The Moscow International Education Salon (MMOS) is one of the main events in the field of education. This year its theme sounds like this: “The boundaries of a new reality.”
– Why a new reality? Because when we returned to our native walls of schools and universities, the figure did not go anywhere, ”explained Maxim Kazarnovsky, director of the Moscow International Salon of Education, presenting the program of the event. – And the balance that develops between traditional forms of education and digital – this balance will be the focus of our research and reflection during the three days of the salon.
According to Mikhail Kozhevnikov, President of the Enlightenment group of companies, today the main task is to provide schoolchildren and teachers with equal opportunities to access the new digital reality through infrastructure development. Therefore, “Enlightenment” will present its flagship projects on the technical equipment of schools, information security systems, and IT solutions in the field of research activities at the MISO.
“The last one and a half to two years have taught us that children perceive educational digital technologies naturally and organically,” says Mikhail Kozhevnikov. – For them, it is a familiar tool that they use every day. But problems arose among teachers and parents for completely objective reasons. First, the infrastructure is far from ready to provide all children with equal conditions. And secondly, the teachers themselves were not ready for the new situation. We are faced with the task of rebooting the teacher education system. Today, the teacher lacks subject knowledge and the ability to understand child psychology. It is impossible to do without skills in digital tools.
“What I like most is that we started using the word“ reality ”instead of the concept“ virtual world ”,” says Andrey Sebrant, director of strategic marketing at Yandex. – Because when we talk about information and computer technologies throughout the entire salon, we will always remain within the framework of reality. Today even such traditional things as voting are moving to electronic format. And there is no need to tell anyone about the opportunities digital technologies provide for communication, education and work. One of the tasks of education is to prepare children for real life. And in this world, along with natural phenomena, which are told about in a physics or chemistry course, there will be a lot of everything digital.
According to Andrei Sebrant, the new digital reality requires a change in the principles of teaching mathematics and computer science, since the importance of these disciplines has gone beyond vocational guidance. After all, we study biology not because we expect to see all the children in a medical or veterinary university. It's just that we are living organisms and we must understand, at least in the first approximation, how we are arranged. Likewise, if we live in an environment where there are many different digital technologies around us, then it is important to understand how this works. It is necessary to feel confident, to be an effective specialist and just a happy person. Accordingly, computer science and mathematics, on which computer science is based, should take a different place in the school curriculum. Today these are sciences about the world around us, and not sciences about a possible profession.
Last year, the MMOS was held entirely online. The current salon (like all our education) operates in a hybrid format: offline events will be held from October 6 to 8, 2021 at the Crocus Expo exhibition complex, and online you can participate in its work on the MMSO.Connect communication platform. More details of the salon program can be found on the website mmco-expo.ru. The conference will host all 85 finalists of the Teacher of the Year competition for the first time. The name of the winner will be announced on October 5, and on October 10, a big concert in honor of the laureates of the competition will take place in the Kremlin Hall.
