Connected Blog

Four months ago I began holding lunchtime sessions based around the world famous TED Talks. These Inspiration Sessions had a simple format with a complex aim: empower anyone in the organisation to change the organisation. Here, I share the format, the resources, the questions and hope that it can be used in your school, your department or your Local Authority, to challenge current ways of thinking and empower everyone to make small, powerful changes.

The sessions themselves lasted no more than 90 minutes: 20 minutes of video, a different one each month, discussion about the clip, how it relates to our work or education in general, and then breaking out into reflection online. The advantage of using the cips as a stimulus is that the age-old reason for not sharing online – “my stuff isn’t good enough” – doesn’t figure here. It’s an opportunity to share something that’s not our own, and opportunity to rethink what we and our colleagues do, pubicly. It also presents a chance to discover a new technology that allows us to share, allowing for a natural extension and progression for the conversation stimulated by the monthly films.

At LTS we found the most popular ways of sharing were delicious social bookmarking, which allows simple things such as the talk itself or literature around the talk to be shared, without the individual feeling that they may contravene our self-publishing guidelines or that they don’t have the skill to write an engaging blog post. By using a Friendfeed room we’ve been able to connect our Research team with others around the organisation over a period of a few months, and an effective information-sharing group has begun to thrive.

Others found that crafting a blog post was the best way forward. Existing high quality examples of LTS blogging were joined by new blogs. Others are taking up much more internal blogging as a way to communicate better across teams.

Above all, the opportunity for a diverse group of colleagues to get together in a ’safe’ environment and self- and peer-assess what we do every day has helped show the way in several of our largest projects, finding room for improvement and gaps where innovation is required in the future. As they say, watch this space…

Here is a six-month outline of the talks we chose to use and some of the activities that we have designed around them. If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments and they will be added over time. Let us know, too, how you get on should you plan your own Inspiration Sessions.

Month One:
Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Links from the first session

• Creativity in the workplace: do we have any? where is it? what’s lost?
• Kids take chances – can we? What are the barriers to taking a chance? Are we prepared to be wrong? What have our biggest ‘wrongs’ been?
• We squander tremendous talents; what are the tremendous talents in LTS? how can we stop this happening?
• We have no idea what is going to happen in the future; how do we teach kids (and guide their teachers) when we don’t know how?
• Hierarchies and their role in decision-making, workflows, coverage, time, attention
• University professors: does LTS live in its head? How can we make sure that what we do is more ‘real’? Is the ‘real’ the same in the minds of teachers, learners, Government? What is ‘real’

Month Two:
Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
Links from the second session.

• How do we know that what we are doing is going to be good? Are focus groups, samples etc any good? Is there another way? Another type of person? Role of learners in helping us choose material for the online service.
• What’s the role of the niche?
• Are we LTS or a group of LTSes? How would this work?
• Teaching as mustard – there are only different kinds of mustard. Technology needs the same kind of democratisation.

Month Three:
David Pogue: When it comes to technology, simplicity sells
Links from the third session
Learning aim: Use internal blogs to talk about how we could simplify things, use external blogs to ask users what they would do. Examine Glow, Curriculum Design and documents (e.g. Building the Curriculum 3). Are we a simple as we can be without being simplistic? What would we change in our approach and systems to guarantee simplicity? How can individuals effect this kind of change?

Additional video:
Richard St John: Secrets of Success in 8 Words and 3 Minutes
How can we get these messages across?

Month Four:
Hans Rosling: Debunking Third World Myths With The Best Statistics You’ve Ever Seen
Links from the fourth session
Workshop on making better presentations, in time for Scottish Learning Festival.

Month Five:
Barry Schwartz: Paradox of Choice
Learning aim: how to track so much information, maybe based on this. Compare and contrast with the previous sessions on simplicity and the power of the niche. Where is the balance to be struck between catering for all and doing well for all? What’s the role for involving more ‘users’ of a service, students or parents, in taking on more of the workload?

