Educationally, musically YouTube

I have just discovered that there is a YouTube channel for a symphony orchestra ...

Join the world's first collaborative online orchestra.
We invite musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Your video entries will be combined into the first ever collaborative virtual performance, and the world will select the best of you to perform at New York City's Carnegie Hall in April 2009.

... and that on October 6th The London Symphony Orchestra played the 'Symphony for YouTube' for the first time ... well worth a listen.

What better educational use for a video channel ... will this persuade some to unblock it ?

Mike Waters talks about the Rose review of primary education

Last week Mike Waters spoke at NCSL about current progress on the primary curriculum review being conducted by Sir Jim Rose. Mick, the Director of Curriculum at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), considered the implications of the findings for school leaders and leadership.

You can listen to his comments on progress here.

Ten Years on ...

Back in June 2, 1998 at Imperial College, London for the 11th Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication, Professor Bruce Sayers, Emeritus Professor, Imperial College introduced Dr. Seymour Papert to the audience. I was not there but now reading what he said, prompted by a blog post form Betchablog in my feeds, I so wish that I had been. The resonance of his statement:

“The model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.”

.....so clearly applicable (and growing even more so) today should show the way forward in institutionalised education systems. Perhaps our ability to learn is not what we would all like it to be.

It does your heart good ... in more ways than one !!

Allanah Kay is an inspiration ... there is no doubt ... a teacher who puts her ideas into practice and who is not afraid to be 'out there' making great things happen. Read here rationale behind the 'Collaborative Dance Video' and smile. ( Hope you don't mind me 'borrowing the picture Allanah!)

So it goes ...

With acknowledgement to Billy Joel and the Kurt Vonnegut ...(for the title of this post)

What seems like a very long time ago now Tricia Neal and I (and others)worked with Becta to begin to the fly the kite of online learning. We put together online conferences and invited suppliers to have their own online space attached to them.

Ahead of our time, we were not successful in engaging people in the affairs because of technical, cultural(in its widest sense) and personal reasons.

One of the things we tried out was trying to persuade schools and Local Authorities to have a 'blended' inset session in their own schools or centres where the session was prepared and directed externally but received and supported in the schools. No travel costs, no supply cover, food provided by staff themselves, short sessions. We felt we were on to something very positive ....... but no ... we were too early ...

Today trawling through my feeds I read on the 'Ideas and Thoughts Blog' that this suggestion is offered as a really positive way to use the materials of the K12 Online Conference ... I couldn't agree more and would be very interested to hear of anyone taking up the idea.

Off by Heart ...

Poetry has always been a big thing in my life ... from reading it to writing it to ( best of all) reading it to children. It is for this reason I am totally delighted to discover the BBC's new idea 'Off By Heart'

Here is the idea: The BBC wants primary school pupils to engage with learning and reciting poetry. Every primary school in the UK can enter a child aged 7 - 11 to compete for the title of UK Poetry Recital Champion, and the chance to represent their school and region in what will be a fantastic BBC competition, shown on BBC TV in spring 2009.

If you are a teacher in the UK you just go to the website link above and register and then take it from there.

Here is the poem list
1. Alligator by Grace Nichols
2. The Way Through The Woods by Rudyard Kipling
3. The Pig by Roald Dahl
4. Daffodils by William Wordsworth
5. The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear
6. Leisure by WH Davies
7. Talking Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah
8. Matilda by Hilaire Belloc
9. The Tyger by William Blake
10. A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns
11. The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
12. The Walrus and The Carpenter by Lewis Carroll
13. The King's Breakfast by AA Milne
14. Macavity: The Mystery Cat by TS Eliot
15. The Lake Isle Of Innisfree by WB Yeats

Here is my go at 'The Owl and the Pussycat'

Asking the questions ... and answering some

My post of a couple of weeks ago about 'Million Futures' which is part of the creative ideas that are coming out of the BCH (Beyond Current Horizons) project, attracted a good deal of interest from a wide audience of friends and colleagues who have used it variously for their own personal interest and for professional purposes.

On a vist to the BCH site today my eye was caught by PowerLeague. This is what the site says about it:

Tough questions about the future of education
What will education be for in 20 years' time? And what does this mean for how it should be delivered? This special edition of Power League is designed to find out how you feel about the future of education. It's completely free and anonymous, and your opinions could contribute to government education policy.

It is very well worth having a good read of what interested people are saying ... also worth having your say ... and... if you wish, develop and use your own leagues.

The rest of the World ( well ... a bit of it) moves on

Two news items brought to me by my colleague Tricia today following my blog post about laptops in Venezuela.

Firstly one from Italy where an experiment is taking place in one school in Turin to replace all of their books with computers ... for a year. The mini laptops, which run Windows software, weigh less than a kilogram, can be dropped from a height of one-and-a-half metres and are waterproof. Instead of spending the equivalent of $700 (£400) a year on books, the laptops, built by the Italian company Olidata, cost less than $400 (£228).

And secondly news from Ghana that all children between the ages of 5 and 12 in public schools are to be provided with a personal computer. Speaking at the 14th annual Teachers Awards ceremony in Sunyani yesterday, President Kufuor announced that the first batch of 10,000 units of what he described as “Magic Computers for Children” would soon arrive in the country in fulfilment of the government’s promise.

Shift happens ...

PS

Brian Smith has an interesting take on 'one laptop per child'

Nintendo DS - the research comes in ...

It seems that in Scotland the trials to test out the impact of the use of computer games on learning are bringing in positive results.

The Consolarium research on 'games based learning' is being widely reported.

This is what part of the report said:

Our results have shown that a small, cleverly designed handheld game can significantly enhance learner performance in mental maths as well as having a positive impact on other aspects of classroom life.

So, I hope, games loaded onto one of the many ultra-portable notebooks will soon have their regular place in schools and homes as personal educational tools.

Venezuela '1to1' ... getting there

Announced at the end of September:

The Venezuelan government has signed an agreement with Portugal that will bring 1million low-cost notebooks, which are based on the Intel Classmate PC design, to the South American country. In July, Portugal signed an agreement with Intel to bring 500,000 Classmate PCs to that country, and now the Portuguese OEM manufacturing those laptops will supply these Intel Atom-based laptops to Venezuela.

So the Venezuelan Government has seen a way to get/keep its young people somewhere near the front as the world goes even flatter. I wonder, with all money being spent on BSF and the Primary Capital Programme whether some such initiative should have been included for all of our children/students.

