Connected Blog

As 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.

66% of 15-24 year olds have broadband and about 82% of them have Social Networking Service (SNS) profile. Most 16-17 yrs have a profile (67%).
15% of very young children (6-11 yrs) have used Bebo, 4% have used Facebook and 8% have used MySpace. By 12 yrs most kids can describe what a SNS is, although they don’t know the term. Most adults don’t have a SNS but are more likely to if their children do (is for the purposes of snooping?).

The most likely intellectual rejectors of social networks are older teens. In social networks most people have between 1-20 friends.

Mobile net use
24% are concerned that the existing ways of controlling the web would not have any effect on the many young people accessing the net on their mobile phones. Many of those who don’t use the net (this tends to be the older generations) are most likely to also not use mobile technology. Those who do use mobile phones use them most for (2007 compared to 2005):

• Sending texts (83%, up from 79)
• Taking pictures (60%, up from 38%)
• Sending photos (44%)
• Playing games (27%, down from 28%)
• Listening to music (25%)
• Accessing email or the net (15%, up from 11%)

Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs)
100% of schools should have Acceptable Use Policies that are regularly reviewed, monitored and agreed with parents and students.

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.

Andrew Brown has had more time to play with the Asus EeePC, on which we gave a video tour last month. He’s started to find a few challenges for using this in a classroom setting.

East Lothian are revealing what goes into a successful adoption of games consoles, this time the Sony PSP, moving beyond the obvious game-playing capacity into cross-curricular uses for the tool. Find out how they’re doing it from ICT Officer Tess Watson.

… on a blog. Happy new Year to you all from Connected Live, including all those who filled up my phone memory this morning when the network finally came back on.

Point of note: more Christmas cards and New Year wishes received via mobile phone than on cardboard and paper than ever before, with more people doing both than just using their mobile.

Other point of note: More seasonal wishes through Facebook than any other medium. A new set of seasonal traditions?

My esteemed colleague across the water Dr. James Frankel, flagged up an interesting story from the NY Times which featured a mobile with a ring tone of such high frequency that people over the age of 30 were unlikely to hear it. This way young owners of the phone could get away with having their phone on in class or way past their bedtime.

As I was reading the article, a colleague, sitting near me but facing another direction asked, “can you hear a high pitched noise?” I’m too much of a gentleman to reveal her age. Suffice it to say I was impressed by her range!

See how you get on: ringtone

I was surprised that I could hear it as I tend to use the car as my main hi-fi and pump up the volume.

Tess Watson over in East Lothian spent yesterday playing with her new PSPs, but also managed to experiment with colleague Ollie Bray with using Glow on the portable gaming console. Another great excuse reason to get PSPing in your classrooms! Ollie explains a bit more about what the PSP project involves.

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.

Sharon Tonner of the High School of Dundee has been experimenting with several new technologies over the past few years. At this year’s Scottish Learning Festival she talked about her positive experiences of using mobiles in the classroom. She’s now published her brilliant full presentation, including audio, over on her blog.

The blogosphere is beginning to become alight with excitement on the Handheld Learning conference taking place in London.

LTS’s own Derek Robertson will be leading a seminar today alongside Marc Prensky on the potential of handheld games consoles. I’d have loved to take up the invitation to join in via Skype, but the time differences with New Zealand mean a very early rise.I, along with others, will be relying on Leon Cych’s live and archived video streaming to see what’s going on. Also worthwhile, is taking a look at the blog posts on Prensky’s opening talk, where the statistics on the numbers of mobile phones in the world compared to PCs make me wonder why more schools are not encouraging their students to use their own devices to share, create and publish on the web:

• PCs 200 million
• PlayStations 100 million
• GameBoys 150 million
• DS 50 million
• Mobile phones 1.5 billion

Can we say there really is a digital divide in terms of available equipment these days? This all reminds me of why Stephen Heppell keeps emphasising the importance of mobile phones in our classrooms.