Month Six:
David Eggers: Homework drop-in centres
An example of civic innovation in practice. What role is there for organisations to kick-start this kind of initiative, extend the potential of learning beyond school?

When it comes to technology simplicity sells. That’s the title of David Pogue’s TED Talk which provides the basis of discussion at the third Inspiration Session for Learning and Teaching Scotland employees. But this time, with Scotland’s teachers on holiday and clearly with nothing else better to do, we’re inviting you along.

With apologies for the late invitation, if you fancy a trip to Glasgow or live nearby, you are welcome to join members of the Glow, online services and technology teams, as well as Development Officers and Knowledge Management colleagues from across the organisation:

• Monday, July 28th, 11.45-14.00
• Classroom of the Future at Learning and Teaching Scotland, Glasgow
  Optima building, 58 Robertson Street
• Meet at 11.45am in the 9th floor reception, session from midday until around 2pm.
• If you wish to attend, please leave a comment here or email me.

This session will feature a team viewing of the, ahem, sideways look of
technology and what ’simplicity’ actually means. We’ll then have a
fairly loose discussion around how LTS could do its job better by
finding its simplicity bone. Your input here would be most valuable. I
do hope you can come along. If you want to see what we’ve done so far in our inspiration sessions, please flick over to Connected Live.

For the past three months I’ve been hosting these Inspiration Sessions, providing regular “thinking pitstops” for nearly half the staff in this time, getting to grips with what new technologies’ potential might be for their own projects and mining the staff at all levels, from administrator to Director, for their creative ideas. Several new blogs and web services have been launched with the growing confidence of staff, and internally we’re beginning to see much better sharing of information using the likes of social bookmarking on del.icio.us, an internal wiki and weblogs.

It’s not as odd as it sounds, but innovations in spaghetti sauce (and Pepsi, and mustard) might hold clues as to how Glow, the Curriculum for Excellence and other ‘national’ initiatives can prove successful on the most niche of local levels.

At Learning and Teaching Scotland I’ve been leading some monthly Inspiration Sessions, today being the second one. Last month’s debates were based on Sir Ken Robinson’s Do Schools Kill Creativity?, and from it came some key points for development in the way staff might approach certain challenges. More on those later, I hope, but for the first session we kept the results on our staff forum to see what would happen. 10 times the number of views than normal is what happened; people have seen where they can move things forward for themselves. You can see some of the links we discussed on delicious.

This month, I was curious to see how the niche would be catered for in Glow and the Curriculum for Excellence, especially having recently presented a fair bit on how the social web has capitalised on small passionate communities. The basis was Gladwell’s talk on how marketers in the past forty years have discovered the niche’s power, in much the same way as Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail describes. As some of my colleagues noted, most of the ‘big deals’ in Scottish education these past few years have been “national initiatives” or “national programmes”, leaving LTS and Local Authority staff to impress the importance of local contexts and connections. It’s what Gladwell calls the “platonic dish” approach to policy: this is the right way to do it, there is no other, versus a more user-centred approach, where we empower the user to do what they want, versus an “ask the user what they want” approach, with the complication that the user doesn’t always know what they want. Gladwell puts all these three arguments forward and leaves you buzzing, recognising elements of each in every project you’ve ever done, and not entirely sure where you want to go next.

View a high quality version of the Malcolm Gladwell talk here.

