Creative ICT News

Licenced to teach

A colleague wrote on her school Ning (private), "In order to teach I have needed to get 2 degrees, my teaching standards are monitored by the headteacher, by Ofsted and by advisors, and let's not forget the GTCE. And now I'm told I may need a licence to teach. What's the point?" Quite.

Is having a Facebook account compatible with being a teacher?

A number of local authorities are now advising heads and teachers to consider whether having a Facebook account is compatible with their status as a teacher. Services like Facebook and Twitter seem to be routinely blocked by the filters. There appears to be an ever widening gulf between the innovators and pace setters in the world of educational ICT and the "authorities".

Straightaway I'll set my stall out. I think the way to teach children about the dangers of water is by immersing them in it and teaching them to swim. Some, like me, will only ever plod around the pool at a sedate pace; others will be transformed and will embrace water as if they should have been born a dolphin. Both groups of us will be safe and we will have the knowledge and experience to evaluate risks and take the necessary decisions to mitigate them.

It seems that the reasons given for banning Facebook et al revolve around the dangers of inappropriate contact with children on the web via social networks through the blurring of professional boundaries; children accessing inappropriate content on your social network accounts; or children attempting to impersonate teachers in order to become Facebook friends and cause mischief. All of these things happen and have happened and a few teachers have been suspended due to their social networking activities.

The General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) are also wading into this arena with the publication of their draft code of conduct for teachers. As an aside, it would appear that faith groups have more influence over government than techno geeks as they have succeeded in substantially watering down the entirely laudable (in my eyes at least) requirement to "promote equality and value diversity", and to "proactively challenge discrimination." This code will, however, only add to the clamour to block and ban.

But, is this the right thing to do? I think it is incredibly patronising of the blockers to tell headteachers that "we know best". Apparently, there are 20 million Facebook acounts in the UK alone. Secondary school children especially are using it to collaborate and chat about school projects and homework, thus avoiding the institutional attempt at building "creepy treehouses," a phrase I learned this week. Social networking and Facebook in particular have become part of the fabric of our society and teaching children how to make safe choices online is becoming an ever greater imperative.

Surely what is needed is education not banning? Teachers need to understand the privacy implications of social networks. They need to be taught how to discover and control their digital footprint and to understand the protocols surrounding online contact with children out of school hours. It seems there is an obvious tension between those wanting to develop Virtual Learning Environments and extending school beyond the traditional hours and those that want to block and control the technologies that help to realise these policy ambitions. I find it ironic that one of the banning authorities is Kent whose document on safe practice with technology for professionals in schools I admire greatly.

I do worry, though, that the newest recruits to the teaching profession have gone through school and college with a very open and relaxed attitude towards social networking and I think it is incumbent on teacher training institutions to  include discussions around the issues raised in the Kent document in their courses. These might include:

• Use of personal equipment (phones etc) to take photo, video and audio recordings of children;
• Teacher use of social networking sites;  
• Attempts by minors to "friend" adults via social networks or engage in online conversations; 
• What constitutes inaapropriate content; 
• Use of school equipment such as laptops at home.  

Schools may do well to include references to these issues in their acceptable use policies and staff induction materials.

So, I think that telling teachers to delete their Facebook accounts is akin to sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that we are still in a 20th century education system. We're not, and we need to provide teachers with the skills and confidence to exploit this technology for the benefit and education of children (and adults), and not to be afraid of it.

  

White Paper or White Elephant?

There has been lots of excited commentary in the edublogosphere on the the pre-announced demise of the National Strategies. The reality is that this Government's White Paper declaring this as a stated aim and "ringfencing" the £110 million pounds thus saved to go directly into school budgets is never likely to come to pass. Surely there will be a general election before Ed Balls' paper could be translated into law. It doesn't mean to say that the end of the National Strategies won't still happen under a Tory government as it is such an easy symbol of New Labour to knock down. Don't count on the money finding its way into school budgets, though.

Reading the TES forum on the announcement, one gets the impression that a form of institutionalised child-abuse was being abandoned (and this phrase actually appears in the thread), however, I think they protest too much. What really annoyed me about the whole National Strategies thing was not the abomination of the "stopwatch" lessons that you were forced to teach, but the way in which advisors and teachers adopted the new orthodoxy with such zeal. It appeared that no critical thinking was employed to question the academic validity of the approach. They soon realised their mistake and the Framework documents came out offering a slightly more flexible approach. The mistake, however, was compunded by producing such detailed lesson planning within it, reinforcing the orthodox view that this was the expected approach. To those that say it was always "optional", I would say yes, it was, for those whose SAT results allowed it to be. 

