Category Archives: ELearning

Posts relating to my post as E-Learning Director at Stretford High School.

Mobile, Personalised Learning – The Essa Academy

7 Replies

These are my notes from a fascinating day at the Essa Academy, courtesy of Apple. We were treated to a tour and talks by a number of staff including the Principal - Showk Badat, Abdul Chohan & Jeff Ellis.

I was fascinated by not just the integration of mobile technologies (they are famous for giving every pupil an iPod Touch, and now, every teacher an iPad), but also their innovative New Basics Year 7 curriculum and their elective personalised curriculum for years 8-11. I was also impressed by the fantastic pupils and the excellent learning that we saw.

Below are basically my notes as I took them, I hope they’re of interest to some people and I will reflect on them further in relation to my IT Provision Plans.

Continue reading →

IT Provision in Secondary Schools in 2011

33 Replies

Another what’s the best way forward? blog post where I try and dissect my own thinking on what IT provision should look like in a Secondary School in 2011.  Continue the current mix of laptop trolleys and IT suites or move towards a 1 to 1 environment of tablets or laptops?

iPad at age 2

Are tablets the answer?

Financial Planning

This year so far has been all about planning ahead for me. We’ve started the process of planning two completely new courses to deliver to our students in ICT, and I’m delighted that both GCSE Computing & Creative iMedia have enough students interested for me to run both courses next year.

Next on my hit-list is managing & planning our IT provision across the whole site for the next few years. Our school has always been relatively cash-rich for a variety of reasons. This is not the case going forward.  Despite Michael Gove & the Conservatives’ claims that they would not cut school budgets we are receiving less money this year than we have previously. This is after we take into account the pupil premium (and being situated in Central Manchester we have an above average percentage of Free School Meals). All of this at the same time as costs are increasing thanks to the Government’s removal of the Harnessing Technology Grant. Historically the IT Support team has been given a fairly modest budget with which they maintain the existing equipment and add some provision each year.  Replacement of entire suites / trolleys etc have then been funded by ‘Summer Projects’ funded from surplus school cash. I am acutely aware that the surplus school cash may well not be here next Summer and it is time we plan and budget ahead carefully for the next 2-5 years.  And so I come to my current position where I am left impressed at the cost of continuing as we are, yet thinking there must be a better way…. Continue reading →

The Village – A Great Idea – Your Help Requested

6 Replies

I was delighted to be contacted last week by one of our Humanities staff with the following email:

I presented Project 8’s new learning platform for next year, ‘The Village’ in the Humanities teachers toolbox on Tuesday. Our idea is for us to set up an imaginary world where students can create a community, developing alter ego’s through role play and using their imaginations etc.

The other major element to the ‘The Village’ is to create a virtual world where students can create their characters inside a virtual setting. We were thinking about building an online virtual community through ’Second Life’, and linking it up with the new VLE. Building the imaginary world virtually is an opportunity to create wider out of school opportunities, linking with home learning. I was wondering if I could  arrange a meeting with you when convenient, to discuss if this is at all possible? How would we go about it? What implications may be when setting something like this up?

Attached is my power point, which outlines our idea a bit further for your interest.

Appreciate your time and support on this, I will get us some cakes and coffee’s for the meeting!

This was accompanied by this presentation:

I was obviously delighted with such a fantastic idea and look forward to meeting the team tomorrow to discuss the ideas further.

However I have little experience of Second Life. Has anyone out there got experience of using Second Life in schools, I’d be really interested to hear of the pros and cons, bonuses and pitfalls. How easy is it to set up your own ‘safe’ areas? What’s the learning curve like? How easy is it to link Second Life to external content? How do you keep pupils safe in Second Life?

My second thought on this project is that it would make a fantastic project to collaborate on with another school or two from around the World. If you’re interested then please get in touch and we’ll see what we can make happen.

#LWF11 – Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia – Evolving The Dream & Final Questions

1 Reply

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Another presenter who is challenged by presenting ‘in the round’!

