Do schools kill creativity?

Ever since I heard Sir Ken Robinson spoke during our Company's Staff Assembly, his words stucked in my head. Aside from having a great sense o humor, he speak very eloquently. He said "the reason why we don't get the best out of people, is because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers.

In his thoughts about Bringing on the Learning Revolution he said:

Current systems of education are based on the manufacturing principles of linearity, conformity and standardization. The evidence is everywhere that they are failing too many students and teachers alike. A primary reason is that human development is not linear and standardized, it is organic and diverse. People, as opposed to products, have hopes and aspirations, feelings and purposes. Education is a personal process. What and how young people are taught have to engage their energies, imaginations and their different ways of learning.

I myself hates standardization and rigid rules which I think stifles innovation. Watch it for your self and you may agree.

What happened in 1982?

How many of us know that in 1982, Michael Jackson's "The Thriller" album was release and went on to be the biggest selling album in history? or The Time magazine person of the year was a computer? Or do any one ever recall the Tylenol scare which we popularly called "pataylynol"? Probably not too many of us. Maybe if we were globally wired then, we would have know more about world event.

1982 was the year when i finished high school. Undoubtedly, I would never forget about pimples, adolescent love (or love triangle), psychological maturity or immaturity and hormonal imbalance.  And what about intellectual and physical rivalries? The list goes on...

1982 will forever be a part of my life with either good or bad memories to boot. It was the time when I started to either dream for the future or simply refuse to grow up.

read more of this at ericbringas.blogspot.com

233: College

Spent the whole day last Saturday attending Josh's orientation. College makes or breaks dreams and aspirations. I expect the former for him. Although it cost me a parking ticket for parking at the wrong spot, it was a great day otherwise.

223: Josh's Day

A special day for Josh. Today is the end of his high school days and soon the start of his college days. As I sat as one of the spectators watching the formalities, I can't help but feel proud of him. How he have grown to a fine young man. He said he wants to be in business and will soon rule the world. Quite a lofty ambition, I said. "But make sure you do it right. And when you're up there remember you still owe me lunch. "

#187: Josh

My son Josh has been practicing everyday for his audition this month. He'll get a chance to get into Berklee College of Music in Boston this fall.

Here's two of his recording.





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#115: Sharing your knowledge

 I used to teach Computer Course at UEI College. I was teaching for about 9 months until I left due to some projects that needed my attention. Plus the fact that I was logging more than 14 hours of work everyday. It was too much to handle.

Today am back. The school called me and they needed me to teach once a week to cover the night class. It is hard to refuse considering I always love to teach.

I met my class tonight and they seems to be good students, lots of potentials and I feel I would enjoy the time with them.

I always think that knowledge is power but only if you are willing share it.

#107: Demostration project for Abra High School

I got a surprised call from my brother Panchet from the Philippines. He said he read about my earlier post about online Course Management Systems. He had earlier checked the site and opined that this could be an interesting project for Abra High School. Panchet is currently the principal of the school.

Apparently, the school is somehow already connected to the Internet and most of the teachers and students are allowed to use their system.

The idea of the project is for me to establish a central host in the U.S. and install the software. The School will then be connected to this server via the internet. The system will feature an online learning tool for students such as courses, schedules, resources and even a facebook-style collaboration.


This project will certainly teach student, teachers and even parents about utilizing technology to improve collaboration, communication and the quality of education.

And by the way, I would like to point out that this project will be of no cost for the school.

Watch out for more detail about this project in the coming days.

#97: High Tech in Education, anyone?

Schoolforge.net is  an interesting site that collects free and open source software for use in education.

SchoolForge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. We advocate the use of open texts and lessons, open curricula, free software and open source in education.

One section of the site highlights some of the best software applications, for uses such as education assessment and evaluation, cirriculum planning, and teaching education. Learning management systems & Course management systems and administrative tools to fit various needs of schools.

To mention a few:

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. Moodle is one of the most popular CMS out there.

Open Admin for Schools  - is entirely web based and can run from a centrally located division wide server or a single computer in a school. It is designed to support an entire division on one or more central computers but can also work just fine for a single school. Currently several school divisions use this approach and have 15+ schools on a single central server. This is because it is designed to be lightweight both in server resource requirements and in communication bandwidth.

 SchoolTool will draw members of the education community: staff, students, parents, alumni and administrators into a tight-knit community with instant access to relevant information. SchoolTool will not depend on a technology-intensive environment, but in those schools with broad and deep access to technology in the form of computers, laptops, PDA's, cellphones and wireless pagers, SchoolTool will leverage those forms of communication and devices to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

 These are great technology tools that can improve the way teachers teach and communicate with student. And the best thing is it's free and it's so easy to implement using cheap computers.

Such solutions can be a cheap for the entire public education in the Philippines to use. I would love to be involved for such a project. Maybe a pilot project in Abra (e.g. Abra High School) could be launched to prove it's viability.

So what about it sir Panchet? are you up for the challenge?