My own opinion of the Literacy Hour was formed by my son, now in Year 8. He was always an avid reader and completed The Lord of the Rings by the time he was nine. He hated the literacy hour complaining that they picked on random passages from classic books to illustrate a given learning objective. "You never got to find out what happened in the end." was his summary. It has failed completely to switch children on to reading.

And, the teaching of formula writing (yes, I know the year 6 teachers are scanning examples of their SATs writing tests right now to see if their charges have used connectives, sub clauses and metaphor) did produce a jump in "attainment", but it has clearly not been embedded. How else could you explain the fact that secondary children have routinely done worse than their Year 6 counterparts in testing the single level tests?

So the National Strategies will surely die at the hands of the Tories if not at the hands of Ed Balls, and good riddance to a horrible centralised approach to attempt to hit a policy target, but let's just hope that next time someone comes up with such an approach we have the courage of our convictions to stand up and say no.

Image: Creative Commons License from Kimberleyfaye on Flickr

Manchester Head Teacher's Conference: Be careful what you tweet.

Yesterday, I spent the day at the Hallmark Hotel in Cheadle Hulme for the annual Manchester Head teacher's Conference at the invitation of Dave Watson, headteacher at Chorlton Park where I teach three mornings a week. On the bill were Professor Stephen Heppell and both the former and current headteachers from Robin Hood school in Birmingham. The idea was to prod and provoke by demonstrating some interesting and innovative developments in technology here in England and around the world. Originally I was hoping to get the opportunity to put some of that into a local context by demonstrating some of the excellent blogging that goes on at Chorlton Park, but, for whatever reason, that didn't happen. Their loss.

I feel I have to make the point that the coffee served by the hotel was the worst I have ever tasted -truly dreadful and prompted discussions as to whether someone had mixed the tea with the coffee as the taste was completely indeterminate. Inexcusable.

The audience listened intently to Stephen Heppell's tour d'horizon of developments in ICT around the world, and he had some particularly interesting points to make about school design including what furniture we might consider; shoes off, slippers on; and the size of schools (small is best). On this latter point I tweeted about his comments that secondary age children tend to look back wistfully at primary school and the learning that took place there. This turned out to be a salutory lesson in thinking before you tweet. I tried to pithily sum up his point. My tweet was picked up by Dave Stacey who teaches in South Wales. Here is the resulting blog post that came out of the discussion his class had about my tweet. My point about thinking before you tweet, especially on the fly while listening to a presentation is covered in the comments below the post.

Was Mr Stacey wasting his time in school by picking up my tweet and using it to stimulate a discussion? In today's Telegraph there is a story about a Scottish teacher who has been suspended for tweeting about school. My real anger about this article is in the ignorant and reactionary rubbish spouted by the "LA spokesperson," parent and local councillor. Let's just consider the fact that all the tweets quoted were outside of school hours, and it's not at all clear whether the member of staff tweeted from a school computer or a mobile phone (how are you going to block that then, muppets?). I agree that, as in any other social network situation, teachers must be extremely careful about tweeting about their charges, but the revelation that she thought that some children were "hard work" is really shocking (yeah, right). This sort of reporting does the profession no good whatsoever and just stokes up the ostrich brigade and the web blockers. The message is clear, teachers are not to be trusted in deciding for themselves what resources and websites they should be using in teaching and in their professional development. It also reinforced the lesson from my tweeting of Professor Heppell's words.

The afternoon was kicked off by Neil Hopkin who is the current head of Robin Hood primary school in Birmingham. Early in his presentation he showed a video of primary age children explaining how they used Yahoo Pipes to edit RSS feeds. The looks of utter bewilderment on many headteachers faces was a delight to see.

I thoroughly enjoyed the day and will definitely be taking up Neil's invitation to visit Robin Hood. 

Teachmeet Midlands - preaching to the converted?

On Friday evening Daniel Stucke and I headed over to Nottingham for Teachmeet Midlands organised and hosted by Tom Barrett and held in the very salubrious surroundings of the National College of School Leadership (awesome buffet ;-) ). Despite awful weather and a minor navigational lapse we were only slightly late.

As usual, it was great to meet many Twitter colleagues from my network and find new people to talk to. I demonstrated a couple of tools that I am currently playing with in class: Mapwing is a great virtual tour creator, which with a little imagination can be applied to all kinds of different curriculum areas (here's an example that my year 6 are working on); secondly I (rather badly) demonstrated Prezi, a new presentation tool which is fantastic for non-linear presentations (i.e. a presentation that doesn't go from slide to slide, but can be explored in any order that the presenter fancies). Here is one I am working on presently.

I will blog more about these two great tools soon and how I think they might be used in the primary classroom.

