Andreas Skog was one of close to a hundred teachers, educationalists and school managers from Västerbotten, who visited the BETT conference in London in January – the world’s largest educational technology event.
- It’s important that school teachers get to go on these trips. It enables us to see our own reality reflected in what’s new, and get new inspiration, comments Andreas Skog.
Andreas himself has recently started a new job after years of teaching multi-media at the Midgård high school in Umeå. These days you can find Andreas working as an IT educationalist at Mediacenter in Västerbotten County, and the trip to the BETT conference gave him a helpful boost to in order to stimulate other educationalists in the county.
Digitally competent students
BETT is a massive fair with over 500 exhibitors. One of the themes of the fair that caught Andreas’ eye was Playful Learning, a concept that is all about learning being fun, which includes using computers in teaching. For his own part Andreas is very interested in exploring the use of Google in the classroom, or how mathematical games can be used. He also believes that it is important for schools to embrace the students’ ways of informal learning.
- Studies have shown that young people mainly become digitally competent outside of school. Our challenge is how to make the best use of that competence in our teaching”, says Andreas Skog.
School needs strategies
As a high school teacher he has been able to follow discussions in high school about whether students are doing other things in class than they should be. But he thinks that this might be because the school has not taught students to use IT and computers in an instructive way.
- We need strategies to know in which direction we’re heading. There must be a course and we are partly lacking that.
Andreas thinks that schools will be more open in the future, with the aid of new technology and interaction between students and the rest of society.
- Many American universities have open learning resources. Why shouldn’t we be able to do the same thing here, and let people who might not even be in school take part in what we are doing, suggests Andreas Skog.
Students become producers
He believes that students feel a real empowerment when they are not simply consumers, but also producers. That is something he has seen proof of, not least through his role as a multi-media teacher.
- I’ve had students who wrote blogs, and we published videos on Youtube and the school’s own website. I think that if we open up the school, the general level of knowledge in society will increase. The mass of knowledge increases when we let many contribute, says Andreas Skog.
