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
Alan might be fighting a cause that can never be won but it is a battle worth fighting.
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?....
Dr Ken Robinson is a leading force in the development of creativity and in this video he expounds on the issue of creativity and the education system and his view that the education system may well drive out the skills that we will come to depend on in the future. His wit and engaging approach is used with skill to draw you in while he weaves a compelling argument to challenge our current approach in formal education. He promotes his strongly held views that creativity needs to be nurtured and not undermined by the education system.
In a previous post on this blog I described the work of Daniel Pink and his arguments regarding the way our education system seems to give preference to developing left brain thinking! Dan Pink claimed that the more creative right sided thinking was being stifled in the traditional education system as it does not recognise, value or develop creativity. The argument is well known in education systems that seem to value measuring outcomes in terms of Maths and English SAT results or other forms of formal tests.
In the US, as in the UK, SATS scores and examination results are THE measure and all else seems to fade into insignificance. The name given to the US programme is 'No Child Left Behind', aiming to secure standards for all children by relentlessly focusing on standards of mathematics and literacy - many educators are concerned of what they claim is the bias toward SAT scores and not the equally important development of creativity. Maybe that is why some that I met in Boston in 2007 referred to this programme as 'No Child Left Alive'!
Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough UK was one of the buildings created to demonstrate an entirely new approach to the design of schools as part of the UK's Building Schools for the Future programme. The design, brainchild of the well known designer Norman Foster, is certainly nothing like any school I have been to before. The Foster and Partners business has been responsible for some of the most celebrated designs world wide.
The Academy is actually an amalgam of three previous schools to create a school of over 2000 students aged 11 to 18. I visited the school during a typical school day the fact that 2000 pupils were are work there was pretty difficult to believe as the place was not overcrowded, nor were corridors overflowing with the rush of bodies between lessons. First Myth exploded for me was that a school has to look like the schools we all attended.
As with any design there were issues that could have been addressed slightly differently e.g that classrooms were a little smaller than you night ideally want, but they were bright inviting places geared to focused work. Very few straight walls in the design which is often frowned on by teachers as not being suitable for standard classroom use - but these are not standard classrooms with fill glass walls on the interior making classroom activity visible to anyone passing. Two further myths exploded for me were that you have to have rectangular rooms and that working in classrooms that are open for all peer into.
Again this might put some people off claiming that students would be distracted by things going on outside the classroom. I was pretty impressed to see a group of students sitting chatting and laughing outside one of the classrooms sitting on a settee with students inside the room not taking a jot of notice - the novelty had obviously long worn off.
Another exploded myth is that they use thin client systems throughout the school, 1,100 terminals for a school population of 2,200 students! The technical team reported that they were reliable - suffered from some glitches as with any system and had been delivering everything that the students and teachers wanted. There are some fat clients for use with CAD/CAM or some other specific curriculum tasks but everything else is delivered through thin clients.
The concept of floors seems to vanish as although there are levels there are also structures that defy the normal idea of floors - the library is built above the dual lecture theatre but that is buried into the ground so the layout looks very different from what you would normally expect.
All in all the school opens a whole new set of ideas around the notion of what a school should look like - not surprisingly the students seem to love it.
Libraries have been important places for the sharing of text based materials for centuries. There are many famous libraries across the world holding some of the most amazing resources. Trouble is that many of these resources were only available to researchers or academics until the arrival of digital technologies.
In schools the library has also seen changes with the arrival of digital resources with many more school libraries now equipped with computers so that users can carry out research using the web as well as other resources held by the library. In some schools this combination of technology and traditional printed material has been merged to create the Resource Centre or the Media Lab.
The change in use of school libraries has been interesting. Schools now tend not to spend money on expensive resources such as encyclopedia when they can access up to date and low cost resources that do the same job online. The non-fiction resource has become the internet which has allowed some schools to report that they have been able to expand their range of fiction materials and stimulate an increase in reading for pleasure.
So are libraries of the future only places where the balance between the non-fiction and fiction materials will shift further to become more and more digital? If this is the case why bother with a physical space? If it has social aspects (not something I tend to see in libraries) then is not the social networking provided by digital technologies far more powerful than could be achieved simply by meeting in a physical space called a library? Maybe libraries are gradually going to shrink to become the repository for the rare original artifact that you can go and visit....... We need to think more about the function and role of libraries in schools - what sots of things should be available in these places and just what will they mean to the generation that is growing up as avid web users and who often report that they feel agitated when not connected!
This video clip explores some interesting ideas about the potential of the lib. Interesting that the library of the future is a physical space and that there are actually books there - also interesting that it does not look like any library that I have visited..... yet!
There are loads of examples of innovative design on web site, in magazines and presentations - how did those come into being? In the majority of cases where good design can be identified the designers and architects have spent time working with the owners or users of a building to convert their vision into reality.
The fact that there are so many bad designs around would suggest that something has gone badly wrong in such cases. In the case of schools might this be because the users are used to their current buildings and can only envisage a better version or that the designers and architects are unable to convert the requirements into suitable designs? Not sure- but whatever the reason there is a desperate need to spend a long time thinking about alternatives and testing our existing thinking around school design before any real planning begins.
The fact that so many kids are not turned on to schools would suggest that what has become the 'standard' school designs are no longer fit for purpose. As an aid to thinking the issues through there is a useful resource at the School Design Research Studio by one Jeffery A. Lackney from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has produced a paper entitled 33 Principles of Educational Design. The paper provides some real food for thought when considering the design of any new school.