Perhaps it has been considered and I missed it.

Marc Prensky in Middlesbrough

Marc's keynote at the Middlesbrough ICT Conference at the famous Riverside Stadium today struck so many chords they resonated all over the building. Teachers listened to an impassioned invective to act now rather than later in embracing all that is good in technological development. Marc urged the group to take risks and do it with passion. To embrace change and make change work.

In the opening of his Keynote Marc may have announced the end of such 'stand up and lecture' sessions (at least for him). He explained how he had been challenged about not moving onwards in terms of still being out there at the front talking 'at' rather than opening a dialogue 'with' his audience. He tried to involve the teachers in taking sides to some of his questions but it was hard work. The practitioners in the audience were in 'conference' mode and their expectation was that they would sit and listen ... not participate. It was their expectation. The question is ... 'How do we change the expectation?' ... and is this how it is in classrooms ?... Do students/children get what they expect? Are they learning in a way they recognise and are they comfortable with it? I think the answer is a resounding 'NO'. We can change expectation ... we can do things differently but if we do we must make sure that differently = better.

Earlier this week I did a very enjoyable and similar keynote for a group of Headteacher with a similar result. The body language of the audience was excellent as a reflection of the things I was saying and the 'post keynote' comments were enlightened and positive. Expectation delivered and received. But Marc made me think.

If we are saying 'shift happens' and change is getting to be exponential then why are we presenting in the same way as we did (okay we have projectors now) fifty years or more ago. How can we get messages ove more effectively? Or is this the best way? It is the comfort range of the audience and does give new ideas and provoke thought. But is this good enough?

Marc will have made some think about the appropriateness of style and the divergence from the one size fits all scenario and his hope was, I believe, that these thoughts should be taken back and embedded into classroom practice.

I hope in the next few days to have a link here to the presentation so you can read for yourself what he said.

A new year begins ... there will be changes

Today a group of 121 primary PGCE students assembled in the Fraser Noble Hall of Leicester University to begin their year long journey towards becoming teachers. It is a real hope that they keep their enthusiasm and excitement about working with children intact as they tread the pathway through the maze of documentation that will come their way. I do hope that they won't get sidetracked by strategies and schemes but will keep their eyes firmly focused on the job of making sure that the children they interact with have a good experience that will carry them forward.

About School by R Nukerji

He always wanted to say things. But no one understood.
He always wanted to explain things. But no one cared.
So he drew.

Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn't anything. He
wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would
be only him and the sky and the things inside that needed
saying.

And it was after that, that he drew the picture. It was a beautiful
picture. He kept it under the pillow and would let no one
see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it. And when
it was dark, and his eyes were closed, he could still see it.
And it was all of him. And he loved it.

When he started school he brought it with him. Not to show
anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.

It was funny about school.
He sat in a square, brown desk like all the other square, brown
desks and he thought it should be red.
And his room was a square, brown room. Like all the other
rooms.
And it was tight and close. And stiff.

He hated to hold the pencil and the chalk, with his arm stiff
and his feet flat on the floor, with the teacher watching
and watching.
And then he had to write numbers. And they weren't anything.
They were worse than the letters that could be something if you
put them together.
And the numbers were tight and square and he hated the
whole thing.

The teacher came and spoke to him. She told him to wear a tie
like all the other boys. He said he didn't like them and she
said it didn't matter.

And after that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way
he felt about morning. And it was beautiful.

The teacher came and smiled at him. "What's this?" she said.
"Why couldn't you draw something like Ken's drawing?" Isn't
that beautiful?"
It was all questions.

After that his mother brought him a tie and he always drew
airplanes and rocket ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and
blue and of everything, but he wasn't anymore.

It had stopped pushing. It was crushed. Stiff.
Like everything else.

The end is nigh ... I mean SATs

My friend Tricia points out to me that on the Andrew Marr show (you can listen to the interview on BBC iplayer if you are quick) on BBC this morning Ed Balls seemed to hint that the end of Sats may be nigh. Marr asked directly if 2009 would be the last year for Sats and Ed Balls answered that the present system was not set in stone ... a hint maybe but a positive hint. This was also reported on the BBC web site.

Now its writing and arithmetic ...

Today the BBC report that:

Struggling pupils are to get one-to-one help with the Three Rs under a trio of government-backed programmes beginning or being extended this term.
Two new schemes, Every Child a Writer and Every Child Counts, are being piloted in England and will be rolled out nationally by 2011.

This on the back of the: successful (?) reading scheme, Every Child a Reader, is being rolled out to 30,000 of the worst-performing pupils.

I just wonder how it feels to be a 'worst-performing pupil' and how the arbitrary set standards have become so important that they have taken over from the idea of education in childhood which embraces excitement and enthusiasm for knowledge and understanding.

I watched a video presentation of this news earlier today and was taken by a young boy writing on paper with a pencil ... this is the way that the press conceptualises writing and indicates a perceptual backwater. On the whole today when people write on paper with an instrument it is for their own purpose. When they write for others they do what I am doing now. They compose on screen and check and edit and amend as they go along. What concept of writing will our young people have if schools perpetuate the pencil and paper approach?

This is the bit I like:Typically about five or six children aged seven and eight in a school would receive intensive support of about 10 hours over 10 weeks - probably outside the school day.

I bet the children will be pleased!

It is rather like seeing families out for a ride on their bikes ... children togged up with their helmets and parents riding along without. One idea for one set and another idea for another.

Mr Balls says that by taking these steps of providing individual help for the poorest performers we will ... have a massive impact on the standard of education in this country and make us a world leader.

I think not ... it is not usually the middle to lower end performers that make a country into world class ... if this were so why are we not ploughing all of the money to be spent on 2012 into this strata ? Were we not recently told that athletes who were going to get medals were to get the money ... not the 'all-so-rans'?

It is also interesting to review these ideas against the increase in University entrance and the news that students graduating from 'lesser' universities (and having a debt of £20,000) would have been better off not going as they often end up in jobs/careers not requiring high academic qualifications. ( This does not, of course, take into account that many of them have had a superb 3 years away from home growing up.)

TED - Can kids teach themselves?

Sugata Mitra's talk made at the Lift Conference held in Geneva in 2007 has just been posted on the TED site.

