Arion Bratislava 2006

Le Beaujolais is a famous Vine region in France where you’ll can find beautiful landscape, good food and… splendid vine of course

Please, visit the official tourism website.

The Slovak vines are very good too, espacially the white vine. But I am a little bit less convince by the hot vine from the Bratislava Chrismas market.

The French Ministery of Education provides, on a dedicated website,  advises, teaching material, official instructions, links… for the integration of ICT in the primary and secondary curriculum.

To have an idea of the way of using of ICT in France, you can see some video of Educ@tice 2006 which held on the last month in Paris.

In partnership with different types of institutions and establishments – universities, écoles normales supérieures (teacher training schools), the CNRS (national scientific research centre), the university institutes for teacher training (IUFM) –, the INRP contributes to the development of research in education on a national scale.

In compliance with its recent contract, the INRP is now developing much of its research duties within the framework of shared units. As a research body involved in basic or applied scientific production, it conducts its work based on clearly identified development directions and targets:

- learning processes and situations;
- changes in the education system;
- development of teaching knowledge and professionalism.

These directions take on board the expectations of society with regard to the education system, and the position of research in France. They also aim to make it possible to implant the agency into the university environment in Lyon and the Rhone-Alpes region.

The work of GEOMATIQUE focuses on ICT uses for geography and geosciences teaching/learning.

… and some more information about my work and publications on my weblog.

Today we heard about the use of the Logo language in Slovak schools. The language was developed in the end of the 1960’s and is mainly build on LISP.

Read the presentation by Peter Tomcsanvi

In Slovakia they use Logo in competitions where the pupils compete in different stages. In the final stage the pupils programmes small games.

In Slovakia they use a version of Logo called Imagine Logo. Read more about Imagine Logo.

StarLogo

In MIT they have developed the language and the newest version here - StarLogo - is now equiped with a graphical programming interface. The focus is not programming but the use of ordering the program by graphical instructing it to do algorithms. From the StarLogo website it states:

StarLogo is a specialized version of the Logo programming language. With traditional versions of Logo, you can create drawings and animations by giving commands to graphic “turtles” on the computer screen. StarLogo extends this idea by allowing you to control thousands of graphic turtles in parallel. In addition, StarLogo makes the turtles’ world computationally active: you can write programs for thousands of “patches” that make up the turtles’ environment. Turtles and patches can interact with one another — for example, you can program the turtles to “sniff” around the world, and change their behaviors based on what they sense in the patches below. StarLogo is particularly well-suited for Artificial Life projects.

Read more about StarLogo on the MIT website.

Our visit of the School IT Center of Bratislava was an opportunity to share opinions about “teaching for the future”. Most of us agree with the idea that schools have to face a great challenge : forming citizen for the future. So, education must be based on skills and competencies developing for problem solving more than knowledge delivering. Future citizen will have to adapt to a more and more complex world and school must give them the tools for understanding this complexity. According this point of view IT appears as such a tool and it might be teaching as embedded in subjects and not as a subject as itself.

For more information about teaching and learning for the future :

Morin E. (2000). Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur. Seuil.

Some others goals for the education for the future according to E. Morin (2000) :

” Faire connaître ce qu’est connaître”

(teaching what means knowing)

” Enseigner les principes d’une connaissance pertinente”

(teaching the principles of a relevant knowledge)

” Saisir les objets dans leurs contextes”

(studying the objects in their contexts)