of Climate Change

National Lab Day: Zientzia astearen ondoren.....

(..)Sin demasiado miedo a equivocarme puedo señalar que la ciencia es cada vez más irrelevante para nuestros teenagers, aunque sean buenos consumidores de productos tecnológicos. El interés escolar por la ciencia está prácticamente agotado y su atractivo como horizonte profesional decrece, lo que también ocurre en otros países occidentales. Estudios de evaluación de la educación secundaria ponen de manifiesto que el nivel de excelencia en este ámbito es bastante limitado. Tanto en Catalunya como en el resto de España sólo hay que observar las "notas de corte" de acceso a la universidad para comprobar la escasa demanda que, con contadas excepciones, tienen las carreras que imparten estudios de ciencias, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas. La falta de competencia para acceder a estos estudios indica claramente el poco prestigio y el escaso interés que estos ámbitos suscitan en los estudiantes de educación secundaria. Las implicaciones económicas de este hecho son potencialmente enormes en una sociedad que proclama que aspira a participar plenamente en la economía del conocimiento. (..).

Institutos STEM



Students with High-Level Science Skills

"Encouraging young people to be makers of things, not just consumers of things."
President Barack Obama

White House Pushes Science and Math Education


Eta hemen... Y aquí(?)

The Gardner Project : Looking to the future from today

What is the Gardner Project? (source)

The Gardner Project is an effort to develop a device that processes imagery based on faster-than-light particles (tachyon particles). Unlike a camera which processes light, thus depicting the present, this device should theoretically detect the particles originating from a point in time farther ahead than the present. Since faster than light particles move backward in time the particle imagery that is developed should theoretically depict what we would call "future" time.



About 'tachyon particles' (source)

A tachyon (from Greek, meaning i.e. swift, fast) is any hypothetical particle that travels at superluminal speed. In simpler terms, they are particles which are faster than light. The first description of tachyons is attributed to German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld; however, it was George Sudarshan, Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk, Vijay Deshpande and Gerald Feinberg (who originally coined the term in the 1960s) that advanced a theoretical framework for their study. Tachyonic fields have appeared theoretically in a variety of contexts, such as the Bosonic string theory. In the language of special relativity, a tachyon is a particle with space-like four-momentum and imaginary proper time. A tachyon is constrained to the space-like portion of the energy-momentum graph. Therefore, it cannot slow down to subluminal speeds. Even if tachyons were conventional, localisable particles, they would still preserve the basic tenets of causality in special relativity and not allow transmission of information faster than light.


No Physics for old teacher