"Educational Technology - ICT in Education" - 5 new articles
Awards for the best use of technology in schoolsBecta has announced Inner-city comprehensive Broadgreen International School in Liverpool and independent Prospect House School in Putney, London as the top two schools in the UK when it comes to the best use of technology. I think it's worth reading the article below, and going to the Awards website (see below), in order to pick up some more ideas about what constitutes great use of ICT in schools. The prestigious accolade of ‘Best Whole School’ is given to only one secondary (high) and one primary (elementary)school each year. The two schools beat more than 100 other schools across the country to collect their awards at Bristol’s newest science venue, At-Bristol, last night. Both schools have demonstrated that they have successfully placed technology at the heart of learning as well as wider school management. This has helped to enhance teaching and bring lessons to life. It has shown how technology makes a difference, not only in the classroom, but at home within the family and across other school activities. As I will say in my talk at Classroom 2.0 Live tomorrow, "People ask: how can I use this application in my teaching? That’s starting with the technology and hoping it will lead to the education bit. A better question is: what applications can I use to help my students achieve X? That starts with the education and leads on to the technology. I think there’s a reason our area of expertise is sometimes called ‘educational technology’ as opposed to ‘technological education’!" Broadgreen International School impressed the judges with its futuristic technology centre and use of ICT to involve the wider community in every aspect of the school’s life including its deaf resource base and a lively ‘silver surfers’ group. The school’s Deaf Resource Base was able to create an online British sign language version of ‘Living in the Blitz’ for history lessons. It is fully accessible by deaf pupils, allowing them to work alongside and complete the same work as hearing pupils.
The school also has ‘Silver Surfers’ groups for older members of the community learning to use technology. Age is no barrier and Les, an original member of the group who is ninety next birthday, regularly communicates via webcam and has his own blog about his war time experiences. When giving advice to other schools looking to boost ICT, Peter Banks, Assistant Headteacher, says: “Use the Becta self review framework to see where you are and how you can improve. Ensure your ICT equipment is up to date and sustainable in terms of financing. Visit schools that are using ICT well so you can learn from them.” I would certainly agree with all this, and made that last point myself in the article 10 Ways to Become an Inspirational Teacher. The SRF is something I very much go along with too. It's comprehensive, and at the same time generic enough to incorporate as-yet-uninvented technology. Prospect House has students who are confident, enthusiastic and independent in their use of computers, mobile devices, digital cameras and virtual learning platforms across the entire curriculum. From reviewing their sporting performances on screen to creating animations in art lessons, technology is used in every lesson to help students achieve more. It sounds like the school has successfully embedded the use ICT right across the curriculum. The school also posts podcasts of lessons on its Virtual Learning Environment, so that parents can see how, say, long division is taught. This has helped to raise parental involvement in their children's work.
When reflecting on why the school won the award, Dianne Barratt, the Headmistress, says it is a combination of a shared vision by the Senior Leadership Team, including the school governors combined with an enthusiastic staff, all of whom are committed to developing their practice with the aid of technology. For more information on the Awards, please visit the Winners 2009 website, where you will find details of other winners, as well as further information about each one along with short videos. On a personal level, I was delighted to learn that The Havering ICT support service was a joint winner in the Support for Schools section. AcknowledgementsThanks to Kate Brennan of Shiny Red for information, case studies and photos. I’ve amended the written stuff (not the photos!) with permission. Thanks also to Dave Smith of Havering for additional information. Read Dave’s Havering blog for more ICT-related news. Further informationThe ICT Excellence Awards is an awards scheme open to all schools which aims to identify and reward excellence in Information & Communications Technology (ICT). The awards acknowledge UK schools approaching technology in outstanding or innovative ways. See also the Next Generation Learning website. Source: Shock Tactics: 7 Ideas For Teaching With Technology (http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2009/11/13/shock-tactics-7-ideas-for-teaching-with-technology.html) Getting permission to go on an ICTcourse or to a conferenceSo, you’ve discovered a conference you’d like to attend, but there’s a real possibility that your boss will say “No”. What can you do to maximise your chances of being allowed to attend? The suggestions which follow cannot, obviously, be guaranteed to succeed. However, they will almost certainly give you more of a fighting chance than the usual approach, which is just to ask for 3 days off. The trick when talking to supervisors is to make your problem their problem, and their problem your problem. Let’s start with the first, making your problem their problem. Making your problem their problemReasons to be allowed to attendIt’s a big challenge keeping up with current thinking and research and practice, so a conference can be a very useful way of doing so very quickly. The issue is: will you get more from going to the conference than you could obtain by other means? In this respect, two factors come into play. First, does the conference, or a particular theme or strand of the conference, deal with something you’re especially involved in? For example, are you running a particular course, are you about to buy and implement a particular type of learning platform, are you about to enter your students for a particular examination? These kinds of needs, if addressed by the conference, are powerful arguments in favour of your being permitted to attend. Second, do the speakers have particular expertise in the area of concern? Note that this is not the same as “is the speaker famous?” If you’re about to start a new course, and the main speaker is one of the writers of the course, or from the relevant Awarding Body, that is likely to be much more useful than an entertaining but, ultimately, empty talk by a well-known personality. There is a need to network. Even the best schools can become complacent or out of touch, if they have no external reference point by which to judge themselves. When I used to do inspections of schools’ ICT provision I often found myself recommending to the