In his talk he poses the question 'Can kids teach themselves?'. He uses his 20 minutes to explain his view: In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

The most interesting thing about what he reports is that children adopt peer learning styles automatically. And that the learning took place in groups ... that was an essential factor. He also comments that the children seemed to learn by watching rather than doing. I feel sure that our institutional, individualised education systems may have something to learn from this. Worth leaving it to the kids.

Have you ever had to teach a child how to use a mobile phone?

QCA Consult on GCSE ICT

The consultation by QCA on the ICT requirements for GCSE could have real implications back down through the key stages in English schools. This top down approach has the potential to change pedagogical styles and attitudes to a tool which is seen as a subject. (I actually feel the same about literacies in other curriculum areas)

The main thrust of the proposals which are up for comment is encapsulated in item 10:

GCSE specifications in ICT must require learners to demonstrate the ability to:

• think creatively, logically and critically
• independently select, use and integrate ICT tools to meet needs
• find, select and evaluate information for its relevance, value, accuracy and plausibility
• manipulate and process data and other information, model situations and explore ideas
• communicate data and information in a form fit for purpose and audience
• adopt safe, secure and responsible practice when using ICT
• develop appropriate and effective ICT-based solutions in a range of contexts
• work individually and collaboratively
• iteratively review, evaluate and, where appropriate, modify the effectiveness of their own and others' use of ICT.

This does seem good to me but I was looking for a relevance in other curriculum areas to be made more obvious. Maybe that will come. I just feel that ICT in the rest of the delivered and examined curriculum might take a back seat as teachers of other subjects don't see it as their concern. I suppose the answer is to leave it to the children/students ... they will sort it.

6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling

John Connell's blog always provides me with amusement and insights ... now I am back (Have I been away? ... well 'Yes' ... France beckoned and the sun shone and the orienteering in the high pastures of the Aveyron was awesome).

He passes on a post he found David Gilmour's blog ... read the post from 'The Onion' here.

Of course, it doesn't have to be like this ...

'Age Banding' of children's books

I noticed yesterday that the Times ran an article in the 'Books' section called 'Many paths to the same end'. Alan Gardner postulates that' The imposition of such bands ignores how we laern to read.'

As a teacher who came through flash cards in tobacco tins, ITA, any number of reading schemes from 'Janet and John' past Ladybird, through 'Letterland' and beyond to 'Real books'. And I watched the cycle repeat with more modern books and more modern schemes.

Gardner comments on books that should just be read, not as books for children but just 'books' and he adds that 'To ghettoise books is to insult text and reader.'

This all leads to 'The Children's Writers and Illustrators Group Conference at Robinson College, Cambridge' where, on August 31st there will be a session to discus 'age banding'.

Watch this space for their view and consider whether or not it will change yours.

PS

This might help to explain it all...

Lookybook

My trawls today directed me towards Angela Maier's Blog and her report of a web site Lookybook. This site appears to have been around for a while now and I missed it first time round!!

This is what the site says about itself:

Picture books are for looking at. Lookybook allows you to look at picture books in their entirety—from cover to cover, at your own pace. We know that nothing will replace the magic of reading a book with your child at bedtime, but we aim to replace the overwhelming and frustrating process of finding the right books for parents and their kids.

Our mission is to create a comfortable place where a curious and devoted audience can search, view, talk about, and buy from a diverse and rapidly expanding collection of picture books. We intend to create the greatest opportunity for authors, illustrators and publishers to reach interested consumers and dramatically extend the life of their books.

Lookybook currently features over 300 titles and is growing daily.

On the site you can look at the book, embed it in a blog or web page or go to a shop and buy it.

I think this is a brilliant idea.

Some common sense ... perhaps

So, it transpires, that there are more Sats papers missing and now there is a big search on to try to find out where they are and just how many.

The question still needs to be answered about the viability of continuing with a system that few will now have any confidence in.

Perhaps this company ETS, with all of its inadequacies, have done my cause a favour. Just maybe we will now see some more radical rethinking. Today, previous Education Secretary Estelle Morris says in a BBC News item:

Ed Balls should not resign over the Sats problems - but he should use them as an opportunity to overhaul the testing system.

Hope he listens ...

Podcasting in Surrey (without a fringe)

Sometimes people just make my day.

Yesterday I had wakened early (before 5.00) and had begun my drive down the M1 towards Surrey. My route was to take me on to the M25 and then around to J10 and off to Cobham. I gave myself 3 hours to do it ... it was not enough. I arrived on the M25parkway at just before 7.00 and then stopped and started my way around anti-clockwise ... even had time to count the number of jets I could see in the sky over Heathrow (7). I arrived at the 4S Training Centre in Cobham at 8.33 ... rushed in ... and was greeted by smiles and a really warm welcome. Just down the corridor, in the room we were to work in I met Tim Barette ... more smiles, warm handshake, and 'What can I get you to drink?' and 'Is there anything I can do to help?' and ' Will this be okay for you?' and 'Is there anything else you need?'

Sometimes people just make your day ... thanks Tim !!

Then the teachers came and we podcasted. We used Podium from Softease and it was easy to use and didn't get in the way of what we were trying to do and we recorded sounds and made podcasts and had fun and could see why we might want to do this with children in classrooms.

We took poems as a theme and the teachers read and developed lots of ideas and added backing tracks and 'stings' to their productions. We spoke of building a podcast as a 'design and build' exercise in D & T and commented that preparing the resources ( sound files mainly) was a pre-podcast job.

The scripting tool in the software excited interest and its potential was not lost on a group of primary teachers who could see the cross-curricula application of both the scripting and the podcasting.

The 'witches' from Shakespeare's Macbeth, concluded proceedings.

It was no big deal. Not once did any of the teachers ask how to do something. They listened, watched and then experimented ... brilliant !! I do hope that they enjoyed it as much as I did.

The podcasts they made can be listened to here (Remember it was a first try and was supposed to be fun)

A Sat too far ...

I have always had a high regard for Ken Boston, the head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, but it appears that someone has fed him the wrong information. How can he say categorically that ... the current position is that in Key Stage 2the marking is now 100% complete ... when it so obviously isn't? Newspapers and media agencies up and down England are find this out and today the BBC report yet again on the failure to get the thing sorted.

This all indicates a mess but what worries me even more is the reaction of head teachers up and down the country who have used it as a rallying cry for something I don't understand.

The children have put their heart and soul into this. That's what hurts. I've had to speak to the children this morning to tell them nothing has come back. said one headteacher in the BBC report.

