Introduction

Currently I work at an international school in Germany, as a technology specialist / digital coach / design teacher / Spanish teacher. I wear different ‘hats’! I am passionate about technology, particularly technology in education, and how it can influence, improve and make teaching and learning more exciting everyday. I also understand the challenges of ‘introducing’ new technology into the classroom, as well as dealing with old systems that make teaching and learning harder than it should.

I joined this course because I am very interested in learning more about ‘Big Data’ in education, especially after I had a brief introduction to the topic and the work of Ben Williamson in IDEL. Data is everywhere in education, in the way we teach, assess and monitor interactions between teachers, students, parents and leadership.

By the end of this course I would like to have a more informed opinion of what Data in Education looks like, what I should be critical about, and what changes the educational sector is experiencing or might experience in the near future. It is during this ‘second’ lockdown and teaching from home, that I think understanding the role of data education is more relevant than ever before.

I am particularly interested in learning more about the future of education in relation to ‘machine learning’ and ‘data analytics’; I would like to have a clearer understanding of the path ‘digital data’ might take in the different educational settings, and how this will shape (re-shape) the learners and educators of the future (now).

This week I’ve been playing with different ways of representing data in a visual form. Here are some digital examples of the practice visualisations I’ve made this week. I finally got some colour pencils and markers! So I will work on the visualisations in Week 3 on paper 🙂

References:

Williamson, B. (2017) Big data in education : the digital future of learning, policy and practice. Los Angeles: SAGE.