My life has recently gone through a lot of (good) changes, which is the main reason why I haven't been able to write as frequently as I would like, and why I haven't gone to any other school since October.
I am now in Portugal, where I plan on visiting other types of schools - seeing that here we have all the different types I listed in the "find out more" section - in order to gather even more ideas for this research.
I also want to do some visits to schools outside Portugal, but those involve more than just scheduling the visit (which is already hard enough as is!), so they might take some more time to do.
But what I was really thinking of these last few weeks was online education. More and more I see online courses coming up, some of which are 100% location independent. But they are all for adults.
And so I started wondering. At this day and age, when kids are able to work with tablets and computers faster than any adult, wouldn't it be a good thing to have online classes for children? I don't mean the whole school system turning now online, because of course children need to be in groups, they need to socialize and develop social competences that are hardly ever worked on if they are sitting alone in front of a computer the whole day.
But why not digitalizing a little bit more of their education? Do you think it would be possible to have a school where there are still group activities and where kids still all sit together in one common space, but where they can truly work on their own learning process through a computer?
I know I mentioned it before, but at Chickering School (in Boston, MA) I saw whole classes using technology to their advantage. And they still worked in groups, and they still had time to develop social skills!
So now I was wondering if it's possible to have even more of that process being done in a computer or tablet, or if that particular type of work is really limited to older kids and adults...
Merry Christmas! :)