Webucation

I was going to call this piece 'Teachers' - Gatekeepers or Keyholders?' the role of the teacher is critical in fostering learning and we all have had experiences of good and bad teachers in our school lives.

Some years ago I did some work for local schools to create a single sign-on system to allow schools to access a wide range of free and purchased e-learning content from a number of different suppliers.


The idea was to provide access to a wide range of learning resources for use at home and and at school which was always available. Interestingly some of the materials that schools bought were provided as content services covering a number of subjects.

Some months into the project I did some surveys of how the service was being used by speaking to students and teachers in some of our High schools. Pupils reported that they found some of the materials very helpful in clarifying or explaining things they had covered in class. Others said that they were able to look up other things they were interested in. Teachers were far less enthusiastic. Some said they hadn't promoted the content related to their subject as they didn't like it or it didn't explain topics in they way they wanted things explained. More worrying was the comment that they didn't want content made available for topics coming up in the future as it may 'spoil their lessons'!

What were were attempting to do was tap into the huge resource that is out on the net to support learning drawing on as many services as possible to increase the range and type of material available to young people.

The system we put together was based on the Shibboleth authentication and it worked very well - we ended up with more than 40 commercial services and some free content linked into the system but our real goal was to tap into the growing number of learning repositories around the world. Much of the work being done is focussed on university level students but a number of repositories also explore and index content for school age children.

One of the first we looked at was the Merlot repository which contains a large number of peer reviews materials including simulations, presentations, text materials and apps for mobile devices. Merlot allows integration with other search systems and the aim was to develop the search side of the system to allow pupils and teachers to access the materials they needed to support their learning or to use in their teaching. The potential is huge and the number of repositories has grown over the years, some specifically aimed at the younger students. A visit to any one of these repositories is well worth it - spend a little while there rather than dipping in - go to iTunes U and take a look at the awesome materials that are available there - again well worth an hour or two of your time.

So why is it that we are not all accessing learning where and when we need it? - why is it that these fabulous materials are not used across the world to support teaching and learning on a daily basis? How come that when you speak to almost any teacher they have never heard of them?

There are probably too many reasons to list but for me the main ones are:

1. Teachers are fixed in the way they work and teach - many do innovate but the critical mass of innovators in any particular school to change to way we learn and teach has not been reached. If something takes a bit more effort to do than their existing ways of doing things it tends not to be adopted.

2. Content is still difficult to locate and it means that teachers have to search for just the resource they regard as 'valuable' before they build it into their teaching. There is no common standard for indexing materials so you have to navigate each repository rather than being able aggregate many of them and carry out a single search.

3. Authentication into some of these services is not easy to automate so you end up registering with multiple sites and that involved too much fiddling about to get at the resources you need

4. Peer review is powerful, in that it establishes a 'value' placed on the resource by other practitioners. Trouble is there is no standard and no real match between the teaching you may do as a teacher and the reviewers

There are others but the potential is huge and the quality and range of resources is impressive and all given away free by educators. Once we have cracked the indexing, searching and access issues, the opportunities for personalised and independent learning would expand rapidly. Teachers would have access to a wealth of materials to promote the learning of their subject and students would have control of their learning. Institutions and formal learning would still be a key component of education systems around the world - I'm not a de-schooler, but the focus could become more individualised and to a degree paced for each learner.

It may be a vision for the future we never achieve but having a direction of travel is important and there are many that share the vision and are working hard to achieve it.

Whatever the positive and negatives there are about being online it is clear that the world is not suddenly going to change - young people spend a lot of time online; its not easy to find youngsters without a mobile phone in their hand even when they are not actually making a call or sending a text. We are in a 'just in case' scenario these days - having to have the phone handy 'just in case' some critical (or trivial) bit of information arrives.

Schools have largely led the way regarding internet safety education or information literacy and some have striven to support parents and families though training sessions, e-safety days or other information hosted on the school web site. Mobile phone companies in the UK now restrict access to certain types of sites unless you can prove you are over 18 by holding a credit card. There are also bills going through the UK parliament to try to address some of the issues arising from a largely uncontrolled and ungoverned internet. (UK Online Safety Bill 2015-16) 
All this activity along with all of the discussion that takes place does not stop the tide of abuse, exploitation or manipulation that can occur when the vulnerable are targeted online.

There are some enlightened schools that have tried a different tack. I once visited a school in Quebec, Canada and discovered that they did not filter internet traffic as many schools do. the approach was to create an online experience much the same as they had at home so there was the potential for all sorts of unsavoury material appearing on web browsers etc. The school worked with its parents on the policy and the behaviours that were encouraged at school where adopted int he home. This is an approach I have never seen anywhere else. Most UK schools filter content in a highly controlled way and as a result create a safe but unrealistic experience for young people.

