Technology alone cannot deliver outstanding schools, people do that. However, if you put technology in the hands of creative risk takers, whether they are teachers or the school leadership team then it can have a major impact on the delivery of the curriculum, the engagement of learners and parents and the effectiveness of a school.In the years I have been supporting schools, too long to admit to, I have seen huge impact in situations where the teacher has limited resources but a creative spark that converts the mundane into a vibrant classroom. I have also seen thousands of UK pounds spent on a product or service that someone deems to be the ‘must have’ service or application only to find that after a while its use and impact withers and eventually is forgotten.
Firstly a leadership team and headteacher who encourage innovation. This does not mean that they take their eye of the issue of standards but does mean that any idea must prove itself if is is to be sustained - the space for the teacher to generate the proof is what the school leadership can encourage and support.
Second, the teacher needs to be supported in their endeavour and the measures of impact need to be a wider than simply acquisition of knowledge. In many instances the impact is actually more about how learners are encouraged to learn than the learning itself - clarity around what outcomes could be expected from any particular innovation or idea needs to come from the teacher. Doing something because ‘it might be interesting’ is not really good enough in the modern target driven school.
The impact could be felt as you went around the school. Teachers felt that they could contribute to the development of their school and their ideas would be given due consideration. Very few schools I know have adopted anything like this as an approach to staff development is such a systematic way as we always seem to want very short term returns.
Jim Rohn
While it has been relatively easy to find schools that have used the odd open source software package such as Open Office or Seashore it has been far more difficult to find a school that has gone much further and are using OSS tools for admin, pupil management and within the curriculum.
The old arguments always seem come up - 'its not industry standard' or 'it may be free but it is costly to support' or 'we have had a look at using open source but staff and parental pressure has made it impossible to change'.
'Open source software in schools: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs'
set out to explore the cost benefit of using OSS and demonstrated that savings could be made but that there were issues about the lack of curriculum specific software (something that was prevalent at the time in the UK with software to help deliver the National Curriculum). The report indicated that the take up of OSS solutions were affected by the perceptions of staff and that training issues might mean that it would be timely and expensive to move staff from one approach to a more OSS rich set or resources. Administrative staff were reported to be lukewarm about the use of OSS due to its inability to integrate or inter operate with already existing systems.
In my search for a school that has gone further than most with open source software I discovered Albany Senior High School in Auckland, New Zealand and their decision to explore the full potential for OS in schools was driven by an educational vision and not by a financial argument. Albany's WikiEducator pages make interesting reading and they set out five key educational arguments for their approach with Open Source Tools. The page also lists the tools they use, which includes some that have been put together by students for use within the school.
Is a device like an IPod Touch sufficient
as a 'use anytime' device?
Having worked with schools, learners and teachers for a number of years I am increasingly convinced that a single technology device is just not enough! Various surveys have been done about the use of technology by learners at home and at school as well as attitudes towards technology across the age range.
Some of the more recent research makes interesting reading such as the recent 2009 e-Maturity Study produced by some of the leading researchers in the UK.
What the research like this does not do is to study the actual use of technology by young people and teachers and what the minimum technology they would need to meet their immediate needs. Having observed a large number of lessons where ICT is used it is clear that many do not require the power provided in the majority of the hardware devices that are actually used. Teachers may use their devices to create materials for classroom use but during lessons the technology is mainly used for presentation purposes. Pupils use of technology varies depending on what they are doing but again in the majority of cases the devices are not used for creating content.
It may be that we are all waiting for the right technology to come along e.g suitable sized keyboard, long battery life (longer than a school day) high quality screen etc etc but in fact maybe all you need to be able to do is take notes, perhaps snap a picture and access information. The more heavy weight uses such as creating presentations, editing movies or creating publications need more processing power.
My contention is that we need a ' use anytime' device that is used mainly for the less sophisticated but important tasks such as the researching, note taking and watching with additional resources available 'when needed' to do the more demanding tasks.
confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives
responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.
In the UK some local authorities are working flat out to come up with designs for schools that will stand the test of time for the next thirty years. The UK government's Building Schools for the Future programme set out in 2003 with the grand vision to replace the secondary school stock throughout England over a fifteen year period.
Similar programmes are underway in other countries. Ask different people what the key characteristics of such schools will be and there are as many views as there are learners that will attend these schools.
It is clear that a single characteristic or feature is unlikely to dominate but there might well be a small number of vital ones - use the poll below to choose the three that appear to be the most important to you.
What society wants from the education system is changing all the time although for many it still appears to provide more or less the same diet as we have seen for the past hundred years or so.
We are in a connected world and there are resources for learning in all sorts of formats along with the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world. Never before has there been something that had such an impact on the education process as has the advance in technology and the internet. We need to think carefully about how the use of technology will affect the design and delivery of the curriculum in our schools.
The question is how much will the curriculum be allowed to change? How much can we accommodate these new ways or working and how ready are our pedagogues to accomodate the use of technology to allow the changes to take root?
Some would suggest that nothing much will change. The subjects we are used to have been around for ages. Others argue that young people now have more choice than they have ever had and that the social networks and other communities online will be the future for formal education.