One of the most interesting discussions of the evening was whether Teachmeet was preaching to the converted and how we could reach more sceptical teachers, or even teachers who just don't know about Teachmeet. It's fairly obvious that hosting Teachmeet on a wet Friday evening is only going to entice a fairly engaged and committed audience, but even if held in school time I doubt you'd get the ICT sceptic to come along. Maybe its real strength is the fact that Teachmeet reaffirms the importance of ICT in education amongst those who are trying to advocate its power. At times it can be a pretty thankless and lonely task as an independent ICT consultant and an opportunity like Teachmeet, where I can join like-minded colleagues, provides much needed strength and resolve to carry on preaching/ranting/provoking.

It is about time that the northwest held a Teachmeet and it is something I have been mulling over for a while. there has been some recent Twitter talk about organising one, but seems to have gone quiet. If anyone is interested in helping organise one, I'm all ears.

Image under Creative Commons licence from TriciaNeal on Flickr

Back to school, back to the blog...

Welcome back to the new term. The beautiful sunshine always brings mixed feelings when starting back, but never mind here a couple of ideas for your blogsite this term: 

Google Forms

 

I have written a short piece on how to embed a Google form into a blog. Google forms are incredibly useful  and powerful tools as they capture data straight from a form into a spreadsheet. This makes it extremely easy to design relevant data handling activities using live data captured from your blog. Here is an example of a form I did for cycling and so far I have collected 75 responses. I can think of a myriad of ways you could use Google Forms in the classroom:

 

·         Traditional data handling type activities where you survey and analyse the results;

·         In a science lesson each group undertakes the same experiment and uses a form to record the results;

·         Evaluations of teaching sessions;

·         Creation of homework activities with boxes to fill in as a result of research undertaken.

·         Pupil voice and surveys by school councils etc;

 

Creating and embedding a form is incredibly simple as you will find out here.

 

Wordle

 

Wordle is one of those brilliant and simple ideas that everybody loves. Here is a brief post about it. And here is my blog displayed as a Wordle:

 

Note: when you finish your Wordle you save it to the Wordle website. The website provides the link to the image, but if you want to display the image, as above, you need to use a screen capture. I always use Jing for screen captures – a free and powerful application that can either take pictures of portions of a screen or record video of you using your computer.

 

Welcome to Plymouth Grove

 

Plymouth Grove primary school in Manchester are the latest recruit to the Creative Blogs family. Please take a moment to visit their site and say hello. I’m sure they will appreciate it.

 

Stuff that’s caught my eye

 

Not necessarily related to blogging, but interesting, nevertheless:

 

An interesting piece in today’s Telegraph online about new teaching methods producing dramatic results. My thanks to Mirandanet for bringing this to my attention.

 

A thoughtful blogpost  by Anne Collier about online safety and how we are in danger of losing the message.

 

Quizlet: a brilliant online flashcard generator for memory games, vocab quizzes etc. Apparently they are embeddable, I just need to find out how: more soon.

 

The fuss about SCORM

A blog post of two halves.

Anybody getting into the world of Virtual/Managed Learning Environments/Platforms will rapidly become aware of the "standard" that is SCORM. It's presented as a means to allow content providers to put their content into a learning platform in a format that is platform agnostic, i.e. it should work in any platform. More than that, it is used to provide feedback to the learning platform itself as to who has accessed the content and (sometimes) how long they spent on the task and whether they got to the end. It tells you nothing about the learning that took place.

I'll be the first to admit that I'd never really considered the limitations of SCORM - especially the way in which it is packaged up for learners to access, so was very pleased to read Ian Usher's blog post on the subject. It's somewhat technical for some, but it makes very interesting/essential reading for anyone interested in subscribing to or buying content for their learning platform. I draw two conclusions:

1. Only buy content where the package allows you to break it up into chunks so that the teacher can present the learner with the precise piece of learning that they need for the task without having to go through loads of navigation.
2. Review the actual content thoroughly - just because the piece is SCORM "compliant" doesn't make it good content (or even interactive). Ian demonstrates how simple it is to convert a PowerPoint into a piece of SCORM content. Now, there are good PowerPoints and bad PowerPoints, but the bottom line is, it's still a slideshow, it's not interactive content.

It's the usual case of "buyer beware", all content needs evaluating from the point of view of the learner.

Another blog post from Mark Berthelemy on SCORM

An object lesson for bullies

Ian's obvious point in his blogpost was to make sure that people needed to be aware of the limitations of SCORM, and to ask the relevant questions when considering what content to buy. As an example he used some freely available sample content from JSH Education to show how a PowerPoint could easily be converted to SCORM content (see conclusion 2 above). His regular readers will have read the article and drawn the necessary lessons from it. Enter JSH Education. Via a comment on his blog they demanded that their content be removed (without stating any reason why). Ian has 1030 followers on Twitter, and all it took was one tweet to the effect that a content provider had made a "take down" demand for conversations to erupt all over Twitter. I imagine there was a huge spike in readership on his blog, too. The result is that JSH Education look very foolish indeed and have turned what was a well written post aimed at informing into yet another Twitter cause celebre. The question is, when will corporates "get" the web? They can no longer control their brands in the way they used to and using old style bully boy tactics will lead to them being outed for what they are. 

