Visit to New Zealand & Australia
ITTIP is proud to an announce additional global partnerships. As part of new partnerships with New Zealand and Australian schools, Dr. Mano Talaiver and Paula Klonowski-Leach traveled abroad to visit schools in these countries in May. The overall goal of the travels to Australia and New Zealand was to offer a LilyPad workshop (see a blog from New Zealand to learn more), disseminate information about the HP Catalyst project, and to recruit teachers for the online courses on Scratch developed by ITTIP under HP leadership and HP Catalyst Academy.
The Institute learned about the Australian Curriculum Technology has two strands — Knowledge and Understanding and Processes and Production Skills. They are interrelated and inform and support each other when developing teaching and learning programs. When Talaiver interacted with educators in multiple private and public schools, teachers emphasized that students need engaged learning activities that will develop skills and dispositions such as curiosity, imagination, creativity and evaluation; engage all aspects of perception: sensory, emotional, cognitive, physical and spiritual, and work individually and collaboratively. Both in Waverley College and in Parramatta Marist, classrooms have been restructured to promote collaborative workspaces for students.
ITTIP hopes to continue our partnerships with the schools in three ways: a) Possibility for expanding international STEM learning project (HP catalyst grant) by connecting students in Virginia, Ghana, India, South Africa, Brazil, New Zealand and Australia. Waverley College is interested in the concept of individual students identifying one global problem and collaborating with international peers to design a solution. This school focuses on a) LIBERATE, an instructional model built on project based learning pedagogy b) Sharing and learning about problem based learning in our teacher professional development. Parramatta Marist High School focuses on problem based learning. Teachers create their online curriculum modules with 12 problems for each course. Each module needs two weeks to complete. The students learn their content through inquiry, research, and presentation when they collaboratively derive potential solutions or research findings. Parramatta and ITTIP will share resources on problem based learning and c) Recruitment of teachers for online courses developed using HP grant. Most educators during the interactions were interested in learning Scratch and the administrators have accepted to disseminate the course information once we are ready to announce the online courses.
ITTIP looks forward to this new collaborating, learning and sharing with both New Zealand and Australian schools.