Such school/parental partnerships as the school in Quebec are rare and in the majority of cases the unguarded spaces are in the home. There have been numerous reports of children online in their bedroom and parents have no idea what they are doing.

Some parents use free filtering products such as K9 Web Protection or other such filter products which allow control of access on a single computer - some also have reporting back to parents.

An alternative to filtering is monitoring. Here the idea is to allow things to be viewed or to allow interaction but to know what is going on. This takes more effort but is potentially much more rewarding as it allows for discussion and debate about appropriate behaviours, the risks and how to deal with them.

Many schools have monitoring systems in place although I get the feeling that it is used as an adjunct to filtering rather than as a educative tool.

Norton Family is a product that encourages discussion within the family about the use of the internet and it allows for those agreed policies to be monitored and reported on. Everyone should ideally be involved in setting up the house rules which then governs how the internet is monitored and what is reported. The great thing is that it also works on mobile devices and tablets. It also reports if the monitor has been disabled or switched off. Norman have summerized the functions in this video - well worth considering and the basic service is free to use with paid for add-ons if they are needed.



Whatever happens to the internet over the coming years it is clear that it will become more and more intertwined with our lives and educating our children on the risks and ways to stay safe are vital. That said we need families to become more net aware and parents to take more interest in what their children are doing online - its more about share not scare i.e. making the internet part of a balanced family life rather than trying to scare our kids away from it.

In the UK we have spent a lot of money over the years creating a high speed infrastructure for schools. Many schools have fast internet connections but I wonder just how many of them are working to establish what might be called an infrastructure for learning. What does this mean?....

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.

There is much discussion about Transforming Education but what does this mean and how can you transform something that in many countries is driven by achieving specific outcomes. We all know that we need our schools to deliver citizens ready for work in the 21st Century but what does that actually mean when the measures we have for success are largely the ones that we have used for hundreds of years.

Dave Seddon is headteacher of Baxter College in the Kidderminster area of Worcestershire, UK. When he arrived at the school he faced a huge challenge with a school that was deemed to be failing, had falling student numbers and was in an ageing building that seemed well matched to the then aspiration of the school.

He has turned the school around in a remarkably short time and won the Public Servants of the Year Award in 2006 for his achievement. Dave has very strongly held views about the creation and sustainability of effective learning environments and he set these out in a Powerpoint presentation he made which is now posted on the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust website. The presentation makes clear Dave's' determination to make a difference to the lives of the young people in his care and shows just what an impact he and his new revitalised team has made.

The educational turnaround has been made of of many components, together combining to have a powerful effect on the school. Among the mix of issues was the nature of the building and his efforts to make changes to better reflect the atmosphere and culture to more closely fit with his own vision for the school.

I spoke to Dave about the work he has been doing and some of the challenges he faced and still faces and a podcast of part of our conversation is with this post.

Addition: Dave Seddon was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) by the Queen in her 2013 Birthday Honours list for services to Education.

I have long thought that we need to develop a carefully crafted model for the learning environments of the future, particularly for students in the state school system attend compulsory education.

Research into the views of young people about their school experience reveal that many feel that it is not meeting all of their needs. If we are intent on delivering personalised learning then we need to listen to young people and build environments. Both physical and virtual, within which they can flourish.

Students also say that they want to be able to engage with other young people and in many cases the opportunities to do this are either difficult to arrange or are not sustained over long periods and are limited to specific projects.

The safe space of a learning platform or VLE, where learners are supported in their formal learning, combined with the more open global tools, where greater opportunities for social interaction become possible, must be our ultimate goal as educators. Our aim should be to ensure that we support learners effectively in their formal learning while allowing them to explore ideas and interests with each other. We also need to reach out to other learners world wide rather than requiring them to enter our closed managed online worlds which may well restrict the nature and extent of the discussion that can take place.

The diagram here shows how we could create much more stimulating online worlds. The use of RSS feeds are probably one of the most powerful ways of linking these external systems into the safer spaces without the need for complex API interfaces and authentication. Educators can ensure that their learners are aware of the risks associated with online system while harnessing them to serve the education process. A larger image is available here.

I would be interested to here how educators and/or learners use these different spaces and just what the impact of this approach might be.

WebQuest UK was produced by the Worcestershire Learning Technologies team in 2001 following a visit to Quebec in 2000 with a group of secondary teachers looking at the way in which ICT was being used for learning.

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.