Connected Blog

We all know that the world is shrinking, but nothing brings this home to me more than a message I received this evening from Govinda Prasad Panthy. In my day to day school life, I worry about problems which are miles away from Govinda’s experience, and yet we share a common bond: a desire to make a difference in children’s lives.

Govinda is the wonderfully titled Founder/teacher/manager of the Shantideep Adarsh Vidhyasadan school in Nepal. Founded 10 years ago, his school has risen from 13 students to 137… but the catch is that he cannot take all the pupils he would like because of a lack of resources and materials. I wonder what our own truants and NEETs could learn from Govinda’s pupils, it might be an interesting experience for both sides.

There is an explanation of some of the problems Govinda and his school have had to face as they have grown on his Classroom2.0 page and I think reading it will put a few of our own problems into perspective. I would love to see his school thrive, but can’t help thinking that there are so many areas of the world that don’t have a Govinda to drive them forward and make a difference, that there are so many children who will not have the opportunity to realise their potential, and that there are so many people in the “developed” world who have no idea just how valuable their education is.

If you want to know just how impressive Govinda’s efforts have been, then all you have to do is take a look at the photos he has posted. They will put many of our pupils to shame…

CLICK HERE FOR ALL OF GOVINDA’S PHOTOS

Want to be a better teacher? Want to know what’s really going on? Then you’d better be prepared to share…

Dean Shareski has just posted a really interesting presentation about the importance of sharing on Slideshare. As well as giving a great insight into why he shares as much as he does (and it’s a lot!), he also makes a compelling point about professional responsibility. As he says in his excellent voice-over, we are there “…to do more than just teach our own students…”. In the past — and with apologies to any music instrument teachers reading — this might have created nightmare inducing visions of peripatetic teachers being carted from school to school in order to deliver their latest series of lessons. Not any more.

Connected learning means that we can all learn from each other, and more importantly, share with each other. As part of my own drive forward, I’m intending to post most of my lessons online over the next year. I’m hoping that this will force me to be a better teacher, but also it is intended to start a discussion about actual lessons and the mechanics of what I do in my English classroom. The reason for this is simple: I want to make the learning experience for my pupils better and that means asking for advice and help and hints and tips — not doing the typical ‘closing-the-door-and-getting-on-with-it-because-
I’m-an-expert-and-have-nothing- new-to-learn’ that we have all seen…

It’s no secret that lots of teachers don’t share with their colleagues because they feel that the materials aren’t good enough… I’ve felt it often enough myself, but as so many people have said, we have to be prepared to fail if we are going to move forward…

It goes back to another of Shareski’s points. As teachers, we stress the importance of sharing with our pupils and students. What is group work if not sharing of ideas? If we truly believe that there is value in sharing of ideas and knowledge, then it is up to us to model this behaviour by sharing our amongst ourselves.

I’ll be using a separate blog or more wikely, a wiki, for the purpose. Stay tuned for the URL and my first batch of lessons… and while you’re waiting, go and check out Dean Shareski’s entertaining rationale for sharing!

Cross-posted to Mr W’s Blog

Here is the full, uncut text of the research report by Robert Hart, Director of Research at Intuitive Media, which was featured in issue 20 of Connected Magazine. Drawing on the results of a research project into how online connectivity is changing children’s lives, Robert shares the story of Emily Sanderson.

The human species is evolving rapidly. Our children are growing up in a very different environment to their parents. They have access to huge amounts of information at the click of a mouse. They can connect with people all over the world from their desktops, their laptops, and now increasingly from their mobile phones and mobile internet devices. Things have changed.

Let’s wind the clock back 25 years to 1972, when Carl Sagan was asked to design a plaque to go into deep space with the NASA Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. It was naively designed to invite ET round for tea, or to eat us for tea! It showed how to find us and what we looked like. Looking at the plaque (pictured left), the humans are standing side by side, but disconnected. If Sagan had known about Emily Sanderson and her online friends, the picture might have been different.

With humans now intimately connected to each other online around the world, we are seeing the emergence of Homo sapiens continuus – the Connected Ape.

Working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and Becta, Intuitive Media conducted extensive research into how children behave and learn in protected online social learning networks. The research included observation and analysis of the online behaviour of more than 120,000 children, direct online consultation with some 12,000 children who took part in a series of research surveys and the detailed profiling of eight representative children. Here, we distil what we learned through the profile of a single 10-year-old girl.

Who is Emily Connected?

Emily Sanderson is a real child (although her name has been changed to protect her identity). She is 10 years old, lives in the Midlands and is a representative of more than 120,000 children in the SuperClubsPLUS & GoldStarCafe social learning networks. This profile describes Emily alongside other children in her online community.