If these principles should contribute to the creation of a vision for new accommodation or be a stimulus to thinking about what outcomes are required for any building programme then perhaps these slides illustrate the results of such thinking.
With so many new school designs ending up with updated versions of what existed before maybe tools such as Sketchup provides an ideal opportunity for those involved to consider all sorts of alternative design ideas.
Google now hosts a School 2.0 Design collection of 3D models and there is an open invitation for designers to add their own designs. If this were to take off we could see a valuable resource of ideas to consider and modify to meet a range of different needs. The current set of 13 models have all been added by Fred Bartels whose other designs using Sketchup are fascinating to explore. The design he has come up with is wacky to say the least as the school is designed in the shape of a leaf. I would guess most architects would either throw their hands up in horror or rub them together thinking what they might charge for such a building. This said, the use of software like Sketchup makes it possible to explore ideas, discuss the use of space and how the association between different subjects may be incorporated into the designs.
The 13 models developed by Fred can be found a the The Google 3D Warehouse of School 2.0 Designs and the Sketchup software is free to download.
It would be good to think that students and their teachers might become involved in a dynamic dialogue about the school of the future - hopefully before the steamroller of a formal design activity involving the private sector begins.
In the local research, which was focused on the 14 to 19 age group in a number of UK schools, it was found that the opportunities provided by online collaborative spaces is actually having an impact on these ‘quiet’ learners. The report stated that;
"There appears to be a particular emphasis of certain impacts on ‘quiet’ boys (even though there were fewer of these that self-reported as being ‘quiet’), but the impacts on both groups were potentially important. It should also be noted that ‘quiet’ is likely to encompass at least three different groups of learners: those who are naturally reticent in terms of offering their ideas in classrooms; those who find difficulty for emotional or social reasons with engaging in a classroom learning environment; and those who do not want to be seen by others as being engaged or interested in the topic or lesson."
Many learning environments that are solely concerned with course delivery or assessment may well be missing a trick as the true potential appears to come from extending the routes by which learners can engage with the learning process even where the actual engagement is more about meeting their personal needs or providing an outlet for social interaction.
If we are determined to provide learner access to online learning then it must go well beyond access to content, their coursework or communication between teachers and their class group. The greater the opportunity to collaborate and communicate the greater the opportunity for quiet learners to find their voice.
Alan November is well known in countries around the world for his work on Information Literacy. His book 'Empowering Students with Technology' is an essential read for anyone trying to harness the use of the net to support learning.
Alan has also been in a position to visit a number of the most innovative schools in the US and elsewhere and in his usual candid way is well able to set out his opinions about everything from e-safety to school and curriculum design.
After the BLCO7 conference in Boston this year I asked Alan to take part in a discussion about the future of learning via Skype.
We discussed a number of issues as always Alan brings his experience to bear on the issues and provides insightful comments on the challenges that are ahead.
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.
The development of tools for social interaction and which foster collaboration and membership of online communities has exploded in recent years. Myspace, Flickr, Bebo etc are all sites which draw people in, share their identities and interests and then share in all sorts of ways (some not quite legal).
There are tensions in the educational world regarding such technologies. Leading advocates like Steven Downes would claim that Web 2.0 will provide massive opportunities for learning but absolutely not in the traditional school or even a school at all. Others say it is the way forward and it has a significant contribution to make to, what you might call, more formal education.
The term Learning 2.0 was coined (I guess) by those advocates of Web 2 technologies to claim the educational ground and to promote their vision of the way the future of learning should go. Learning 2.0 is really what Wikipedia would refer to as e-learning 2.0 i.e. the second generation of e-learning tools based around collaborative tools such as wikis and blogs etc.
Most innovations in learning and which have an ICT component have come and gone - remember the CD ROM? We have been through a whole raft of software and hardware systems which we have put into schools. In most cases the ones that stick are those that seem best to fit the traditional mode of teaching and learning e.g. Learning Platforms as course delivery systems or whiteboards which look a lot more interesting that black ones but still hang on a wall at one end of a room and have everyone looking at it!
The same fate may lie in wait for Web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 if we try to fit it into the standard school setting other than to be used by a few interested people with a passion for exploring at the edges of what we still refer to as schooling.
Alan November was asked a question about the relationship between web 2 and learning 2 at a recent conference - although the audio is poor his comments are pretty realistic.
What constitutes a community? Are online communities real communities? Are online communities important for education?
Users of YouTube think they are a community........
Research about communities is extensive - do a search on Google Scholar and you get 9 million hits, try Learning Community and you get 1.8 million with the top hits leading to some of the leading thinkers in this area. From my reading around this I was attracted to the definitions of 'community' presented by Kowch and Schwier (1997) where they describe four different types of community, each with distinguishing features and which meet the needs of different groups of participant. Reil and Polin (2004) explore the notion of online communities and identify three different types. Task based communities tend to be where groups of people are working on a common task or problem. Practice based communities often share goals or expertise and knowledge based communities are often people who come together with diverse expertise and can establish new areas of knowledge.
This all sounds grand but I wonder just how the notion of community sits within our education system. We don't assess group contribution or how well students share expertise or work together to create new knowledge - at least that is the case in many school I visit. We only seem interested in assessing the individual or what contribution they make to the 'community' (usually through social good works). Seems to me that we have much to do to explore online educational communities and harness them for learning.
The question remains - is the YouTube Community a real community?
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!
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