Monday 9th December, Caroline Chisholm Catholic College in Melbourne invited me to kick off four days of professional learning with a keynote session on Creativity in Education. The school has over 1,500 students from 7 to 12 and this session involved over 200 of their teaching and admin staff.

During this session we looked at some of the recently announced results that came out of the 2018 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey. PISA is well known as a tool for measuring 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. It has been running since 2000 and the 2018 survey was the seventh round of international assessment.

The 2018 assessment had a focus was on reading in a digital environment and also collected extensive data on students’ attitudes and well-being. The section in PISA that I was most interested in for this presentation dealt with the topic Getting ready for the digital world. Some of the key points that came from the assessment included:

• In a world shaped by artificial intelligence, education is no longer just about teaching people something, but about helping people build a reliable compass and the navigation tools to find their own way through an increasingly volatile, uncertain and ambiguous world.
• Tomorrow’s schools will need to help students think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship.
• We cannot ignore how digital tools have so fundamentally transformed the world outside of school.
• People who cannot navigate through the digital landscape can no longer participate fully in our social, economic and cultural life.
• In the 2009 PISA assessment, about 15% of students in OECD countries, on average, reported that they did not have access to the Internet at home. By 2018, that proportion had shrunk to less than 5%.
• The amount of time that 15-year-old students in OECD countries spent on line outside of school increased between 2012 and 2018 – by an average of more than 1 hour per day (on both weekdays and weekends).
• Students now spend about 3 hours on line outside of school on weekdays, on average, and almost 3.5 hours on line on weekend days. For young people, the digital world is becoming a sizeable part of the real world.
• In the past, students could find clear and often singular answers to their questions in carefully curated and government-approved textbooks, and they could generally trust those answers to be true.
• Today, they will find hundreds of thousands of answers to their questions on-line, and it is up to them to figure out what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong
• Reading is no longer mainly about extracting information; it is about constructing knowledge, thinking critically and making well-founded judgements.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/

Following the keynote session, I ran an Adobe Character Animator workshop with the IT & media teachers.

We also had a quick play with the new free augmented reality iOS app Adobe Aero …

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A special thank you goes to Monique Dalli (Director of Professional Learning) for inviting me and organising this week of professional development activities.

The resources I shared for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-CCCC-19