• Statements about Emily are given in relation to the statistical analysis of whole community. For example: “Emily owns a Nintendo DS (24%)” indicates that statement is true for 24% of the community.
• How and when is Emily connected?
  Like 61% of the SuperClubsPLUS and GoldStarCafe communities, Emily has a home PC. She also owns a Nintendo DS (24%) and a Sony PSP (16%). She has a mobile phone (like 76%) which she uses her mobile to access SuperClubsPLUS (as do 46% of her peers).
• Like more than half of the children surveyed, Emily gets just 30 minutes a week on the school computers. Emily would like more frequent access for longer periods of time. Most of her online communications activity is at home. She checks her SuperClubsPLUS emails before she leaves for school and logs in again as soon as she gets home. She’s active in the evenings from 4-8 pm and very active at the weekends. She spends over 300 hours a year in the SuperClubsPLUS community.

What does Emily get up to online?

In her online community Emily is exceptionally productive and communicative. She joined SuperClubsPLUS in June 2006 and makes three visits a day. Emily is a dedicated personal website developer. To populate her four home pages in SuperClubsPLUS, she has sourced, prepared and published 32 images and 15 icons. She’s edited her home pages 4,180 times, with 279 updates per month or nine per day. She also contributes her content to her school’s site in SuperClubsPLUS.

Emily has created her own online club – a Web Ring called ‘Birmingham City are the best!’ Emily’s home pages and webrings are dedicated to her favourite football teams.

At home, Emily likes to create her own images, photos and animations (e.g. icons) and send interesting site links to friends. In SuperClubsPLUS she says she likes to make and share content. Emily likes sharing her ideas and content with others, but wants to retain her creative individuality.

How communicative is Emily?

Emily is very sociable and communicative one-to-one. In 15 months she sent 8,419 emails to 580 different members. She sends 140 emails a week and receives 146. She’s also a prolific communicator in groups. She made 5,721 contributions to 13 different SuperClubsPLUS forums (mostly from her Nintendo DS) She is a prolific contributor to community ‘hot-seat’ forums, making 72 posts in 12 weeks.

Emily’s pages are very popular with other children. She’s had an exceptional 6,268 visits to her main home page and her digital guest-book has been signed by 544 visitors. Her circle of young friends has expanded enormously, spanning the UK. She receives emails from 503 different community members. One hundred children list her as a close buddy (they can only choose 10 buddies each, so this is an indication of high regard).

Emily also has a productive online relationship with her teacher (133 emails sent, 84 received). She talks more with the community mediators (259 emails sent 212 received).

How does Emily’s learning vary between home and school?

At school Emily wishes she had more choice in what she learns. She wants to “choose my own work” and “do my own projects.” Unlike 95% of her online community, Emily says she prefers to do easier work and at a slower pace than other kids in class.

Like 83% of SuperClubsPLUS members, Emily would like to work with her teacher from home, making use of email and forums to show her teacher her work and ask for help and ideas. Emily thinks she learns better at school (like 77%), but says she also learns well in the evenings and weekends (17%), with her parents (53%) and siblings (22%).

In contrast to her limited access to ICT at school, she spends over 300 hours a year communicating, collaborating, creating and learning in SuperClubsPLUS.

What can we learn from Emily?

Emily works at a slow pace at school, but she turns into Hurricane Emily online! Her mobile connected lifestyle has changed her educational and social experience. The combination of a mobile phone or games console plus a safe online learning community leads to a new social learning dimension.

Things have changed. Emily takes her learning home. She communicates and collaborates with a vast peer group across the UK. She has become a productive, effective and engaging publisher and communicator, sociable and popular with a very wide circle of online friends – adults and children.

Emily Sanderson has become Emily Connected, a member of the species H. sapiens continuus – the connected ape!

Here is the full transcript of the interview with Kay Livingston, Head of International Education at LTS, as part of the Broaden Your Horizons story in Issue 20 of Connected magazine. There are also plenty of Chinese culture and language links on the MFLE website:

• Chinese language special
• Teaching Chinese at St George’s School for Girls
• What it’s like being a Chinese teacher in Scotland (video diaries)
  
• Some advice on setting up a link with a Chinese school
• Some advice on curricular projects with Chinese schools
• Some advice on visiting partner Chinese schools
• A story of one school’s Chinese adventure

What’s the latest update on launching the Confucius Classrooms?
Learning and Teaching Scotland is in communication with schools and local authorities in order to develop Confucius Classrooms that will serve as hubs across Scotland. The aim is that every school in Scotland will have an opportunity to access these classrooms and their valuable resources. Our aim is that by June 2008 three of the classrooms will be open and that a further three will be up and running by the end of the year. This might seem quite ambitious but we are optimistic that we can deliver this, as many schools are already doing a lot of work on teaching Chinese language and culture and are very keen to host a Confucius Classroom.