Sats are not fit for purpose and educationalists have been saying this for long enough now for someone, surely, to listen. This latest problem is just that - a problem. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that we should have stopped testing children in this way some time ago and simply haven't.

The fact that heads, teachers, parents and the media have used it as a rallying cry for something or other is strange. None of this is going to materially damage children, teachers, schools or education as we know it ( pity in some ways really, it could have initiated a period of great change). The educational effect will be an absolute minimum and systems that have been developed just to satisfy the beast of Sats have, at best, had there time and effort misplaces and at worst could be accused of missing the point of education itself.

As I have said before, several times, time to stop this. Let's not get sidetracked by a company that has failed to deliver on its contract ( to collect, mark and return) let's concentrate on the real issue. Sats must go !

So where do we go from here?

There are many people contributing to the idea of the necessity to change the game and think what education should really be like in the 21st Century for 21st century learners. With the onset of Web 2.0 has come Learning 2.0 with a, sort of, implication that the next step might be something to do with advances in technology.

I am not so sure. I think social demography has a really important part to play in educating the next generation (and those that come after). We have, for a long period of time now relied on the institutional definition of education and have allowed schooling to be the function of it. This has lead to an over-reliance on the curriculum and its measures which has, in my opinion, led learning into a dark place.

There is need to change.

Charles Leadbeater has written, under the title of 'What Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning' produced for the Innovation Unit on the future of learning in England, about such things.

The thrust of his argument seems to be about personal responsibility in a group dynamic to make education authentic for learners. This is an all-inclusive view.

One of the 21 for me is the idea of 'third spaces'. Places in space and time between home and school that provide the personal bridge to make it all work. For some this 'space' will be in sport, for others art and music; some will need to be there alone and others in groups that will dynamically change. Technology could provide that space - but should it, will it ?

The report is more than worth a read for those who see and follow the need to change.

To Sat or not to Sat ... no question ...

There is no question here for me. Get rid of them and plough the money back into teaching and learning. Particularly learning. John Connell's post of yesterday and my response to it is all part of this agenda. We need to move on from this obsession with measuring what our learners do to supporting their interests and enthusiasms and, as professionals, channel their time and efforts . We are no longer 'training' pupils for jobs but should be providing them with the stepping stones towards a creative, adaptive adult life. And this does not demand to know what Sat level you are ... or for that matter what level you are in anything. Learning and understanding is surely not based on a level of anything.

Today the BBC report that Sats results expected to fall I am totally amazed that such an arbitrary scale can be deemed to rise and fall anyway. But this BBC comment is based on an organisational juggle. Am I bovvered? Not a bit.

It is all okay though because the MPs are going to 'grill' the exam chiefs. What an incredible smoke-screen. Have you heard the one about 'wood' and 'trees'?

There is a problem with the amount of money being spent on 'weighing' our children but this really is not a big issue. But the fact that it diverts attention away from looking forward to the challenges of 'learning 2.0' is a problem.

We must be planning to move the focus of education from pedagogy - in a blended way -towards andragogy and heutagogy. The ownership of the learning must be invested in the learners and it is their active participation in their own learning that education should seek. Selling them the idea that tests show what they can do and what they will be able to do is just not fair ... we need to move on.

John says that, at the moment he 'doesn't buy it', but he does comment that, the context within which education systems need to work is changed. He continues ... The key sets of stakeholders, the world over – governments, parents, business, the teaching profession, universities – remain obdurately tied to industrial-age education ... when we don't live in one any more. A read of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman will indicate why a change of perspective is important.

SATs - time to call it a day !

On Sunday last I flippantly commented about 'not being bovvered' about the delay in the reporting of the KS2 and KS3 SATs results this year. Today I am commenting on the reported mistakes in the marking.

By the BBC's reported account it has failed to meet up to the standards set and many children/students/schools/parents are going to be supplied with the wrong results. Even if the results are correct, if some are wrong, who will believe the others. People will be prepared to believe the good but not the bad ... over inflation is just as much a problem here as under inflation.

Surely time to call it a day ... it does no good, it doesn't work, it costs lots of money, it diverts attention from real teaching to just focusing on testing and it upsets very many people.

Let's stop it once and for all ...

Copyright ... time to re-evaluate

Copyright laws/rules were set for printed materials and have evolved or have been morphed to include electronic sources since music and photo and video became available. The laws and rules do not seem to fit today's publishing methodology and need a complete rethink. Copyright is too complex for mortals and creative commons has helped but ...

My feeds (apophenia :: making connections where none previously existed )today took me towards a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. This is well worth keeping as a reference guide to common sense and careful thought on the subject.

Is the study of such things soon to be part of the new e-curriculum we have yet to write ?

Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008-14

On 3rd July at the ICT in Education Conference in Birmingham Jim Knight - you can read exactly what he said here - ( on behalf of the DCSF, DIUS and Becta ) announced Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008-14.

This update has the potential to ensure ensure that requirements of today's learners are met. The Government says technology in learning is no longer optional.

This document came out of a Becta stable and is promoted by the Government of the UK but as far as I can see it only applies to England, as Scotland - their early Years Strategy here - has its own and Northern Ireland's is up for review as the EmPowering Schools Strategy was dated to 2008. The Welsh Assembly produced their document Transforming Schools with ICT:The Report to the Welsh Assembly Government of the Schools ICT Strategy Working Group back in April.

I feel sure someone will tell me quickly if I am wrong about this as I am just not sure how this works as the UK Government and Becta who both have responsibilities across all of the countries that from the UK. (Haven't they?)This is, of course, a concern to those of us who work across a number of countries.

On the whole the revised strategy is just that - revised - to meet the changes that have happened since the last version. And it leaves openings for continued revision, though I must say, I am mildly perturbed by the 2008 - 2014 tag. 6 years ... it is a brave person who will predict that far ahead in ICT never mind anything else (see my last post concerning the search for the Higgs boson).

For me one of the highlights is the section on Priorities in managing the change: equity, quality and efficiency. The five priorities listed here:
• Learner entitlement
• Family and informal learning
• Professional tools for teaching
• Mobilising leadership
• Fit-for-purpose sustainable technology.

