Heavyweight thinkers behind Education Fast Forward

Heavyweight thinkers behind Education Fast Forward

1. Bálint Magyar

   • a member of the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, and a former education minister in Hungary, said that citizens left behind by technology were disadvantaged socially and economically.

2. Lord David Puttnam

   • Chancellor of the Open University and Promethean non-executive director, said that creativity is “imagining the way things could be”. “I’ve come to the conclusion that if we are truly prepared to take on the immense challenges of the 21st century, we’ve no choice but to embrace the equally immense power of the digital technologies to nurture creativity right across the curriculum and, as it happens, most notably in the STEM subjects

3. Pete Cevenini,

   • K-12 education lead for Cisco in the US, setting the context, responded: “It’s easy to bash teachers and say the profession is drenched in mediocrity, but most of them want to be excellent but they don’t know how. One of the paradigms that we have to shift is to teach them to be excellent… They just don’t know how to be the excellent teachers who inspire kids to learn.”

4. Tony Cann. “

   • “The old system has to die. I think we shouldn’t expect this change to come quickly... we need to plan for the change to come.” He said that he had spent his life trying to invent new things: “What amazes me is that you can create something that becomes ubiquitous but at the beginning very few people can see it. Back in 1992 I was shown email – I thought, ‘What on earth would anybody want that for?

5. Tom Carrol

   • “I think teaching may be the last solo profession in the world. There is no other profession that we don’t ‘do’ in team environments. Health care teams, fire and rescue teams, anything you can think of is being done by teams, so what we need are learning teams

6. Jim Wynn

   • director of education at Promethean, created Education Fast Forward, an impressive ‘think tank’ of more than 20 esteemed international educators including Professor Sugata Mitra, Tom Carroll and Riel Miller. It’s supported by Promethean and US networking giant Cisco.

7. Sister Margaret Wong,

   • “I would like to involve the students,” she said. “We are the ones saying what sort of education they are getting, the curriculum, what they should learn and so on, but what do they think about their own learning? Because now with the technology they have lifelong learning and personalised learning so I would like to involve students as well as teachers.”