How has The Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban) offered assistance with setting up the classrooms?
Hanban has offered to provide a package of resources and teaching materials for children across a wide age range to help with teaching the Chinese language and Chinese culture. The classrooms will also become a hub for twilight and in-service events.

How do you envisage the classrooms being set up?
We’re still at very early stages of defining how exactly the classrooms will be set up, but they will become a focus for teachers and somewhere to set up events to promote Chinese language and culture and forge links with Chinese communities in the area. Each classroom will be able to operate in a way that’s suitable for its particular context.

What will be the main advantages of the classrooms?
The classrooms will stimulate the provision of services for teachers, pupils and the community. The introduction of SQA qualifications at intermediate level 1 and 2 in Mandarin will be part of the initiative. Lots of pupils are already learning the language so this will act as a great way to advance and spread its teaching.

Why has China become such an important focus for international education?
Within international education we are developing links with other countries, not just China but also countries in Africa and Europe for example. It’s all about widening the horizons for our children. Chinese is already offered at many schools but often as an optional subject. The classrooms also recognise that China is a strong economic force. The initiatives of Scotland-China Education Network (SCEN) convened by Judith McClure of St George’s High School have developed a lot of interest in China. SCEN hosted a conference in October 2007 and it was a really interesting day involving lots of young people. It was great to see the creativity used in the teaching of Chinese language – the pupils were all so enthusiastic and really enjoyed it.

What’s the main aim of the classrooms?
The focus of the Confucius Classrooms will be teaching Chinese language and culture, developed as part of international education in Scottish schools. The aim is to enable young people to live and work in a global society with other cultures who have similar and different views, religious beliefs, symbols, ways of working etc. It’s so important that our pupils have knowledge that’s based on reality and not myth. Responsible citizenship for a global society is a key part of what international education is all about.

Are there plans to extend the programme beyond creating Confucius Classrooms?
Once the Confucius Classrooms are up and running the next stage will be to arrange visits to China for pupils. Our discussions with Hanban are the first step in developing closer relationships with China and we hope to set up summer schools in China so Scottish pupils have an immersion course in Chinese language and culture and get to meet fellow Chinese pupils who they may have already worked with over the internet. Some schools have already managed to arrange trips to China.

How does international education tie in with the Curriculum for Excellence?
If we don’t educate pupils about a global society, then we are not preparing them for life in the 21st century. If you look at the four capacities of the Curriculum for Excellence then you can see that international education is essential. You can’t be a successful learner in the 21st century without an international dimension, nor can you become a responsible citizen or an effective contributor to society. It’s essential in order to fully understand sustainable development and climate change. It’s also linked to communication skills – how do we communicate with someone whose mother tongue is not English? International education is not an add-on that we are asking teachers to do. It’s an integral part of education and must be delivered through the curriculum.

What’s the future for international education?
Links with schools and other countries will become an integral part of education. Pupils will be presenting their work to schools across the world, doing joint projects, working alongside each other to collect data, blogging etc. Much of this is already happening but it’s a matter of spreading and developing existing initiatives. Links with schools abroad are an excellent opportunity for pupils and teachers to discover how schools in various countries are tackling different subjects – an opportunity to swap and share practices.

“Of course there is child protection issues involved in this but provided that thorough risk assessments are conducted in advance, then child protection shouldn’t stop young people being able to go out and experience new cultures and a different way of life.”

What are the benefits of teachers taking part in international exchanges and courses?
Any teacher who has taken part in these projects returns saying that they are re-motivated and re-energised. It challenges their way of thinking and working. Working with colleagues in other countries and seeing their practice at first hand is invaluable. By understanding the education systems in other countries we can help benchmark the delivery of education here.

Connected Live brings you extra content on top of what you can read in your paper edition of Connected magazine. Here, read exclusively all the questions and answers on Scotland’s national intranet Glow with LTS’s Director of Learning and Technology Laurie O’Donnell that didn’t make it to the magazine:

“Glow’s most important advocates are our teachers and learners”
Few educationalists doubt the power of Glow to transform learning and teaching, but when will it be in every classroom and how has the money been spent? Laurie O’Donnell, LTS’s Director of Learning and Technology, answers your questions:

You have been quoted as saying that Glow is the most ambitious education ICT project in the world. How are we doing so far?
We are putting in place the world’s first national schools intranet, and that’s a very ambitious programme. Glow is an attempt to provide a level playing field, so that whether you are living on a remote island or a big city, you will have the same access to high-quality ICT resources. It’s about equality of access, creating a national service that’s available to big, small, rural, urban – that’s really important.