... address some of the key 'back-at-the-ranch' questions. Of particular interest to me is that of 'personal ownership' and integration and I feel that item 87 will present many challenges and opportunities:

87. This means that increasingly leaders will need to ensure effective
management of a ‘mixed economy’ of publicly funded and personally owned
technologies, and ensure that no learner or family is disadvantaged due to
lack of access to technology. This raises significant issues, including those
relating to licensing and liabilities, data protection, and health and safety.
Becta and its partners will provide advice and guidance on each of these
areas. Industry partners including internet service providers, hardware
and educational service providers, will be fully involved.

To conclude - this strategy has been conceived and developed over time by people who have a group, vast working knowledge of the current state of the ICT game. But, it is institutional and organisational. Clay Shirky has much to say on such things in his book 'Here Comes Everybody'.

SATs results delayed ( Who cares?)

I was driving home from Essex last evening and tuned in to the BBC radio 4 PM slot to pick up the headlines. Top report of the day was that the SATs results for 1 Million pupils would be delayed by one week !!

I had to pull over into a layby as I was laughing so much at the report and the response from the Department. Just WHO CARES ... the Department and the BBC made me feel that a national catastrophy was at hand and that we must all come out fighting (or digging for victory or something). They didn't manage to tie it in with the 'global credit crunch' but I did get the idea that if they could have they would have.

Not withstanding the amazing cost of the five-year contract to ETS and the 'softer' costs to schools, parent, teachers and children and the fact that we are the only country that perpetuates this 'test it, test it, test it' regime are 'WE BOVVERED'?

Well I fancy NO, is the real answer. If the results are delayed a week or a month - so what. What are the real implications of the calamity? For the children absolutely nothing, nil, zilch ... and it is them we do it all for, isn't it?

Okay, I concede that some children/students may have been built up for their results coming in (possibly based on a reward system !).

The Department seems to be bothered about the damage it has done to the credibility of the exam system. The company has ' learned lessons'. What have the rest of us learned ... and are we BOVVERED !!

Podcasting in Wickford, Essex

4th July found me making the drive round the M25 (it was totally clear!!) to Essex to support my colleague Philippa for two sessions of podcasting with Softease's Podium.

We had two splendid sessions made the more inspiring by 'frontman' Alan Drew, Curriculum Development Advisor, ICT, for Essex County Council who had put real time and effort into his opener about the nature of podcasting. This presentation really set the scene for the 'hands on session' to follow and also showed how Essex are using their 'e-folio' portal to support and enhance teaching and learning. Alan explained that the materials he had used and much, much more on podcasting was available through the portal and cemented, for the teachers, the importance of building up their familiarity with it.

Now its up to the Lead Teachers and ASTs who attended to run with the ideas ... they know why they should, they know how they can and they have the means to move podcasting forward in their schools.

I wait with bated breath ...

On 3rd July at the Improving Today, Excelling Tomorrow conference being staged in Birmingham by ICT for Education magazine , Jim Knight will let us all know what the Government is thinking of next with regard to its ICT Strategy for education.

I am told, via Merlin John's blog that the presentation will: ... focus on "driving up standards in the use of ICT, learning lessons from past mistakes and identifying excellent practice to help schools further embed technology into the way they work".

Excited ... you bet ... can't wait to see whether we are going to open up and move on or .....

PS

2nd July ... can't find any mention of what was said if anything ...sorry ... if you find anything please let me know

PPS

3 rd July ... Still can't find any find out what Jim said ...

Defining the edublogger

What is the definition of an edublogger?

An international all-day "meetup" of educational bloggers and those using collaborative technologies will take place on Saturday, June 28th, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio just before the start of NECC. All are invited--whether you yourself blog, are just an educational blog reader, or even just want to hang out with an interesting group of people. The event is free, and you can indicate that you are coming (and see who else will be there) here at the Edubloggercon wiki. This event is based on the idea of an "unconference", and is being organized by the participants in real time here on the wiki. It's maybe better referred to as a "collaborative conference." Through the generosity of ISTE, we have access all that day to rooms at the Convention Center and there will be free wi-fi: beyond that is up to you. So come and help us plan a fun and stimulating experience. It should be great!

Minds meeting minds ... it will be great to trawl the participant's' blogs for outcomes and patch those in to the editorial statement of Annika Small (ex Futurelab CE) where she asks: 'What have you changed your mind about and why?'

You can get a flavour of the event by watching the video. Ewan was there !!

No 'ifs' .. but some 'buts'

Ray Tolley happened upon the poem below on a NZ site ... it was in the appendix to Andy Walker's investigation into personalised learning experiences for students and opens up a whole set of contradictions for me.

The Things We Steal From Children

By Dr John Edwards

If I am always the one to think of where to go next.
If where we go is always the decision of the curriculum or my curiosity and not theirs,
If motivation is mine,
If I always decide on the topic to be studied, the title of the story, the problem to be worked on,
If I am always the one who has reviewed their work and decided what they need,
How will they ever know how to begin?

If I am the one who is always monitoring progress.
If I set the pace of all working discussions,
If I always look ahead, foresee problems and endeavour to eliminate them,
If I swoop in and save them from cognitive conflict,
If I never allow them to feel and use the energy from confusion and frustration,
If things are always broken into short working periods,
If myself and others are allowed to break into their concentration,
If bells and I are always in control of the pace and flow of work,
How will they learn to continue their own work?

If all the marking and editing is done by me,
If the selection of which work is to be published or evaluated is made by me,
If what is valued and valuable is always decided by external sources or by me,
If there is no forum to discuss what delights them in their task, what is working,
what is not working, what they plan to do about it,
If they have not learned a language of self-assessment,
If ways of communicating their work are always controlled by me,
If our assessments are mainly summative rather then formative,
If they do not plan their way forward to further action,
How will they find ownership, direction and delight in what they do?

If I speak of individuals but present learning as if they are all the same,
If I am never seen to reflect and reflection time is never provided,
If we never speak together about reflection and thinking and never develop a vocabulary for such discussion,
If we do not take opportunities to think about our thinking,
If I constantly set them exercises that do not intellectually challenge them,
If I set up learning environments that interfere with them learning from their own actions,
If I give them recipes to follow,
If I only expect the one right conclusion,
If I signify that there are always right and wrong answers,
If I never let them persevere with something
really difficult which they cannot master,
If I make all work serious work and discourage playfulness,
If there is no time to explore,
If I lock them into adult time constraints too early,
How will they get to know themselves as a thinker?

If they never get to help anyone else,
If we force them to always work and play with children of the same age,
If I do not teach them the skills of working co-operatively,
If collaboration can be seen as cheating,
If all classroom activities are based on competitiveness,
If everything is seen to be for marks,
How will they learn to work with others?

