Wow, it really has been an awesome 3 days of learning and acquiring new skills and resources!
Day 3
Experienced a day on the beautiful campus of University of Miami (pictured above). Some of the highlights of the day included a short course on the many different social media tools that can be used in the classroom to have a broader impact on all sorts of educators, facilitators and learners. Interestingly enough the University of Miami has introduced twitter, facebook and wikispace in the classroom allowing for students to interact on a real time basis with their classmates and teachers. This type of participation is really a good creative outlet and can be used as tool for monitoring and evaluation. I was really left inspired and have some newfound ideas on how to utilise these methods to increase learner and public participation at The KZN ScienCentre. especially to evalaute our programmes,workshops and exhibits. Another usefull tool that we will definately be making use of will be creating our own comic strips for more interactive learning, for more information on how to create your very own comic strip go to
www.pixton.com, These tools will also help us to make follow ups with our visitors and make sure we can assist education in the province once learners have left our doors!
The second part of the day included a very interesting and unusual problem and inquiry based learning workshop, where learners decide "what science they would like to test" - in this case the learners get a set of crickets that they use to test crickets taste preferences for example whether they would like to eat a banana or a granola bar. This type of workshop really makes learners practice their very own scientific theories and really unlocks their scientific potential, once again this workshop will be used initially in our holiday programme as a pilot project to a bigger project in the future.
Day 4 & Day 5
"Give Today...And...Change Tomorrow" - On these days we were fortunate enough to look at two organisations that really represents this message.
At the Miami Zoo we had the opportunity of looking at worksheets developed by Grade R educators that were incorporated into teaching a group of 4 year olds the different animals and the ecosystem - this had a great impact on me as we have just developed an ECD centre at The KZN ScienCentre - I will be writing a great deal more about this after we visit the Children's Museum and the ECHOES programme this weekend, so watch this space.
Now on Day 5 we were taken around the Miami Science Museum and their plans for the future - for some background, the Miami Science Museum has been given a grant of around $250 million to move to a bigger and better location. At the museum we looked at their abilities to acquire funding and sustain their organisation by the very many programmes they run. The Miami Science Museum works very closely with their Department of Education and The Miami University and with this partnership in mind we were introduced to an exciting programme that ensures a 89% pass rate of high school graduates who thereafter are accepted to local universities via a scholarship and funding model. This programme is really worth replicating especially if we look at the similar socio-economic problems that exist between the disadvantaged populations of both Miami and S.A. Miami has had over the years a large Cuban influx due to the political and economic situation. I will be engaging with a few people on this matter when I get home ;-)!
Hope you have enjoyed my latest post there's certainly more to come if these last few days are anything to go by!