Most probably we will end up somewhere between the two extremes. We will probably have schools for a long time to come, they will have teachers (but perhaps fewer specialists), we will have more adults working with kids (teaching assistants and mentors from outside the school etc), we will have online spaces (but these may be simply extensions of a particular classroom and not dynamic communities). We are already seeing a mix of provision with some internships or work placements as part of the learner's programme and we are seeing ideas for building the curriculum to deliver the standards that seem to be a political imperative and yet have been formed into a more project based structures.
The nature of educational change is that it is normally a slow process. That said the rapid development of alternatives as technological provides interesting and attractive alternatives will result in huge pressure to speed the change process. We await with interest the results.
The photograph below shows the timetable - not a list of subject sessions one after the other but a series of advisory sessions to support learners with their personalised programmes. Subject knowledge does feature in the study programmes but they are shaped to apply to the particular requirements. Where a number of students are following programmes that require the same knowledge base then they are taught as a group.
Ask a student where they get most of the support for their school coursework and you might expect them to say their teachers.
489 students responded to a poll in our online learner community and they produced some interesting results.
Q. Where do you get most of your information to support your coursework?
School Intranet 1.23% (6 votes)
The Internet (Via Google etc) 51.12% (250 votes)
Teachers during lessons 37.83% (185 votes)
Online Learning Space 2.86% (14 votes)
Other Students 6.95% (34 votes)
Total number of votes: 489
The results pose some interesting questions. Should we be pleased that so many are using the web or should we be concerned that so many are turning to the web rather than their teachers? There are a number of possible reactions to this sort of information. Firstly are we actually preparing learners for the effective use of the web or do they simply decide that they can find most things they need from this source?
How many courses in schools actually teach the efficient use of the web and effective searching and citation. Many teachers say that a large number of students tend to produce the same sort of information when using the web for coursework and in some cases the teachers can actually tell which web sites students have used. Is this a good or bad thing? Are there skills that learners need to be taught and are our teachers knowledgable to teach those skills?
Loads of questions but very few answers. We are only beginning to unpick the implications of all this for education and the approriate curriculum for the 21 century learner - interesting to speculate where it is all going.
Schools have not changed much in their appearance for a hundred years or more.
The Futurlab publication 'Re thinking learning spaces' provides a useful tool to explore the issues surrounding changing the nature of the formal school experience in terms of the accommodation needed along with the training of staff and the structure of the curriculum.
I have used the materials in a number of situations to engender a debate about creating fit for purpose in the 21st Century. The sessions have ranged from groups of headteachers through to newly qualified teachers and they each bring a new perspective in the issues surrounding school design.
More work needs to be done and the next group will involve learners - a critical perspective in any rethinking of formal schooling. The issues faced by headteachers are many and varied but key in UK schools, and I guess all other schools world wide, is to ensure that the standards are maintained against whatever measures exist in the particular country or state. At the same time everyone recognises that the needs of young people are changing and that traditional curriculum may not fit the bill.
In my work with headteachers they were asked to work in groups to discuss a series of What if.... statements such as; What if school was optional or What if classrooms had more adults present. They were asked to indicate which of these were achievable with little or no change to accommodation, training or curriculum, which required changes to one or more and which they felt had little to do with the formal school system.
The results (results in SVG format and as pdf file) were very interesting and demonstrated that much can be achieved if only there is the will to do it - one of the most critical issues is staff development as much of what is desired depends on changing the ways we work. The comments arising from discussions were also collated and summerised.
Interesting that in some other research that has been done the amounts of funding allocated to training staff are a tiny percentage of the overall budgets in the majority of schools!
One thing that Google does not do is allow you to visualise the web, your searches or, as far as I know, use other inputs than text.
LivePlasma does a similar thing for music and film (or nearly) enter an artists name or the name of an actor and a set of dynamic links appear mapping out the interconnections between the searched for artist.
A number of search engines convert their results into a dynamic map of linked keywords. Quintura provides a map and the search results side by side. One I particularly like actually gives you rewards and more functions the better use you make of the search engine. Ujiko rewards your searching with points. With every 10 points, you move to the next level. They say that 'Your search engine is mutating, new buttons appear giving you access to advanced features (search video, images, news, encyclopedia, advanced filters, animated skins, web archive, traffic details...)'
This would seem to undermine Dan Pink's analysis of the changing nature of the aptitudes we need to develop as an improvement or promotion of more right brain thinking. To be fair Dan Pink does make it clear that both hemispheres of the brain as still important and the aptitudes associated with the left hemisphere are still vitally important, just that we need to recognise the importance of those attributes that are often cited as right brain ones.
Alistair Smith does confirm that the left and right hemispheres contain areas which perform specific functions and they differ in the way they process information, For example, the right deals with more global 'big picture' interpretations while the left deals with more local (detailed) ones. Alistair uses this example to demonstrate that the two work in concert and produce an integrated information processing system with each half making its contribution to the overall interpretation of a particular experience.