I think every country in the world will connect schools like this – we’re just the first. Scotland has a long and proud record of building a high-achieving and high-equity education system. Part of that national tradition is to innovate and change. We were one of the first to have a curriculum that was not based on the Classics, and among the first to base education around universal literacy. Glow sits within that. It’s not about having a backward education system that need updated; it’s about innovating part of a system that’s already built on very strong foundations. It’s not a solution technology – it’s an enabling technology.

We are still in the foothills of realising the benefits of ICT in schools and this is supported by the findings of the 2006 HMIE ICT report. Our curriculum, assessment, CPD and infrastructure will continue to change as we seek to engage our children and young people in learning and give them the means to make a good life for themselves in an increasingly globalised economy.

Glow is just another step along the road of continuous improvement for Scottish education – a journey that has always tried to make use of the best available technology, from the slate to the pencil through the blackboard and the overhead projector, and of course in terms of ICT, from the stand-alone computer of the 1980s to the web-enabled device connecting to Glow anytime and anywhere of today.

One indicator of how we are doing is the level of international interest in Glow from across the world. Recent visits to schools in Singapore, USA, England, Wales and Northern Ireland suggest to me that education systems are all facing the same challenges. One of these challenges relates to how we make sophisticated ICT services available to schools. We expect cost-effective, sustainable and scalable services on the one hand (i.e. providing best value to the public purse) and on the other hand they need to be able to support personalised learning as well as collaborative learning, enable and facilitate the sharing of resources and the development of communities of practice, and much more (i.e. systems that are fit for purpose in the context of 21st century education).

I expect other countries to follow in Scotland’s steps as they attempt to connect their teachers and learners to bring their schools into the 21st century – or should that be to bring the 21st century into their schools!

The best part of £40m of taxpayers’ money has already been committed to this project. What do you think the return on investment will be for the country as a whole?
The return on investment has three dimensions. First of all it’s about economies of scale, secondly it’s about releasing teacher time from routine tasks, and thirdly it’s about investment in the future of our young people.

The numbers are big with Glow not only in terms of cost but also coverage: all 32 local authorities; 3,000 schools; 750,000 learners; 53,000 teachers; all trainee teachers and their lecturers; all local authority education staff; SQA; HMIE; LTS and others. Over time we also want to work with local authorities to provide access to parents, but that may be a few years down the line.

When you take that into account, £40m doesn’t seem as much. That’s not to say that I’m not conscious that it’s £40m of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent on health or other key areas, but you have to have a sense of scale.

We have gone through a rigorous European procurement process which generated fierce competition for the Glow contract and we have been able to secure excellent value to the public purse because we a talking about a country rather than a school, cluster of schools or local authority. The five-year £37.5m Glow Intranet contract with RM divides into two parts – roughly half to develop and integrate the systems with the other half to provide Glow as a service.

So, firstly there’s a sense of scale. Secondly, there are the savings. In the short-term, if every teacher saves even an hour a week by being able to access support, advice and high-quality resources through Glow, then it very quickly starts to pay for itself. If you assume a teacher is paid roughly £20 an hour and only half of Scottish teachers save an hour a week you generate £500k of ‘savings’ every week through Glow. If every teacher saves an hour a week then it’s £1m a week – or the total investment in Glow every year. These ‘savings’ are not cashable, i.e. the Government does not make savings on teachers’ salaries, but rather teachers are released from routine tasks to spend more time on teaching and supporting learning.

Thirdly, and in the longer-term, it is about the overall quality of Scottish education as it continues to innovate and develop. Scotland has many natural resources but our most important resource is our people and Glow is an investment in the future of our young people. What do our schools look like in the 21st century? I think it’s unimaginable to have a school now without technology, just as it would be for a bank, hospital or workplace.

Glow provides a trusted and safe resource to bring the benefits of social networking. It uses the power of technology in a learning context, making it much safer. That’s why the investment was agreed and that’s why it remained even after the change of administration.

In the same way that other countries are interested in the Glow model for education, there is considerable interest from elsewhere in the public sector in Scotland and it may be that another aspect of the return on investment for the country is in the development of Glow as a prototype for a wider public sector shared online service.