Seeing a massive change in the quality and quantity of informal learning.  Talk about the dream of free knowledge for everyone.  Free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

What is free access?  Free as in speech, not as in beer.  Something more fundamental.  Free to redistribute and re-use all of Wikipedia.

What is the sum of all human knowledge? Wikipedia is not an archive or library, nor a textbook, can be an adjunct to a textbook.  Not designed to lead you through the learning.  Not Youtube, no funny cat videos, try to keep things serious.  Encyclopedia offers a summary of human knowledge.

Joked about being sick of seeing his face on the website calling for donations to the charity.   Around 50 employees and a budget of $21million.  It’s the 100,000 contributors who make it happen.  All design and content is done by the community.

16 million articles across 270 languages.  199 languages have at least 1000 articles.  Over a million in English German and French.  Abandoned China for 3 years due to censorship.  But was made accessible again around the Olympics, just with certain pages e.g. Taiwan, Tianneman being filtered.  But only ranked around no.50 in China as a website.

Showed some funny Chinese menus translated into English and ended up with Stir Fried Wikipedia, probably due to it being first entry for every search on the internet:

Global content comparisons using a graph of % of page hits for the top 100 topics:  Similar written content across countries.  But readers vary more.  Japanese love searching for pop culture.  Germans most interested in Geography!  Sex very popular except in France and Spain - because they are actually having sex while the rest of us just read it on the Internet!

Wikipedia has 408 million unique visitors (per how long?).

Who is writing Wikipedia?  Important to know for young people as it is such a dominant source of information for young people.

  • 87% male. Too many computer geeks!  Want to simplify the editing interface.  Excluding women but also elderly and other less confident users.
  • Average age 26.
  • Double % PhDs – geekier crowd than normal
  • People at the intersection between intelligence, obsession and free time!
  • Invitation is in the edit button to allow people to take part – nice quote from a ‘user’ in a video Jimmy showed

What is beyond the encyclopedia?  Encyclopedia is just the start.

Library is much much bigger.  Wikia is Jimmy’s next project to take over the rest of the library.  Place for people to dig deeply into, used example of comparing the entries for Twilight the novel.  No need for the ‘source’ in Wikia, more opinions and discussions.  Went on to talk about Lostpedia, which was created on Wikia to write about Lost the TV programme.  Believe that the writers took great inspiration from the fans documenting it, the show was something of a wiki in it’s self.

Jimmy’s final point: How can we get the learners involved in the creation of their learning?

As big a sales pitch as some other talks today, but enthralling.  If only because of the influence it has on our learners, it’s so often their number one source.  Who needs to know the dates of Kings & Queens when it’s a search away?

Final questions with Jimmy, Lord Puttnam & Graham:

Good point in the questions that the whole idea of Wikipedia was seen as complete madness beforehand.  Which feeds into the ideas from Stephen & Lord Puttnam of this next multi-billion making innovation potentially being in the sphere of learning.  Lord Puttnam later added that he thought that great innovation would stem from the games industry.

Great anecdote from Lord Puttnam about someone challenging a member of parliament in parliament as they searched on their phone about a speech from the week before and pointed out that what they were saying was not true and that they were contradicting themselves.  Something that happens more and more in the classroom.

Great question asked of Jimmy as to whether a step by step learning based wiki could be built that would transform free education with a crowd sourced curriculum.  The foundation have tried a variation with wiki-books but it has struggled as software not suited to assessment etc..  But also problems with fragmented educational standards.  One of the big things that inspire people to take part is that they know someone will use their contribution.  Jimmy thinks that people would feel that schools couldn’t use their content in the classroom -I’d disagree with this quite strongly.  So many of us blog about our teaching BECAUSE we hope someone else might find it useful in their classroom.  However he does think it should be possible.

Final question was about what 3 things you’d have in a new school.  Lord Puttnam points out that it’s easy to do great things in a school but it’s really difficult to scale to every school.  Jimmy would want to see increased teaching of media competence and the ability to assess the quality of a source of information, in context of Wikipedia – how do you use it as a starting point to go deeper into a topic.  Fantastic point to finish on.

