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Blog

Involving Teacher Education Institutions in the Future Classroom lab

by Jørund Høie Skaug Future Classroom Lead Ambassador for Norway

 

One of our goals in FCL Norway is to work more closely with and collaborate with stakeholders from Teacher Education Institutions. Several Teacher Education Institutions in Norway are interested in setting up their own Future Classroom labs, and a couple of weeks ago, our own department for Kindergarten and Teacher Education invited the TEs of Norway to an innovation camp over two days. The goal was to get new ideas for using technology in initial teacher training, and let mixed teams compete about the best idea. The innovation camp was organised with methodology and help from Junior Achievement Norway (Ungt Entrepenørskap). The methodology has quite a few similarities with toolset 3 (Creating a Future Classroom Scenario) in the FCL Toolkit, so toolset is also an option for those interested in arranging an event like this. 

 

We presented the Future Classroom lab, and brought some equipment for the participants to play with in the process. Many were interested in discussing how technologies such as coding and video games can be integrated in initial teacher training, and the simple Cardboard Virtual Reality-boxes (which can be used with any smartphone) impressed those who had´t already been exposed to this kind of technology before. One of the teams did a brilliant presentation the next day with a suggested Virtual Reality training programme for initial teacher training, with the instructor stopping a chemistry experiment which went off the rails, and doing an analysis on the fly on what the teacher student could have done to improve the lesson. Even though this idea is a few years ahead of its time, it suggests possibilities with VR in education, and something which may be realised further down the line.

Other teams had ideas for their own Future Classroom labs, or services and websites which could be used for sharing ideas and good practices. Our Future Classroom lab team will follow the initiatives up with workshops for students and teachers this year on three of the institutions, with more to follow next year. 

 

About blog

In this blog we will read stories written by the Future Classroom Ambassadors, FCL network labs, teacher trainers, invited experts, etc. If you would like to submit a story to be published, please send it to fcl@eun.org.