Local authorities need to put a lot of work into preparing for Glow. What would you say is its strongest selling point from their point of view?
The strongest selling point of Glow is that it’s a national system that will be able to connect teachers and learners across 3,000 schools and beyond. If you’re a maths teacher in Argyll & Bute you can communicate with other teachers in your school but now also extend that to other areas. It creates an opportunity for national collaboration. Every single resource created in the classroom should be able to be saved and communicated through Glow. The best lessons can be saved and re-used. You will of course adapt that resource, but it’s wonderful to have. It extends sharing between departments and schools to the whole country. The days of teachers, departments, schools and even local authorities reinventing the wheel should be numbered. Glow provides the structures to support collaboration and sharing across Scotland.

Teachers have been hearing a lot about Glow over the last 18 months, but many are asking “Why is Glow not in my classroom yet?” How would you respond to this question?
The job of making Glow available to local authorities has been completed on time, to budget and as specified. However, implementing Glow at a local authority level is not a trivial task. Each local authority has to have detailed plans that cover everything from local technical support to staff training and development. It is important that local authorities are given the time to implement Glow when they are ready and to be able to do the job well. Our hope is that Glow will be available to every teacher and every learner in local authority primary and secondary schools by early in 2009 and we will do everything we can to support the local authorities to get Glow into their classrooms.

One of the challenges is in how we promote Glow. The people who really need to sell it are the teachers and learners, they’re the advocates. But at the same time we have £40m investment and we need to justify it. I believe it’s my duty to make sure people are aware of the opportunities that that money brings. However at the end of the day Glow is a voluntary programme, so it’s important to strike a balance.

If teachers want to see ‘Glow in action’, where would they go to see examples of how it’s being used in and across schools and local authorities right now?
The first schools to use Glow are in East Dunbartonshire, with schools in Dundee, Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire following quickly behind. We hope to capture the best of Glow online at www.glowscotland.org.uk  LTS also managed an email bulletin Glowing, which you can sign-up to online. Of course, Connected will continue to cover Glow, as it has since Glow was just an idea back in 2001.

Schools from outside of Scotland can also use Glow – how does this work?
Glow can accommodate international guests. The route to accessing Glow is through the Glow customer agreement through local authorities, the SQA, HMIE and other bodies. All of these users can invite guests – be they one-off visitors or partner schools abroad – and limit what they can access. For example, a teacher doing a project with a school overseas can sign in the guest school, chat over the web, hold a video conference and much more. At the end, the visitor account is closed. It’s very flexible but someone has to ‘own’ the guest, and make sure that person behaves properly, without destroying the innovative use of technology. There are of course other social network tools available but they are not designed for education, and Glow offers a safe forum.

We know there are already plans in place for Glow 2. How do you see Glow and Glow 2 driving forward transformational change in Scottish education over the next 5 to 10 years?
We have started to call what happens after the current Glow contract comes to an end Glow 2 and our work in preparing the ground for this is also progressing well. We started thinking about Glow 2 in 2001, when we first started to develop Glow 1! We knew that Glow 1 would take years, but we would only do that once. By the time Glow 2 comes out the schools will have a common infrastructure, so the hard part is over. The question is what to do once that’s established.

The biggest change is the personalised curriculum. You see it in health and other sectors too – your services meet your profile, you’re not just a number in a big queue. I have started to call this development of a more personalised curriculum ‘My Curriculum for Excellence’. Glow 2 will have the aspiration of personalised learning in the context of Curriculum for Excellence at its heart.

When I was a teacher I had a pupil who loved buses, and I look back and think that we could have personalised his curriculum more. Key to learning is motivation. A big review by the OECD showed that there are two groups of pupils. One group wants to go to university and so the pupils are motivated to pass their exams, even in the subjects they don’t like, whilst the other half wants to leave school and get a job, so perhaps they won’t stick in as much. Motivation is about tapping in to what most interests each pupil, finding that enthusiasm and building the structure around them.

However any meaningful level of personalisation is simply not practical without sophisticated technologies, extensive libraries of digital resources and online access to teachers and learners that extend beyond the classroom or the school or for that matter the country. It allows us to open many of the doors.

I am often asked what Glow 2 will look like. My short answer is probably more like a computer game than the current version of Glow – something like a cross between the online game SecondLife (let’s call it SecondSchool) and an interactive game for the Nintendo Wii. You move between the physical world of the classroom and the digital world full of people and resources there to support your learning. It’s a move to a more active, interactive and engaging use of technology.

There has been a big change in the past decade from young people being passive consumers of new media to the producers, actors and designers. That change will move technology to another level. The world outside of education has changed and that will ripple through learning and teaching.

One thing for sure is that technologies change much quicker than education and having a job in the space where the two meet continues to be both a challenge and a delight.