Source: World ORT
Between January 9-13, 2012, World ORT held its thirteenth Wingate Seminar at ORT House, London. There it brought together the teachers responsible for introducing and developing the technology provided to their schools in Israel through World ORT's Kadima Mada programme for their first overseas group training event. The 25 Innovation Leaders from Israel were joined by 12 teachers from the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Ukraine, Russia and South Africa for an intensive five days of lectures, workshops and outings designed not to provide answers but to broaden horizons.
Previous Wingate Seminars have focused on new technology and the skills needed to exploit them but this year the focus was on pedagogy and the educators themselves with the theme, "Leading Technology Innovation in Schools". "The aim this year was to be critical of these technologies, to evaluate where they are living up to their promise and where they are not, because we haven't got the time or money to invest in technology for its own sake," said the Head of World ORT's Education Department, Daniel Tysman. "It can be difficult enough to convince some teachers to adopt innovations. We need to equip our innovators to be leaders, to identify what works well and then show others that the technology can bring benefits to learning, administration or management, that their lives can be made easier and that we can give the students something more than they would have without the technology."
Critical to the teachers' consideration of how to move forward was the opportunity given by the Seminar to meet peers from around the world, share experiences and discuss future cooperation - a process which World ORT is working to ensure is not limited to the meeting in London. Among the methods of sharing resources explored at the Seminar were Moodle and the Times Education Resource Bank, ways by which teachers can deposit classroom material they have developed for use with Interactive Whiteboards, animations, PowerPoint presentations so that others can adopt and adapt it at their discretion, thus creating a clearinghouse of tested educational resources for use of educators around the globe.
The Seminar program was made up of the analysis of case studies presented by some of World ORT’s leading professionals, guest presentations from experts in the field, site visits to schools where technology is fully integrated into their approach as well as a visit to the BETT show – the world’s largest exhibition of technology for education.
See the full post at World ORT.