subject leader that s/he starts to make visits to other schools to see what they’re doing. You can’t really pick up good ideas from reading about them in quite the same way as you can by actually seeing the ideas in practice and asking questions of the appropriate people. In fact, networking is so important that whenever I am involved in organising conferences I ensure that there is time for people to meet informally, and I always try to have this billed in the programme as “social networking” or “networking”, as opposed to “Bar”. Having “bar” as a timetabled activity almost invariably elicits the response “Why should I have to pay for you to go on a junket?” The fact that it takes place in your own time doesn’t make any difference, because it’s the perception that counts in cases like this. Making their problem your problem1. Minimise the disruption. If it’s possible to set work that requires very little effort by another teacher, but which is still useful, then do so. For example, you could set everything up on the school network in advance. You can also compile folders for each lesson. Imagine being a cover teacher, and handed a folder containing the instructions to the class “Log on and click on the X icon”, a list of students’ names and their login details, and simple instructions about what they have to do. 2. Minimise the cost. While you’re away, the school may have to hire a temporary teacher. There are two main ways you can try to avoid or minimise this cost. First, it may be possible for you to organise cover within your team, if you have one. This make sense from a learning point of view, because it means that the students will still be being taught in your absence. However, if your co-workers agree to this arrangement, you must negotiate a quid pro quo whereby they will not be asked to cover others’ lessons in addition. In other words, nobody should end up doing more cover work than they normally would. The second is to see if there is a possibility of volunteering to assist with the conference arrangements, or to speak at the conference, in return for a free place and money to cover supply teachers. Obviously, not every delegate will be able to enjoy this kind of arrangement, but in my experience most of them never ask. As I’ve said, these approaches are not absolutely guaranteed to work, but one thing is for certain: they mark you out as a professional who believes it’s their right to have access to continuing professional development. Robot rights"I will NOT have any daughter of mine bringing a robot into this house!" You can just imagine the family rows of the future, should technology ever reach the point where it isn't possible to distinguish between humans and non-humans merely by looking at them. And what of the ethnic monitoring forms of the future? Will employers have to ensure that a certain percentage of its workforce is non-human? An article in the Daily Telegraph reports that people have already started to think about such matters: "Society must decide if it is willing to accept relationships between humans and robots before the machines become so sophisticated they start demanding rights, a legal expert has warned." I recall reading a short story some years ago in which a person discovers that they're not human, but a robot, and has to leave his job because of antagonism which I suppose would be classified as 'robotism'. It gives grist to my mill that, as I argued recently, science fiction can be a great starting point for discussion in a whole range of areas. Furthermore, as this story in the Telegraph shows, the pace of technological change is such that we cannot assume that just because something is still confined to the fiction area of the bookshop it is not worth thinking about for its implications in actuality. What Anna Russel, the legal expert referred to, has done is to extrapolate from current technological developments to potential problems for the future. This kind of exercise can be quite useful in getting students to think about the (possible) effects of technology on society, which is part of the National Curriculum in England and Wales and the curriculum of other countries.
What's RSS and why is it useful?Here's a quick guide to RSS, which you may have seen mentioned on websites and blogs. (Note: I've written this guide with the complete novice in mind. If you already know what an RSS feed is, think about bookmarking this article in order to refer to it colleagues who are less knowledgeable than you. Thanks!) What does RSS stand for?The most commonly accepted answer is 'Really Simple Syndication'. What does RSS let me do?It makes it easy to do two things really easily. Firstly, it lets you read the articles on your favourite websites all in one place, using an application called a 'feed reader'. Secondly, as an extension of that, it lets you collate the latest posts from several blogs all in one place. It doesn't have to be only blog posts. It could be latest comments on someone's blog, or their most recent tweets in Twitter, or anything else that has an RSS feed. Taking the first point, it means that you don't have to traipse from one website to another to check if there is anything new: new stuff will show up in your feed reader automatically. How do I obtain a feed reader?Just search for the term 'feed reader' and then find one that suits you. You can have one which is installed on your computer, or one that resides on the web. I prefer the latter, because it means it doesn't matter whether you're sitting at your own computer or not when you feel like checking for new content. Some installed feed readers let you synchronise with a web-based one, meeaning that you potentially get the best of both worlds. Popular feed readers include Bloglines and Google Reader, which are web-based. For other readers, look at this article about feed readers. How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?If you've installed your feed reader's browser toolbar, you should be able to do so by clicking on 'Subscribe', if the blog or website has been set up to allow this. Otherwise, look for an icon like this: How do I read new articles?Just open your feed reader and see what, if anything, has been added to the various websites since you last looked. ConclusionRSS makes it easy for you to keep up with lots of reading in a shorter period of time than would probably otherwise be the case, because you're not racing all over the internet from site to site. If you're a teacher, it can also benefit your students. For example, if your school uses a virtual learning environment (VLE) you could set up areas for students to visit where the latest headlines from a range of websites are displayed. That could be used purely for reference, or you could incorporate it into lessons. For example, the first five or ten minutes of each lesson could be spent discussing what's new in the world of hospitality and catering, or in business and finance. At the risk of sounding clichéd, the uses for RSS are limited only by your imagination. I hope you have found this useful. Feel free to comment on the article.