For if they…
have never experienced being challenged in a safe environment,
have had all of their creative thoughts explained away,
are unaware what catches their interest and how then to have confidence in that interest,
have never followed something they are passionate about to a satisfying conclusion,
have not clarified the way they sabotage their own learning,
are afraid to seek help and do not know who or how to ask,
have not experienced overcoming their own inertia,
are paralysed by the need to know everything before writing or acting,
have never got bogged down,
have never failed,
have always played it safe,
how will they ever know who they are?

World Web 2.0 Educational Projects

Terry Freedman has collated a number of educational projects that use Web 2.0 technologies and has produced a booklet outlining these. It can be downloaded freely from here.

Also on this download page is the highly acclaimed 'Coming of Age V1' ... more than well worth a read.

This is what Terry says about the Web 2.0 Projects booklet:

The purpose of this booklet is to give you some practical ideas about the kinds of things you can do with Web 2.0 technology. Please note: this was not intended to be a compilation of projects using cutting edge applications. I simply invited teachers to share what they have been doing.
In many cases the projects were in their infancy. Also, almost all projects will need following up in some way. For example, what were the longer term benefits, or what exactly was meant by “amazing results”?
All the descriptions have been provided by the teachers themselves. I received quite a few submissions, via an online survey, but only a relative handful have been included here, for a variety of reasons:

•Some people asked for their projects not to be made public. I have respected that wish.
•Some projects were not viewable by the public. I have actually included some of these where the description was detailed enough to give the reader an idea of what was going on; otherwise, I couldn’t see the point.
•I have not used submissions where there were very few details and no website to check out.
•I have omitted repeated descriptions of similar projects, but have included the URLs referred to.

As you will see, I have arranged the projects according to the age range they address. However, I do think it may be worth your while looking through all of them. I, for example, found several ideas for podcasting in primary (elementary) schools from the projects listed in the higher age groups.
I hope you find the booklet useful, and I should be extremely grateful for any feedback you would like to give me.

Thank you.

Terry Freedman

Words of visdom from NZ

Reading my feed of the Flux blog took me to an account of how schools in New Zealand are managed and governed and how autonomous their set up seems to be.

And just for those reading who think I should have written 'wisdom' in the title and made a mistake I decided to use my new word 'visdom'. This is a 'mash-up' word implying wisdom and vision together ... perhaps it will make a dictionary somewhere !

The huge quotation that I bring here is this:

When the elephant gets on the trampoline, everybody else has to jump at the same rhythm ... so don't let the elephant get on !! (the last bit is mine)

I wonder what, if anything, our primary schools heading for their version of BSF can make of this?

Podium Podcasting in Newham

A totally awesome day with about 40 or so ICT co-ordinators in Newham at the ITASS powerhouse - the Credon Centre - who arrived to experiment with the curriculum implications behind podcasting. They were very receptive to the ideas that underpinned the ICT and could focus on the classroom contexts while still maintaining a personal, watching brief on the kit they needed to get it all sort out.

I was first up and began with the Ninja Podcasting video followed by the wonderful Common Craft explanation of podcasting:



Then I did my bit with Podium ending up with the participation slot for the witches from Macbeth!!

I was followed by an extremely well planned an executed session by Ken Maslin of ITASS and Emma Parker, Primary Strategy Literacy Consultant who explained case study projects that they had been involved in using podcasting. They introduced us to various versions of 'The Nig Nang Nong' and how explained how motivating the whole thing about recording was for the children.

These were my favourites:





After a superb lunch Pippa Dorma, LGfl Consultant, explained the LGfL approach to podcasting and got the assembled mob to do clever things with Audacity.

A brilliant day with enthusiastic teachers ... lucky children !!

Words, words, words ...

Words just excite me. In text or in speech the way that words shape thoughts and actions have always been a joy. Calligrams, words which explain themselves by their shape, size, colour and juxtaposition have certainly inspired many poets and the idea of creating shapes and patterns with words really does appeal.

I have just come across a Web 2.0 app that takes this to a creative place that I feel is stimulating and different. It is Wordle.

This is what they say about themselves:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Formal .V. Informal education

One of the feeds that I read avidly because it is always thought provoking and at the cutting edge of creative educational thought is the feed to Flux - the blog of FutureLab.

In continuation of the theme of what makes education education Emma Agusita writes:

There are a number of central characteristics evident in informal education practices which reveal a persuasion for socially just’ and holistic approaches:
Relinquishing control of the learning process
redefining the value of what constitutes learning
encouraging self-awareness & reflection
facilitating critical skills, freethinking & experimentation
engaging though innovation and equal access & participation

All of these factors are exciting but, at this time, the one of these that really interests me is the 'relinquishing of control' ... I am anxious that childhood should not be wasted on conventional, institutional education but should, by design not chance, be focused where the child is. By gradual progression and sympathetic mentoring learners should develop their own sense of learning and then 'buy' at the intitutions the learning that is for them.

Institutional education is still in its infancy and has not yet grasped the concept of being a 'service industry'. It fails to inform its buyers of the products it has in a way that makes them accessible. By attempting to be fair and equable it has developed a grand 'several sizes fits all' approach which is not personalisation.

We have exciting ways to go yet.

Does it all add up?

I have just finished reading the Review of Mathematics Teaching in Early Years Settings and Primary Schools by Sir Peter Williams and am left wondering if it all adds up.

Just to take some of the key points from a political standpoint:

There should be a maths specialist in every primary school in 10 years

Isn't that potentially two General Elections away? Never mind the advances in technology over that period that might/could/ought to change the shape of education, who is to say that the next Government will be of like mind? Would that we could effectively predict what skills and competences our young people will need by then. I don't suspect that it may not depend on their ability to ..play with shapes, time, capacity and numbers

The training of the maths specialists will start in 2009 so by 2019 the school down the road will have a maths specialist and two whole generations of children will have come and gone from that school without the benefit of this 'expert' help to do things that could easily (in authentic terms) be questioned as worthwhile or even necessary.

I have been unable to find out the actual figures for the training of ALL teachers in support of the old numeracy strategy and that, together with the training of co-ordinators working on the 'new framework' does add up to an awful lot of maths training over the last few years.

The review says:

All children should be competent in basic maths by the age of seven

Just about the same moment as our Continental neighbours are beginning the formal education of their young people. And what does this competence mean?

