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…
In the final part of a series of posts, we examine the latest research on how young people and the wider population in the UK use the internet, and what it means for Local Authorities, schools and teachers.
Education
Education for parents on effective means of locking, privacy control and timing. This means developing adult skills so that they feel empowered to have conversations with children about online safety as well as understand how to take appropriate technical steps to manage online risks on behalf of their children, which are appropriate to their age and competence. Furthermore, we will empower children to develop their own skills and become strong swimmers in these rapidly moving online waters. This is part of what some
people call ‘media literacy’.
Filtering
Not a top-down approach. Must be collaborative with children, empowering them to take responsibility for their online behaviours.
Safety
There is too much information about web safety, so much it appears daunting. Web safety information will be drawn into a “one stop shop” later this year by a UK Government (Westminster) task force.
Increasing creativity
Creativity is limited to uploading photos on SNSs and creating profiles, with girls, who are more active on SNSs anyway, being more likely to do this than boys.
Other ‘creative’ activities are: making a playlist of music, adding comments (all above 30%). Other activities like making ringtones, short movies on mobile phones or camcorders or writing a blog are done by small amounts (less than one fifth of 12-15s). Rural teens seem to be more likely to be creative online.
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 newblogs. 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.
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’
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Just last week I was introduced to Ben Saunders, who responded with a courteous and short email along the lines of: “I’m a little busy at the moment but would love to meet up for a pint.” He was, in fact, four days away from starting his 30-day dash to North Pole. Alone.
An attempt to set a new world speed record from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole by Ben Saunders.
The current record was set in 2005 by a guided team using dog sleds and
numerous re-supplies in a time of 36 days 22 hours. Ben’s expedition
will be solo and unsupported and on foot. This route has only ever been
completed once solo and unsupported, by Pen Hadow in 2003. Ben aims to
halve his time and complete it in 30 days. More than geographic
exploration, Ben is exploring the limits of his own human potential.
I’m hoping that, the next time, we might be able to help spread Ben’s work to more school children, and bring their aspirations to a high with some of the motivating speak that Ben can offer. Maybe something schools on Glow can enjoy through Marratech video-conferencing, as well as in person. Don’t know what I mean? Take a look at Ben’s TED Talk, Three Things To Know Before You Ski To The North Pole, and be inspired to get cold and miserable yourself:
The ScotEduBlogs site is dear to my heart. An opensource effort by teachers in Scotland to aggregate and redistribute the posting by Scottish educational blogger of all shapes, ages and sizes ScotEduBlogs has become an more than every day read for me.
To cut a long story short; ScotEduBlogs has now moved to its very own server which should lead to (and Robert will correct me if I am wrong) more stability, better updating etc, etc. The SQA and LTS logos now sit prettily on the ScotEduBlogs sidebar.
It might take a few days for ScotEduBlogs to settle into its new home, so if you notice anything strange let us know.
If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:
As there are more and more ScotEduBloggers ScotEduBlogs will become more and more useful as a learning tool, enabling you to get ideas that you might not pick up through your favourite feeds.
Blog feed
Education
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.
A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins 
Andy Wallis
, and see what 