It was with this meeting of minds that we had a good hour of debate, and a set of tangible actions for our teams to undertake, to help make a dent in the concept of encouraging and celebrating small, passionate groups of participation on Glow, exhibiting, if you like, what the Curriculum is all about. Some of the interesting points to come out:

• Making the many ways ‘into’ Glow explicit: with a mentor, through an online module, with a product guide, going to an event, keeping an eye on the Glow blog watch…
• Making variety more visible: showcasing interesting groups or practice. There are some technical questions about how we do this, as it’s hard to see “into” a group created at a local level, harder still to promote it to a national.
• Reinforcing the messages about localising practice through Area Advisers’ work, and with HMIe finding local good practice and innovation, reporting on it during their work.
• Every single launch event should have a “this is what Glow can do in this context”. There might even be some double-branding to drive the point home.
• We’re going to start infiltration of each other’s meetings far more often, using Glow groups of other parts of our organisation to ‘listen in’ on discussions and spot opportunities for collaboration. This will be further aided if anyone can put a date into the whole-staff diary without having to go through a colleague first.
• The calendar is useful as it currently stands on our intranet homepage, but we also need a YouTube-esque Today, Tomorrow, This Month, This Year, to alert us in good time to events happening in the near future. We will also work on an option to have it to text message via Twitter, simply by splicing in a feed from our intranet events.
• Finally, recording of presentations, while happening far more often than ever before, needs to be done as standard, with sharing on Slideshare of visuals. They might not be of use to more than a score or two of people, but the cost is almost non-existent and potential impact huge.

There are some further ideas for developing these in the delicious links I’ve been pulling together on the theme of niches. But the parting shot was an interesting take on what might be called LTS’s Extra Special Range (extending the food and supermarket metaphors to breaking point here!). We all tend to work for our customers – as Don Ledingham has put it before, his customers could be students, parents, teachers, lots of different groups depending on the product or outcome and scenario. One of our colleagues, with experience in the retail sector, talked about the customer’s customer, the theory that we are producing things not for the person who is buying the shopping but for the person for whom the good or service is intended. It raises interesting ideas again on the kind of metrics we used to guage success in Glow or of the new Curriculum. It will almost certainly not be on hits, and may not even be on ‘active users’, whatever they might look like.

However, the big question should be: “What has the impact been on a student’s education?” There are new metrics, involving our development officers, Local Authority QIOs, teachers, parents and students even evaluating the impact of the various programmes, pedagogies and tehcniques that have been employed. How, though, can that be filtered through in a meaningful way, so that those charged with trying to make things better still can do so with reliable evidence? Ideas on the virtual postcard? (or just use the comments below). 

A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins cutting some archived film. Two other classmates seek out some images on the net. Each student in this group, like all those students who attend Islay High School, are using their own Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which they bring to and from school to provide a continuous portable base for their work.

But this is not just a story about cool gadgetry – this is a school which has changed itself entirely in the past five years.

I was taking in all of this on Friday, the same day the school won Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Ambition Awards at the Scottish Education Awards. I was joined by John Johnston, primary school teacher and blogger from Glasgow’s Sandaig Primary School, whose account shows how visits like these can lead to new practices in schools many miles away. Krysia and Doug Semple also joined us along with John’s Head Teacher; blog posts to follow, I hope…

But what grabbed us all was the scope of change. First, everyone in the school community (that’s students, teachers and parents, too) is part of a grand peer-assessment ring, with the UMPC acting as a show-and-tell hub for the work and discussions that took place at school that day. Using OneNote, students can capture text notes, audio and video from their classes, with teachers as accomplices in the recording of their explanations and discussions. All too often, the thought of having a teacher recorded on the fly by a student would have the teacher confiscating the device doing the recording. Here, it is celebrated, with OneNote allocating each segmentof audio to each relevant paragraph.

Students can be heard sharing secret numerical codes – their machine’s unique IP Address – so that such documents can be shared and edited collaboratively in real time. This is how students brainstormed and created storyboards collaboratively, keeping all their progress for future analysis in their review of their work thus far.

Andy Wallis, the English teacher running this excited film-making adventure, brings the class to a brief pause, to encourage them to video their own discussions for the next few minutes. It’s a real eye-opener for those who have been hogging discussions, providing a spotlight moment for those who’ve been a little quieter until now. As they say, the camera doesn’t lie. Another piece of evidence for for the formative assessment pile.