I do agree with the idea that we need to remove the negativity towards the subject. This is largely generated by a starved media who will latch onto what they consider to be a good story rather than bother to investigate the truth.

Even then I am just not sure about the context and content of the teaching. Teachers are only just beginning to get to grips with the New Framework for Maths (did you notice when it changed from numeracy to maths?). I just wonder how teachers will respond to this, some will obviously see the implications as a potential career move.

If this is the report on Maths then I wonder what Jim Rose will say in his Primary Review that moves things forward. And how does all this sit alongside the thoughts and ideas coming from FutureLab about re-imagining learning spaces and what effect will it have on the Primary phase of BSF?

Podcasting at Killhope

Yesterday was spent in the far west of County Durham, so close to Cumbria that it didn't matter, at Killhope Mining Museum. We, that is Shelley Dendy and myself, numerous members of ITSS, at least eight teachers and about 36 children plus the centre staff were there to podcast. Authentically podcast.

The theme had been set by Paul Hodgkinson and was based on the life of a 'washer boy' in the lead mine in Victorian times ... read the challenge here:Podcasting%20Challenge.pdf

What a tremendously exciting day ... more details later but you can listen to the podcasts of the day here.

JKR speaks at Harvard

I have to confess to not being a Harry Potter fan. It isn't that I don't think that the stories would be good it is just that, on the whole, I don't actually read much fiction, and, if I were to start I am not sure I would begin there.

However, I picked up from my one of my feeds (Open Education) that J K Rowling had delivered the Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The video of her speech can be found here.

The writer of Open Education clearly makes a plea for people in such a powerful position to remember that it is the students' day and that they are there to enhance it and make sure that it is totally memorable for them and for their assembled family members. This is what was said:

Delivering a memorable graduation speech is one of education’s most difficult challenges. Somehow the orator must deliver some words of inspiration that add to the festiveness of the occasion all the while recognizing that the ceremony is about the graduates and not the speaker.

All too often, the presenter instead interferes with the ceremony, serving as a distraction to all present. Under the worst of conditions, the graduation speaker manages to actually subtract from a day devoted to the achievements of those who have completed their college studies. In fact, the tales of such negative moments are legendary.

On the other hand, a properly created and delivered speech serves as the perfect supplement for the special day. Similar to a burst of bright sunshine, a well crafted speech adds a scintillating glow to the events taking place.

Delivering such a memorable talk at Harvard University just might be the most challenging of all. Like the World Series, the speaker is on an especially distinctive stage with a multitude of observers examining every word.

For me the speech was a masterpiece beginning with disarming the audience and then opening a discussion on how failure has the potential to set people free from constraints. She argued that rock bottom could be seen as a firm foundation and that it could be built upon. She went on to talk of empathy and commented that ... well, no ... please read for yourself ... here it is far better in her words.

I was reminded, towards the end of her speech, as she said:

... written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

... of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that suggests, if you want to extrapolate the idea, that every time we look at something, or think of something, or do something we affect it. We change it.

So let's look closely at how young people learn ... so we can better understand it and help to change it ... for their futures.

Neural pathways or grey matter ?

Sitting at breakfast, as you do, Kay and I got to talking about someone we knew who had written a book but neither of us could 'get to' the name. Our usual ploy at this point is to start at the beginning of the alphabet and work through saying the letters out loud and hoping for interventions that would reveal what we are thinking about. Several times through proved unsuccessful but then, out of the blue sky came to answer... just like that ... as if doors had been opened by the power of the brain to open them. This was interesting in itself but the next bit got me really thinking. The person we were searching for had a co-author and before I could ask Kay had said the name. It was as if her brain had its own personal tag cloud that finding one of the tags led to all the associated tags.

Now I appreciate that if I was a brain specialist or even a psychologist or had studied psychology or something I would have been aware of this and would not have been surprised ... but I was ... and I got to thinking and banging on about how we revere 'knowing' above understanding.

Trawling, mentally, through the TV programmes to substantiate my point I found that there were a large number of them, at a variety of levels that venerate 'knowing' ... Mastermind, The Weakest link, University Challenge, Question of Sport etc .

We then got to arguing about the change in focus in schools from 'knowing' to 'applying' ... and I was reminded of the discussion on a forum recently about a content .V. skill based curriculum and the idea of what the 'skills' would be proved to be a stopping point.

Heavy for breakfast ... a bit like an intellectual fry-up ... but the continuation was along the lines of - in society are the people at the top there because at some moment or other in their lives they spent doing the 'knowing' bit before they got to the 'applying' bit or were they just fortunate in not having to put any effort into knowing ... they just 'know'.

My son's girlfriend is sitting her university exams at the moment ... she says it is all about knowing.

So should there be lots more effort put into knowing just so that we know in case we need to?

Now, is this progressive or retrogressive thinking - am I ahead of the next wave of developments or so far behind that it isn't worth the thought?

Rant over ... hope you get the idea !

Playing has stalled ... the long school year should end

Okay this is not what the report said. It actually said:

Long school holidays should be abolished to prevent children falling behind in class, a report has said. The Institute for Public Policy Research said studies suggested pupils lose some of their reading abilities because the summer break is too long.

My take on this is that the Institute might well have missed the point of being a child ... it is not to progress on the contuinued institutional step ladder of inferred educational achievement but rather to enjoy living, to play in the buttercups and to run with friends in the open air. Reading is wonderful and if schools can create in the children the excitement and joy that comes from its mastery what better time than during the 'long summer holidays' to curl up in a private spot and to experience the wonder that is reading.

The report goes on:

If we are serious about continuing to improve outcomes for all children, we need long-term reform that better gears our school system around the needs of children and young people.

'Improve outcomes for all children' ... Wainwright, the celebrated fell walker and writer, often said (and I paraphrase here), 'When climbing a fell, always take time to pause and look back the way you have come. The eyes will be delighted.' It looks to me that the report writers have failed to do that ... in their urgency to get to the top and to move ' outcomes' forwards they have forgotten the purpose of the climb!

Language maketh man ...

I do apologise to William of Wykeham (1324 - 1404)and the Motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford for usurping the motto but it just seemed right or this two part post.

I have recently taken delivery of a cre8txt keyboard being promoted by that exceptional man Russell Prue as I am very interested in the speed that some young people seem to be able to communicate with their mobile phones and felt that such a device could well be one way into reluctant writers.