And that’s it – battery nearly flat on the laptop, and internal batteries exhausted – interesting day of live blogging, will read back later and see if there was any quality to it or if I just missed the salient points through distraction!

#LWF11 – Lord David Puttnam of Queensgate

1 Reply

Lord David Puttnam, man of many hats, but perhaps pertinently Chairman of Futurelab:

Joked that Stephen Heppel and he had have achieved so little in the last 20 years!  Not yet a state where what’s best for the child is also what’s best for the child.

Left film industry as it had ceased to be inspirational in it’s use of tech and thought more could be done in educational policy.  Sadly was wrong in hindsight.

Barely begun to explore how technology can transform education.  Digital creation economy is fastest growing.  PwC report shows us as poor exporters of our services.  Education has prospective growth as an industry for the UK.  Could be a driver of growth in modern & competitive world.  More dignified than Financial Services!

Significant division within government on the role of technology in education.

Platforms and technologies have become embedded in the daily lives of teachers, they too are now digital natives.

How did we get ourselves into this mess when BETT has 70 education ministers from around the world?

Digitising old practices seeks to simply get the old outcomes only faster.

What would a digital curriculum look like if disruption did take place?

Apple re-imagined the computer and phone. Disrupted those markets.  Even got a joke about Flash in for the iPad 2!  The App economy has consequentially changed the landscape for software.

Mobile tech is close to reaching every single human being on Earth.  So where is the specific disruption that will change the way we learn?  When will we recognise the learning that takes place in creating a Youtube video or collaborate within an online World?  Our job is to build ontop of these experiences and develop them into learning opportunities.

Worst possible moment to abandon use of tech within learning, but exactly the right moment to re-start the discussions about technology in learning.  Need to talk about what the World of work will look like in 2020-2030 when the students of today begin work.

Next multi-billion invention may be in the field of learning.  Fitting in with Stephen Heppel’s evolution from earlier.

Imagine being able to lower the amount of time spent in school, increasing the productivity.  Would allow us to revisit the economic discussions around school.  Higher productivity, higher skills, higher wages could let the teaching industry enjoy higher prestige.

Young people have less time to listen to ‘corporate speak’, dialogue makes online connections work.  Expect to be active participants within a discussion.  To win back their trust we need to engage effectively with their World.  Need to move technology to the core of their learning.

No matter how gifted or charismatic you are you will never effectively teach someone who does not relate to and respect you.

No education system can be better than the quality of teachers.  Teacher training in digital age has to be continuing. With paid time out for development.

We have to become far far more persuasive in getting our message across.

Another impassioned and inspiring call to action – I think he and Stephen may have been talking before today!

#LWF11 – David McCandless, Author & Information Designer – Infographics & Data

1 Reply

David is the author of http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/.

Worked through some fantastic infographics from his site, go look at them now.  Better still see his TED talk:

Some interesting insights from using Google InSights to track search terms.  Great tool for use in the classroom.

Nice talk about needing to compare proportions rather than totals, in the concept of military spending.  Love the Maths of normalising figures for population.

Take data and use it as a lense to clarify your thinking.

Like Stephen Heppel’s learners David is self-taught in his technical skills using the likes of Youtube.

What happens when you make data beautiful?  Visualisation helps make the mind envisage scale and proportion far better.  Can condense a huge amount of info into a small amount of space.

Nice graphic of the difference between the Left & Right in American politics.  Helps you to see where someone else is coming from.

Information design is about solving information problems, something we have lots of now.

Fascinating and enlightening talk – a breath of fresh air after the intense debate from previous session.  And to top it off his book is on sale at Amazon!

#LWF11 – Stephen Heppell – What’s on the horizon?

1 Reply

Stephen started with a nice anecdote about starting his career asked a tough group of students to help him out by getting teaching tips from other teachers in return from him teaching them the content.