It’s not just pedagogy that has changed to make learning work here; the timetable has seen the beginnings of change. Wednesday and Friday afternoons are curious times for the uninitiated: students who, when I was at school, even had separate social areas are now collaborating on projects. It’s not uncommon to have a 14 year old S3 student working alongside a 17 or 18 year old sixth former who’s seeking to work through a brand new subject area. Here, the class you are in is decided by your level of attainment, not your age. Twice a week these afternoons offer an opportunity to expand horizons through extended project work.

As John says, it’s the overriding desire to learn which can be felt from every member of the school community that is quite overpowering – you wonder why you’ve not felt it in every school you’ve ever visited. It’s the responsibility that has been transferred to students – when they misuse their UMPCs they are subject to the ‘normal’ rules of engagement you’d find in any school. The technology has changed all the things it should do, and left some elements of school life, rightly, untouched.

This is a school where the introduction of a new piece of technology has helped introduce changes across the rest of the system. Or where the system’s changes led to the necessary introduction of the technology. You see, that’s the other thing. When change is so integrated into everyday life, it’s hard to remember what happened first.

See the rest of the photos from this trip on Flickr.

Update: Doug “DigitalMaverick” Semple has just added his extensive thoughts, too.

Some days you think you’ve nothing to say and then you chance upon an idea and off you go. I read with interest a new blog by a former depute whom I knew at Knox. Now at Liberton High School, Donald McDonald has launched Head’s Blog.

I was struck in this post by the idea that classroom management can be learned but not taught. This intrigued me and before long my comment had assumed the proportions of a complete post.

The comment awaits moderation but I feel sure that Donald, who specifically invites comment, won’t mind if I pre-empt his acceptance here:

Hi Donald:

Nice to catch up – if only virtually. I came across your blog today (thanks to Ollie) and enjoyed reading your interesting posts. I’m intrigued by the notion of something that can be learned but not taught (classroom management being the example given in your latest post).

I suppose whether one resonates with that view depends on what is meant by taught. Taught in the sense of someone telling you things? Taught in the sense of observation followed by analysis and discussion? Taught through role play? I’m particularly interested in this being an instrumental instructor as hardly any of us underwent teacher training of any sort and learned on the job. Sadly, for some pupils, part of this must have been through our mistakes. I’d say there is a place for some sort of preparation before beginning our particular job – even if it only amounted to a short observation/mentoring programme before beginning. There are many skills to pick up and I’ve seen people unnecessarily drowning in a torrent of unfamiliar administrative and procedural matters – and that’s before the teaching even begins!

More than anything, though, I’d say language is the key. I’ve sat in the classrooms of some great (class) music teachers, eavesdropping from the PC printer, and the unambiguous simplicity with which they give instructions, offer explanations, pose questions lifts a veil from the ears. I’d say that some of this could be taught.

Here’s a daft but, hopefully illuminating example from my own practice. I like to finish lessons with some sort of aural games. A favourite is to play short phrases which pupils then play by ear on their guitars – using any new notes featured in that lesson. They’re told the starting note and asked to look away, as it’s a game for the ears and not the eyes. When I first began using this game, I noticed that some pupils, although they had faithfully looked in the other direction for previous examples, were staring directly at my guitar in advance of the forthcoming one. At first I thought that they’d simply forgotten that little detail or perhaps imagined that I wouldn’t notice. Then it struck me that I’d announced the next example by saying, “OK, what about this one?” Using the word, “this” was effectively a direct invitation (almost an instruction) to look. That phrase has since been replaced by “Right, here’s another one – look away.”

That was a bit of a ramble – but I hope it made sense. I’ll look in again soon to see if you have any comments.

Cheers

Alan (http://edubuzz.org/blogs/alancoady)

In this video snippet see how some principals and headteachers-to-be are learning the skills on the job. 

You can view this video below or by visiting the Connected Live Blip.TV Channel.

