iFuture education conference Pak Kau College Hong Kong

Today I attended a very interesting conference at Pak Kau college, where I gave the keynote on the underlying difference between the education system in HK and in Finland. From my perspective to key difference comes from the culture of each country which is to some extent then reflected in the approach to education. For Finland the culture can be said to be one of collaboration, for Hong Kong, the culture is driven more by the need to compete, one approach is WE the other is about ME.

The audience (280 !) attending the event were teachers who were looking at their PD development, particularly in relation to the introduction of e-learning into their classrooms. So part of the focus of my keynote also related to the work Polkuni HK is now involved in, through the relationship with xEdu and edtech companies coming through the Helsinki based accelerator.

An area that gained some interest from people after the talk was my explanation of the new method we are working on in Finland with our partners KOKOA Agency. We have developed a method to evaluate and validate digital learning tools. This is now becoming a major issue as the number of digital learning tools grows, so does the increase of products that have little or no true educational value. This is not only an issue for teachers and schools, but also parents who are faced with a massive range of options. The objective of our new system to not only provide a service to edtech studios with new or developing products, but also to ensure what ever digital educational products we promote into the markets, we know from the evaluation process they can really deliver the educational benefits they claim, something that is key to both teachers and parents.

For more information about our evaluation and validation system please check out www.kokoastandard.com. or contact myself at stuart@polkuni.fi

THGGG