By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor and Chief Blogger
On Saturday August 22 PST (Sunday August 23 in Korea) from Cisco’s Irvine, CA offices, I shared an amazing experience with a team of new Korea-based International School Songdo ISS) educators. My work centers on training and coaching executives and teams on Korean culture, norms, history, and expectations. I was thrilled to use Cisco’s TP 3000 telepresence technology to provide the new ISS team with insights into Korea and Songdo IBD.The training session aligned with both Songdo IBD core value as an ubiquitous city, and ISS as a model for Classroom 2.0 education. (For more information of ISS teaching model see Headmaster Dr. Jorge Nelson’s December 2008 comments of Learning- centric teaching).
Chinese mayor and guests tour Classroom of the Future
On December 11th, two tours of the Songdo International School (SIS) were hosted by Gale International on the site in Songdo. In the morning the general manager of Microsoft Research – Beijing and team were given a tour of the entire IT/CCTV/Cable/broadcast TV infrastructure of the SIS campus. This tour was designed for them to get a glimpse of the state-of-the-art technology already in place at the school. They mentioned how impressed they were by the huge investment in IT and went away with a bigger picture of how SIS is truly going to become the Most Ideal Environment (their words) for Microsoft’s initiatives in international education.
In the afternoon a large tour group from China arrived in two buses at the school. They were escorted by Chairman Stan Gale into the SIS Classroom of the Future, where they learned about student-centric, personalized learning that SIS will offer to all students K-12. The SIS team presented the concept of School 2.0 – how children who attend SIS will be learning in small, collaborative groups with teachers who are Guides by the Side, not Sages on the Stages. The SIS team is using best practices as identified by Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor who has recently published a very successful book about where education should be heading.
See HBS publication http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5978.html for more info. Note Learning-centric (left) and Teacher-centric (right). Click to zoom.
Chinese mayor and guests tour Classroom of the Future