The keynotes for the Scottish Learning Festival have been made available now in a version that will play on your video iPod or MP4 player.

It’s a great way to revisit the rich resource that each keynote address provides. You can right-click (or ctrl-click on a Mac) each of the links below to download these to your computer, and drag them to your iPod or into iTunes:

• Pasi Sahlberg: on global solutions to curriculum challenge
• Michael Fullan: on turnaround schools, and turnaround systems
• Stephen Heppell: on the new ambitions for 21st century learning
• Fiona Hyslop: our Education Minister’s address

Cross-posted at edu.blogs.com

Thanks to the kind people at Core-Ed the video and slides of my last ’season’ of talks on how all of us can lead education and technology change in our schools, Local Authorities and organisations have been put online for all to view. There’s also a Google Video without the slides.

Every time I do a talk or seminar it’s different; in the age of podcasts, vodcasts and conference blogging it’s only a fool or a lazy researcher who says the same thing day in, day out. The main lines of this talk have been popular but two points were raised afterwards which are worth tackling. They are both related, one about the substance of what I showed in the talk and the other on the ‘entertainment only’ value of new technologies. I disagree (of course) with both, because I believe they’re just wrong.

In this version of the talk I have unashamedly concentrated on the final products of learning, giving passing mention to the importance of the changes in process that leads to them. I was, if you like, appealing to the professionalism and attitudes of teachers to think about what the processes might have been, rather than just listing what changes took place.

The second relates as much to the way I present stuff as to the depth of change and transformation these new technologies offer. Yes, they are entertaining, and what’s wrong with that? Yes they increase motivation for being rather fun to use. But they also transform the way we do things because they open collaborative and time-shifting opportunities in learning that have never, until now, been on offer.

I hope these points come through for most people, but any other ideas or feedback you have that hasn’t already been mentioned would be greatly appreciated.

Ever fancied taking part in one of the world’s largest education conferences, with scores of great speakers and some brilliant opportunities to mingle with fellow teachers from around the world? Ever fancied doing it without leaving your desk? The K-12 Conference is just for you.

Throughout the month of October educators from around the world will be offering presentations on the latest technology and teaching, all for free, all online. You can register your interest in the conference and get details of how to access the material on the conference website.

If you’re reading this, the chances are you’re already pretty sold on the potential of new web technologies in education. But how did that happen?

At last week’s Scottish Learning Festival I enjoyed hearing from John Johnston, at his talk Audience, Purpose and Conversation: the World Wide Display Wall, about how he got hooked. His engagement with new web tools led to the Sandaig Primary blog, now one of the best primary sites.

Sandaig has the longest running primary pupil blog in Scotland and is recognised nationally and internationally as an example of good practice. link

He described how, after getting every child in the school to write a 3-line poem for a competition, he’d decided to try publishing the poems on the web. There wasn’t a grand plan behind it, it was simply an experiment.

It was when the comments started to come in that things really took off. He told us how the students received a comment from the States, in which the authors were asked if they’d mind a play being made from the poems. That then led to the play being performed, and the school being sent some of the materials to enable them to stage it – a huge dose of positive feedback.

There were similar stories at TeachMeet07, where teachers like Lee Carson implored people visiting school blogs to leave comments.

We know that hearing stories like this at the Scottish Learning Festival can inspire individual teachers to try these things. But for the full benefits to be realised we need to find ways of making it possible for the much larger numbers who couldn’t attend to have other opportunities to be inspired.

At last night’s eduBuzz Open Meeting in East Lothian there was some lively discussion on this. We’ve learned that often teachers can be initially enthusiastic about web publishing when they see how easy it is, but that doesn’t mean they’ll build it into their classroom practice in the long term. Sometimes technical glitches can be off-putting, for example, or lack of support.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know where we could all take things.

You might also be interested in Katie Farrell’s take on the Learning Festival and TeachMeet07: how can we stop preaching to the converted?