Be Very Afraid programme.  Students taught themselves to play an instrument in a month.

Evolution of tech in our lifetimes: Hardware -> software -> databases -> searching -> socialising -> learning next.

Learning will happen where we least expect it.  e.g. subtitling Bollywood movies in other languages in India; superclasses – 3 teachers, 90 kids, 5 terms learning in 3; Sugata Mitra – hole-in-the-wall.

Spent a few minutes tearing apart teacher training, if you don’t have the very best schools in that area then what right do you have to teach teachers?!

Should be ashamed to be at the top of Gove’s English Bacc league table – child cruelty!  We can do better.

People plus technology breaks cartels – education is a cartel that will be broken by people and technology.

Interesting to hear that Stephen is planning a free school, taking advantage of Gove’s policies to push his own way of doing things Academy!

Pupils need to prepared for the uncertainty.  The reason we are in the vanguard is because we’ve lived through the endless surprise of technological innovation in our lifetime.  We haven’t articulated how good this could be.

The World is broken, learning can heal conflict and suffering.  We have the chance to do so.  Make it loud make it heard!  A proper call to arms.

A captivating talk, Stephen showed how easy it can seem to present when you know your subject matter so well, no notes, just a series of images and a belief in your argument.

#LWF11 – Keri Facer, Prof of Education, MMU

1 Reply

Keri Facer.

Can’t continue to argue about whether we focus on the individual or whether we use technology to bring learners together.

We need to learn to live with connectivity that we’ve never imagined before.  Evolution of non-human-like intelligence.

Need a curriculum for collaborative and collective intelligence.  Diminishing economy and rapidly changing aging demographic.  Need to understand the relationships between generations.  Beginning to see education become divided by wealth.  Changeing environmental situation.  Responding to refugees, water supply issues etc..

It’s all doom and gloom, but truly passionate!

We need to develop spaces where we can all come together and solve these issues.  Can’t continue the lie that  a 1st class degree will be the ticket to immunisation from these issues.  Education needed that is engaged with it’s communities.

Cooperative education movements, democratic education movements, small schools, sustainable schools and education justice collectives are all helping to bridge these gaps.

How do techs build communities and enable learners to think about their futures?  Need to start shouting about these projects and values so that the next Government might support this movement.

A highly passioned, and not surprisingly well received argument.  Graham chose these two contrasting viewpoints well, certainly enlivened the debate.

#LWF11 Katharine Birbalsingh, Teacher & Author

5 Replies

Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Head Teacher famously sacked following her outspoken speech at the Tory Party conference.

Started with the story of challenging behaviour in Secondary Schools.  How have we got to this point, a dark age of education?  How can we move schools on into the 21st Century?  Need to equip children with a bag of goodies to enable them to thrive in the World.

One thought is to stop teaching so much content and to concentrate on skills, group work etc..  Basic knowledge though is necessary to be able to be creative.  Need to move back towards a more traditional form of teaching.  A middle class child already has this as they pick up so much at the dinner table, from the Maths tutor or from Dad reading at bed time.  Not so from less advantaged children who rely entirely on their schools.

Many reformers went to Grammar school and mistakenly think that most children are going through a similar education system.  Creating a system where children do not get access to the ‘bag of goodies’ that they themselves received.

We know that exams are being dumbed down. We are letting down many many pupils.

Many believe that an injection of tech is needed.  But this is reformers again misunderstanding what is needed.  Eton has only 2 interactive whiteboards.

Katharine continued talking along these lines, pointing out that Eton etc are very different to main stream schools, but without really going anywhere with her argument.

Argued that lack of technology not an issue as children are already skilled to the hilt from their own use.

“The education that is best for the best is the education that is best for all”.  Need to be educationally Conservative.  Argued that main stream schools reject what is successful in the likes of Eton.

There is no hiding from negative feedback in this room, the Twitter feed on the hashtag #LWF11 throughout this talk was cutting in it’s criticism.