18 highlights from the 140 ConferenceYesterday I attended the 140 Character Conference in London, where I met up with Bill Gibbon, Neil Adam and Bill Lord.
Here are 18 highlights, any one of which could be the start of a rich conversation. I think if you take the volume and variety of the presentations overall, you would have to conclude that any schooling which does not address matters such as etiquette in, and use of, Twitter and other social media is not really a fully rounded education at all. Anyway, here are my ‘takeaways’. I love the idea of Buy A Credit. Donate £1 and you get to have your name listed on the credits of a film. The money goes towards financing said film. What an ingenious idea. @buyacredit. In the eracism slot, Kyra Gaunt told us that racism gives us the opportunity to be courageous. Apparently, one fifth of businesses in the UK are on Twitter. Several people, such as Stephen Fry and the lady from SB Buzz reminded us that Twitter is a relationship channel, not a sales channel. Alex Bellinger told the story of a high street florist which engages its customers with Twitter. The plasma screen in its shop, displaying Twitter conversations, attracts curiosity, and then converts. This would probably be a good tactic to adopt in a school setting, both as a way of engaging other teachers and, on open days, parents. I liked hearing from Dean Landsman and Dean Meyers that an augmented reality system tried out in New York provided the information that, in a particular direction, the nearest tube was 3,000 miles away. This is almost science fiction: think of the great creative writing you would see if you used this anecdote as a starting point. In the musicians’ slot, Manny Norte started a sentence with the words, “M and M comes from an age…” That was only 5 years ago! He went on to say that if M and M were starting out now, he would almost certainly use Twitter to engage with fans, as part of the marketing strategy. I have to say that, in the ‘brands’ session, talk of ‘humanising the brand’ all sounded very cynical to me. Why not just be upfront and admit that Twitter is part of the marketing mix and be done with it? JP Rangaswami, chief scientist at BT, asked why we couldn’t subscribe to a car park’s Twitter feed. Brilliant idea: you’d know which car parks are full in advance. After all, Tower Bridge has a Twitter feed and sends out alerts when the bridge is about to go up. Josie Fraser gave an excellent talk about retweets, followed by some fake stats. I didn’t realise: RTs are a rarity apparently. If you’re a consultant, maybe you miss the buzz and gossip of the office? Federico Grosso suggested that Twitter is actually a gigantic water cooler. Nice idea! Does that mean, then, that home-working is now not only technically possible, but feasible from a ‘human’ point of view too? A question for business studies students perhaps? Some of the more ‘switched-on’ police forces, both here and abroad, have used Twitter to find missing persons and murder witnesses. Chief Inspector Mark Payne explained how using Twitter as a two-way information stream allowed the police to be deployed in the most efficient way during demonstrations, and to keep the public informed of what they were doing, and why. Question for citizenship students: is this a step towards policing with people rather than the policing of people? The education session was interesting. James Clay stated the obvious (which is often necessary) when he said that “We need to get educational leaders to understand the value of social media.” I was impressed by Ruth Barnett, of Sky, who emphasised the need for integrity when quoting from sources like the ‘Twitterverse’. For example, when covering the recent troubles in Iran, Sky apparently did its best to ensure that the tweeters it obtained information from were people who had already been reporting on it before it became the hot topic. I also thought what she said about the challenges of networking with China was very interesting: they use a different character set and different networks. I’d also add that they probably have a profoundly different world view. All cultures differ, of course, which is what makes all this so interesting and, ultimately, rewarding. Vikki Chowney made the point that, at the G20 conference, live blogging was difficult because of the volume of data being thrown at the audience. Twitter became, in effect, a tool for live blogging. That’s exactly what goes on at many conferences these days, of course. She said that Twitter closed the gap between politics and people. Finally, the author Thembisa Mshaka listed the differences between celebrity and stardom; for instance, a star has a tireless work ethic. She said, in a way reminiscent of Malcolm McLaren’s talk at the Handheld Learning Conference, that mediocrity becomes the order of the day because it is so easy to get away with. More Recent Articles |
