Tag Archives: EdTech

SSAT National Conference 2010 #NC10 – Initial Thoughts

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The SSAT National Conference took place last week at the ICC in Birmingham (a venue rightly compared to Escher’s Relativity!).  I was fortunate to be able to attend as a punter on the Wednesday and as a presenter on the Thursday as we launched the SSAT National Digital Leaders programme!

The theme of the conference was ‘Excellence for All’, and I have to say that the SSAT delivered , each aspect of the conference itself was excellent.

Wednesday started for me with Dylan Wiliam extolling the importance of assessment being the key to good teaching.  He was as inspiring a speaker as ever, as those of you who watched his recent TV program would know.  In particular I was impressed with Dylan’s ability to demonstrate his techniques within a ‘classroom’ of 400 educators, and also his incredible use of research evidence to support his teachings.

Wednesday Keynotes came from David Hemery, former 400m Hurdles Gold medal winning Olympian, he was telling his story and promoting www.21stcenturylegacy.com , part of London 2012′s legacy programme for schools.  He was followed by Sugata Mitra, telling his engaging tale of children teaching themselves using the Internet, from his hole-in-the-wall Mumbai slums experiment to his recent work in Gateshead.  This was an engaging tale that at first seemed to question the need for teachers at all!  As with all the speakers, more to follow in a future blog-post.  I would add that I was fortunate enough to chat to Sugata over coffee following his talk, a charming man. Continue reading →

A Progressive Approach To The Internet In School

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A post I’ve been meaning to write for many months…

Battles:

I have had my battles with Internet filtering in the past, but I’m now the man in charge.  Every school I have worked in so far in my opinion has had an old fashioned ‘head in the sand’ view to filtering and acceptable use of the Internet within school.  I’ve ranted about this in the past.

Reversing a Head In The Sand mentality. CC licensed image from David Barrie at Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/addictive_picasso/

Battleground:

I would estimate that 95% of our pupils now own a mobile phone, and that 80% of these have unrestricted access to the Internet on these devices.  This doesn’t factor in devices such as netbooks, iPod Touches and PSPs that are also brought into school.  What this leads to is unrestricted, unfiltered access to the Internet within our school, and at a pace and quality that is ever increasing.  I also regularly receive requests from teachers to block this that and the other as a classroom management tool.

Battle plan:

I strongly believe that in response to this situation we need a new approach to Internet access within schools, something that still protects our children but also that prepares them for the World in which they live.

This comes in 3 parts:

  1. An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that is relevant, understood by all parties and linked closely to general school behaviour policies.
  2. Relatively unfiltered Internet access.
  3. Quality monitoring solutions.

Continue reading →

Frog Learning Platforms Conference 2010 – Digital Leaders – The Story So Far

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Embedded below is the presentation that I will attempt in the Pecha-Kucha style on Tuesday 15th June at the Frog Learning Platforms Conference 2010.

For further information on Digital Leaders check out the following links or get in touch with me on Twitter or via the comments below.

http://www.mrstucke.com/tag/digital-leaders/

http://kristianstill.co.uk/wordpress/category/curriculum/digital-leaders/

http://digitalleaders.co.uk

http://vital.ac.uk/

Influencing Policy Part 2: Becta-X: Old Conversations, New Connections, Bright Future?

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I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break.  The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector.  Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated.

The aims of the day were:

The way the digital media industry influences young people is both a threat and a real opportunity to education. As part of its “Fit for the Future” programme Becta has asked Just-b. Productions to independently bring together thinkers and doers from both these two worlds

We hope this participatory and distributed forum will break down walls between these two sectors, between big and small, between speaker and delegate, between real and remote participants and create fresh thinking on all sides.

I’ll not describe the entire order of events, if you want the details or indeed just the perspectives of others then please have a skim through some of these posts from other educators who were in attendance:

Fred Garnett / Tom Barrett / Doug Belshaw / Dai Barnes / Kristian Still / Nicola McNee / Ewan McIntosh

As you will see from those posts there was some discussion and reflection afterwards as to how much of a success the event was.  My 2-cents worth: Continue reading →

Twitter in the classroom rocks!

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Following yesterday’s use of Twitter in the classroom, I was walking to Period 5 (same class as yesterday) after lunch, when inspiration struck.  I remembered this post from @tombarrett .

Go and read it.

Go on!

I threw my lesson plan out of the window and did exactly what Tom did, here are the replies: (click through for them all)

This caused great excitement and interest in the topic, and really helped us look in to the language and mathematics of describing chance.

