How any school, anywhere, can leverage the cloud to bring students into the 21st century
Preparing students for a global world with the C3 Micro-Cloud
The world is changing. Globalization has opened up the world, allowing people to connect in new and exciting ways and society is now a mix of many different beliefs and cultures. The jobs that students will get after they graduate may not yet exist; in order to prepare them for this new world it is essential to change the way we educate them. For that reason, educators and administrators are searching for ways to adapt and develop new ways of teaching and learning that reflect a changing world – just teaching ideas and facts, without teaching in real-life settings, is no longer enough.
In the past, education was about retention and ‘replay’ of information. Success in learning in the 21st century, however, requires a new skill of agile learning, which is about how to immediately identify and apply new concepts at a much more rapid pace than ever before. Instead of simply giving students the information they might need to succeed, teachers should mentor them to be able to find and acquire new information, and to apply it in smart and creative ways. Learning is now all about discovery, not memorization of facts. A teacher’s ability to show how knowledge can be applied in the real world will maintain the student’s interest and increase their curiosity, which will help them become lifelong learners.
While in many countries, children are just a quick Google search away from answers, others are located in more challenging environments that lack advanced infrastructure, and the use of technology is rare.
Students with unfettered access to the Internet have unfair competitive advantage over those who don’t… and this is likely to be reflected in their future professional lives. In some parts of the word, students have ready access to the latest technology and the best available learning aids. As a result, they have a better opportunity to achieve excellence in education (and preparation for the future) while those in less developed and economically challenged areas are more likely to stagnate, glued to obsolete curriculums and teaching methods.
At Critical Links, it was our desire to bridge that inequality gap that led to the development of the C3 Micro-Cloud solution. The C3 Micro-Cloud is a self-contained, cloud-enabled environment that allows the provisioning of content, resources, and management to local students (and teachers) even if they do not always have an upstream connection to the Internet. Content, in the form of texts and other resources, can be centrally curated in the C3 Cloud Control portal by those responsible for curriculum, and distributed to any authorized C3 Micro-Cloud, regardless of where it is, whenever a network link becomes available. In addition, rich added value educational resources, such as those from approved HTTP and HTTPS web sites, can also be included in the school’s local C3 Micro-Cloud repository – again to be available even if the upstream network is down.
With the C3 Micro-Cloud any school can use podcasts, e-books, quizzes and learning games, allowing students to access to seek and gather information on their own, under the guidance of their teachers, instead of passively receiving only the hardcopy information available in books.
Are your students getting a 21st century education today? Even if your school/classroom faces technology and infrastructure challenges (such as limited or sporadic bandwidth, lack of connectivity, rigid security and usage restrictions, etc.) you can use the C3 Micro-Cloud to bring 21st century learning and discovery to your students!
Let us show you how can you use this technology in your school to open a world of learning and opportunity to your students!
By Critical Links #connectingstudentstoknowledge