Dan Pink's arguments can be presented without the left/ right brain issue getting in the way as what he is pointing out is a need for particular competencies requiring more attention. Certainly there is a shift toward curriculum models that provide for a wider range of assessment types than we have been used to through SAT's so the debate. Alistair points out that educators and scientists are asking different questions. Therefore it seems sensible to assume that any curriculum that is developed or teaching approach that is adopted can only really be informed by drawing on the analysis and research undertaken by both to inform future approaches.
Many educators are concerned about the way in which students seem to accept the results thrown up by Google as the ultimate truth and there are major efforts in the UK to raise the level of web literacy for students and educators alike.
Understanding what you are looking at, knowing its origin and whether the content is valid is a 21st century skill for learners of any age. We have never been in the quite the position of having to validate the sources of information they way we do now.
Many of us are used to paper based publications which have ISBN numbers, known publishers and which are subject to peer review or scrutiny by peers prior to piublication and we are often told something about the author. This is not the case for the web and search engines like Google. A colleague of mine created a situation in a school which was filmed for Teacher's TV - a UK service sharing practice and ideas within the teaching profession.
This film says it all. If the film does not run or you have difficulties you can access it here.
There are a number of Information Literacy resources available on the web and it is vital that we make kids safe, not by blocking access to things or preventing them using the web, but by providing them with the information literacy skills that they will need for the future.
Opening Minds - UK exploration of the 21st Century Curriculum
1 comments Posted by Dave Thomson at 22:44
Curriculum change is something that education has been dealing with for hundreds of years and the history of education is littered with theories, ideas, claims and even legislation.
Talking to educators during a recent visit to the USA and discussing the failure of the UK education system to remain meaningful to a growing number of learners would suggest that change is in the air across the western world. What was regarded as the skills and aptitudes needed for the industrial age and more recently the information age seem to be under detailed scrutiny in a number of countries.
In the UK the debate has been accelerating in pace for some time, with efforts to develop a more personalised approach to learning and the consequences that result from tailoring the curriculum to more individual need.
The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) Opening Minds initiative set out to encourage the introduction of systemic change within the UK national curriculum and proposed a new competence-based curriculum. It seeks to re balance the information based national curriculum and draw in those competencies that are necessary for the 21st Century. The competencies are:
- Competences for Learning
- Competences for Citizenship
- Competences for Relating to People
- Competences for Managing Situations
- Competences for Managing Information
The initiative is being taken up by a growing number of schools in the UK - keeping one eye on the pressure on them to maintain their examination status in league tables but recognising the need for changes which meet the needs of the learners in their care.
In July 2007 the national awarding body QCA made the announced of changes to the formal secondary curriculum to reduce the prescription that existed previously to allow teachers and schools the freedom to innovate. Opening Minds, changes to the statutory curriculum and other programmes for curriculum innovation are clear indicators that we are in a continually changing curriculum landscape - exciting times.
They work in teams, sometimes from across the world and collaborate to create these sites drawing on any expertise they can locate. The sites are totally student created with an adult to act as mentor or guide.
I promoted ThinkQuest to an online community within an e-learning project known as the Virtual Workspace not knowing how students would react. Two teams appeared out of the ether with students drawing in potential team members from within the 18 thousand or so learners within the community. Lee's team had a number of challenges to overcome in the six month journey for the project. They completed the work and ended up publishing a site on Nanotechnology which is now in the competition library. The team that put the project together were from totally different schools. They never met until they went on a trip to London paid for by Oracle, sponsors of the ThinkQuest competition.
On the coach journey back they began planning their 2007 entry which won the 14 to 19 category in the UK version of the ThinkQuest competition having chosen the topic - Water.
The potential of online communities and that of project based learning really came home to me as a result of this work but don't listen to me listen to Lee on the ThinkQuest Podcast.
The Building Learning Communities conference run by Alan November and the November Learning Team was my educational highlight of the year (probably the last few years).
Alan brought together a number of the best thinkers from around the world to share their thoughts with us on issues ranging from student voice, through school design to the best uses of educational technology.
It is the only conference I can remember were I actually cried twice (that is quite something for a bloke to admit but its true) The first tear jerker was the speech given by Tim Tyson from Maybry Middle school and the second was a session run by three students working with Marco Torres. These sessions changed my thinking and made me realise we still have a huge challenge ahead of us regarding the effectiveness of our education system and how best to make it relevent for all young people.
The conference was aso unusual in that there was a real sense of community - a clear sense of oneness with no boundaries between presentors and delegates. There are loads of photos of friends at BLC07 on Flickr (the one here was uploaded to Flickrby Edublogger on 19 Jul 07, 5.47AM PDT. edu.blogs.com/edublogs/blc07/index.html).
There is lots of information, presentations and podcasts avaiable on Alan's site.
Seymour Papert, developer of the Logo programming language, was hit by a motorcycle in Hanoi close to the hotel he was staying in.
The accident left Semour critically ill and he was tranferred to a hospital in Maine, USA. This image was taken at the MIT Media Lab during a visit during the BLC07 Conference last month.
The poster says 'Get Well Seymour' and the coloured stickers are names of individual colleagues at the Media Lab.
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