At the 2009 Ulearn Conference in Christchurch, we were given this book and I believe it is truely amazing. Below are the things that are going to be shaping my teaching philosophy:

• 'Start with individual passions, talents and interests and unleash each person's almost unlimited ability to flower'.
• Most schools are teaching students for a world that no longer exists. We are not talking only about a different world. We're talking about a different people. Our students have changed radically. Todays students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. Our brains are now actually wired differently.
  
• Most schools are still teaching in ways similar to the blackboard and chalk, desks in rows classroom model invented more than 300 years ago.
• Use the world as your classroom.
• Truly education citizens should be familiar with a core body of knowledge, and be able to read, write, spell, count and understand the basics of history, geo and science. But we live in an era where around 10,000 new research papers are published every day - in science alone! So its much more important to learn how to find the new information, and to turn that combination into new knowledge, ideas and actions.
• kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did - sitting in rows, listening to the teacher, scribbling notes, reading textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed.
  
• The formal classroom needs redesigning.
• Visonary educators are already well down the road to create a Global Cyberspace Interactive Learning Web - which everyone can access, anywhere, any time. Not only access it - but contribute to it.
• We are talking about a new world where information is available virtually on demand - in virtually any form and free. So the teachers role as mainly a purveyor of up to date informatiuon is changed forever.
• Almost certainly, schools will become open any time, hands on community centres for life long learning - in partnership with cyberspace learning programs and specialist local coaches, mentors and skilled teachers.
  

I want to be a trend setter!!!!