Engage with the conversation, don't try to silence it.  

QR Codes

This is a QR code. It's atype of bar code and this one contains the URL of a website. It was generated using the brilliant Kaywa.com. Also available on the site are QR code readers for mobile phones (Symbian i.e. Nokia phones and Java based phones - the website will tell you if your phone is supported). How could you use this in education?

The ICT Suite is Dead, Long Live the ICT Suite

Steve Moss, who I know from his days as ICT leader in Manchester, apparently was steering schools away from the notion of building ICT suites in schools in his presentation at the Naace conference. Indeed, I know several schools (my wife's included) that are actively considering other uses for the space. This move has been accelerated somewhat by the rapidly growing popularity of the "netbook" style of computer. Much smaller, and more robust than a traditional laptop, they seem to fit the needs of schools extremely well. However, before you chuck out the baby with the bathwater there are some points that need careful consideration.

1. How well is your existing ICT suite utilised? Is there a clamour for any available time slot? Or are the doors locked, as they were in the school I visited last week. If it's well utilised, it's worth stopping for a moment and considering why? It's often down to reliability, nothing switches teachers off to the benefits of ICT faster than clunky and unreliable kit, and the converse is equally  true. Teachers build trust in a well set up ICT room where the computers are available for log in throughout the school day. Come in, sit down and the lesson starts.
2. What are you replacing the ICT suite with? A bank of netbooks or laptops in a lapsafe? Or, a device per child for the whole school? I would suggest that there aren't many schools yet in a position to afford the latter. Assuming it's the former, ask yourself how good are your staff at managing resources? Will they routinely ensure that machines are placed back in the safe and on charge at the end of a session? There is nothing worse than starting a lesson only to find a bunch of machines crashing through lack of power. Is the building designed for the manouevre of a laptop trolley  around? Or are there steps? How long do you expect the batteries in the machines to last? After about a year of heavy use laptop/netbook batteries lose a lot of their efficiency and their use time between charges falls off rapidly. Have you budgeted to replace the batteries in the machines?
3. What are you expecting children to use these netbooks for? They are simply nothing like as powerful as pcs or higher spec laptops and therefore are not suitable for multimedia work such as video editing. As you might expect, with the name of "netbook" they are good at browsing the web and using basic tools such as word processors, sound recording etc.  
4. What is the state of your wireless network? Designing a wireless network is a difficult task, if you have a wireless router on top of your lapsafe, don't expect 30 children to watch videos at the same time via a single access point. The crucial issue here is bandwidth. A single wireless router plugged into a 100mbps network point has to share the capacity of that point between every wireless device that is accessing it. Compare that with an ICT suite where each machine has its own 100mbps socket (note: massive oversimplification here as network design also depends heavily on switch configuration, speed of uplinks etc.). It is fair to say, however that a hard-wired network will generally give better performance to the desktop than a wireless one.

What do I conclude from this? Firstly, I don't buy the argument "Let's bring the learning to the kids, rather than the kids to the learning." We don't usually do PE or games in the classroom, and why do we go on trips? A well set up and reliable ICT suite can bring enormous benefits in terms of access and confidence building, whereas an under speced wireless network will do nothing but waste time in failed logins, slow downloads etc. There are many creative applications that are simply not viable using netbooks and an efficient mobile bank of devices requires a lot of careful management.

So, don't make a snap decision to abandon your ICT suite. Talk to staff about their feelings on the issue. Think carefully about what you expect a mobile device network might reasonably achieve and how it will be managed. It may be that a mixed environment might suit you best. Having said all that, we also need to think about technological change. I think we can confidently expect netbooks to get much more efficient in terms of power consumption (and more powerful). I think we can certainly expect them to have much more efficient operating systems - many schools are installing a bloated Windows XP on netbooks to make management of them on existing school networks easier - this results in higher purchase cost, and higher power consumption as the processor will be working flat out. Also, wireless networks will only get faster. My own view, for what it's worth, is that today there is still a role for the ICT suite. In five years time, I may not be so sure - an important consideration if you have a new build coming up.

Google Time

Did you know that if you type the word 'time' into Google followed by a place name or country, the first result returned will be the time for that place or country? No, I didn't either.

Well now you do. Thank you to ReadWriteWeb, my favourite techie blog for bringing us that useful nugget