This class have really been inspired with the idea of my network, I had to stop them spending the rest of the lesson bombarding you all with further questions!  Bringing global connections into the classroom is a real attention grabber, and like it or not we are entertainers!

Nothing more to say – thanks Tom –  a great idea, and thanks to everyone who contributed to the lesson.

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Netbooks – Ready for Education Prime-Time?

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As net-books continue to outpace the rest of the PC industry, prices falling and specs improving, are they ready for prime-time use in schools?

I have dallied with eeePCs back in the day, I was impressed then, unfortunately school didn’t back that up with a permanent wireless network and they have been little used since.  Back then the main issues were small screens, small keyboards and small batteries.  All of these features have been greatly improved over the past two years.

Continue reading →

The New Curriculum – Bowland Maths

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The new KS3 Framework has a renewed focus on using and applying Maths along with developing the Personal, learning and thinking skills and the Cross-curricular dimensions introduced with the new National Curriculum.

On reflection the content which we need to deliver has changed little and so with some tweaking our previous scheme of work will suffice in structure.  This statutory change in the manner in which we deliver the content and offer opportunities to put the Maths in context, develop pupils personal skills and link in with other subjects can only be a good thing in my opinion.

There are a number of fantastic resource banks out there full of ‘rich’ mathematical tasks which we could use:

nRich: Hundreds of puzzles and investigations, updated monthly.
Kangaroo Maths: Particularly Using & Applying and Enrichment sections.
Bowland Maths: New resources designed specifically with the new curriculum in mind.
Defence Dynamics: Interactive resources / lesson plans based on real world scenarios from the MoD.

Of particular interest are the Bowland Maths resources, these have been produced by the Bowland Charitable Trust in conjunction with the NCETM.  To quote their site:

‘Bowland Maths makes maths fun for pupils aged 11-14. The aim is to help change pupils’ views of maths by increasing their motivation and enjoyment, which should help increase their confidence and their competence. A second aim is to help teach maths in a different way.

The Bowland Maths materials look very different from most maths teaching materials. They consist of innovative case study problems, each taking 3-5 lessons, designed to develop thinking, reasoning and problem solving skills – as in the revised Key Stage 3 curriculum. Each case study is different, but all provide pupils and teachers with problems that are fun and engaging, while also being a rich maths experience. The case studies are not remotely like answering questions from a book. For Portraits of the case studies, click here.’

As a department we will be reviewing a number of these resources and planning their integration into our teaching over the coming weeks.  I will add more in the future about any particular highlights.

Have you any other links to quality resources to enrich Maths teaching?  How is your department tackling these changes?

MyMaths.co.uk – A Review

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I have introduced a fantastic resource into both of my recent schools over the last 2 years. It continues to impress me to this day and it’s about time I wrote a glowing review of it!

MyMaths.co.uk has been around for a couple of years now and continues to grow. When I originally bought it for my previous school it consisted of a series of excellent lessons with interactive elements for use on the IWB or a pupil’s individual computer.

Sample lesson:

MM Lesson

There are also a wealth of excellent games focussing on all manner of mathematical skills.  These are tremendously popular with pupils and work brilliantly on IWBs.  A particular highlight of these are the leaderboards, showing the highest score of the day and of all time for all users.  It’s a great incentive trying to beat other schools!

Over the last year online homeworks have been introduced.  Each pupil is given an individual login so that their progress can be tracked.  All of your class and pupil details can be uploaded with a simple csv file.  This gives you the ability to set whole classes homework tasks and to monitor their progress online – no marking required!  These combine with the excellent ‘Booster Packs’ designed to move pupils on to KS3 Levels 4 and 6, and GCSE levels C, B & A*.

The Management Console where you can assign tasks etc:

Pupil Feedback:

Overall MyMaths is a comprehensive suite of lessons, games, homeworks and other tools that covers the entire UK National Curriculum for Maths.  The resources are well written and of a much higher standard than alternatives such as SAM Learning, it is also much easier to navigate than many of its competitors.  Our pupils now complete more homework than they used to and have been spotted playing on the games in spare time during other subjects!  A considerable number of pupils come back to the department during their lunchtimes to work through the Boosters.  I must add that this includes a number of pupils who were not greatly engaged with Maths previously and who are now excelling.

At a cost of £400 per year, MyMaths represents excellent value for money.  I am expecting to get much more use out of it now that I have taken delivery of 6 eeePCs for my classroom.  Initial tests show that the site scales well to the size of the screen and I expect pupils will use it in the majority of my lessons.

So a gushing review, but one that is deserved, well done to the team behind it and long may the improvements keep coming.