I have only just begun to get to grips with the USB device and find, at present, that the cable to the laptop rather gets in the way of the small light keypad. I have spoken to Russell about this and await the bluetooth or wireless versions which I understand are 'on the drawing board'.

The functionality is just as it says on the web site and it performs well with the predictive text writer. I miss the auto predictive text that my mobile gives me but this could just be that I am not used to the way the software works yet.

The idea is right and it will develop ... but will it catch on. It would be wonderful if I could use my mobile phone as the keypad to synch with my laptop/desktop and a piece of software that converted my txt to 'real'.

This fits in really well with a report out from Professor David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, where he states of texting that: ... such condensed messages enhance and enrich language skills.

He goes on the say: ... texting had had a bad press, and it was merely another way to use language ... The panic about texting and its effects on language is totally misplaced. It adds a new dimension, enriches language, gives you a new option. Any reading and writing was good for literacy ...

PS

Following my feeds led me to this in the Christian Science Monitor ...( thanks to Will Richardson for the link)... the title should be enough to get you reading - Turn teen texting toward better writing. Teachers who co-opt Web tools for class have the best of both worlds.

And secondly ... while driving home from Swindon last evening across the wonderful Cotswolds listening to Radio 4 news I chanced on an article about simplifying spelling. The argument was that the way we spell may words is just fairly ridiculous and we should simplify the whole thing ... language evolves like this and it would not be a problem to begin to remove the redundant 'silent consonants'.

The debate has been going on for a while now ... the BBC running it just last year. What makes it current is that I understand the Germany has already been through this and so has Spain and the BBC PM programme chose to report on it ...it is possible to read what the BBC PM listeners thought of the idea here.

I never thought that the way we spell many common words was sensible and it seems that there is just the possibility that a combination of txting and simplifying may stir up the evolution. I wonder when the tipping point will be reached?

The good, the bad and the ****

The title was just to catch attention ... I am reporting here on the excellent and the, frankly, stupid ...

The excellent first. I have been following the 'Cool Cat Blog' for some time now and am often amazed by the insightful nature of the comments there on students' work. A particular statement caught my eye today reported from the Horizon Project 2008:

"A teacher should, as Don Tapscott said, no longer be a transmitter of information, but a regulator of educational settings. Our teacher Mrs. Vicki could stand in from of the class room all day and lecture us on exactly what to do and how to do it. We would ace tests and learn a lot . . . for a while… However by next year about 65% of what we learned will be irrelevant due to technology changes and development. Instead, she gives us projects to complete that pose challenges to us that can repeat themselves. Such as giving us a project to make a video by using a program we are unfamiliar with. Though we may not ever make another video, it is inevitable that we face the challenge of having to use an unfamiliar program, ergo, we will be prepared to deal with this for the rest of our lives.

So in conclusion, the role of a teacher is now: to regulate the educational environment; to introduce students to the realm of ambiguities; and to no longer evaluate our overall knowledge, but our constructive, creative, and adaptive capabilities."

I just love the last paragraph. If this teacher has taught her students this then my optimism for the future is reset ! The idea of teachers introducing students to a realm of ambiguities is awesome and I want to hear more about it.

...... and now the frankly stupid .... and it has to STOP ...

Drew Burrett is a teacher and GLOW mentor from Argyll and Bute and his frustration boiled over:


Super School, Super Speed & Web(non)Sense

How Brilliant is Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope?

I’d love to be able to answer that question, but unfortunately my home PC is under spec’ed to do it justice - graphics card not up to the job of rendering the terabytes of images.

Nor is my school machine - lovely MacPCBookWinProXP - able to do it justice, simply because Websense will not allow it access to the internet.

I was quite excited by the announcement of the release of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope, as I hoped it’d make for some interesting ‘find out for yourself’ collaborative Web 2.0 work for the kids as part of our up coming ‘Space’ topic.

Alas, Websense feels it is unsafe to allow such programs (and Google Earth, Stellarium etc) to be used in the education of children. This piece of software is slowly crushing my enthusiasm for incorporating ICT into my teaching.

[I had to laugh when I saw Websense’s corporate website - where they are selling themselves as ‘Integrated Security for the Web 2.0 world]

Andrew Brown made an interesting observation on his blog regarding filtering -

I wish there were some trust in the professionalism of teachers, rather than a blanket ban on everything until its proven to be’safe’. In the meantime, I’m thinking of abandoning any attempt at using ICT and going back to chalk.

Is Microsoft out Googling Google ?

I really do have to tell about Microsoft's World Wide Telescope. I have downloaded it and am doing my best to compare its functions with Google Sky.

Both are very, very clever and both are very, very FREE ...

I am not able to give a breakdown of their functions because my science isn't up to it but feel sure that some teacher users will quickly latch onto either or both of these as exceptional Web 2.0 tools with a difference.

Just WOW really ... wouldn't it be great to have a Google Ocean ?

A test by any other name would be ***** as sweet !

I told myself that I was not going to get on the yearly band-wagon of dissing the SATs ... but it is hard ... there is no doubt about the fact that they are not good for children, parents or schools ... they may be good for the Government but I am not even sure of that as each year they spend an inordinate amount of their time and effort justifying them !

Today the BBC is on it usual rant about them quoting the Government Committee:

The national testing system in English schools is being misused to the detriment of children's education, says a report from a committee of MPs. The Commons schools, children and families committee says teachers spend too much time "teaching to the test". "The inappropriate use of national testing could lead to damaging consequences," warns the report. Schools Minister Jim Knight welcomed MPs' recognition that the "principle of national testing is sound".

I love the way that Jim Knight missed the plot by a political mile. On BBC news this lunch time he bumbled his way through some very straightforward questioning that would not have convinced anyone.

It is heartening to note that some schools who have for years put their children through their 'paces' by using the non-compulsory SATs for Y3, Y4 and Y5 have this year declined to do so ... hooray for common sense and teacher professionalism.

Panorama last evening also did its best to add fuel to the fire by, I think, taking the side of the children ... the best bit of it was the progressive use of ICT to demonstrate emotion by using animation in cartoons ... excellent. I would download the video and embed it here but my technology in cahoots with the BBC will not allow me to do this ... Why not ?

The answer to all of this is to simply stop doing it. Other countries don't. All of the justification is based on a political concept of 'what parents want'. Just think what the money could have been spent on to support and advance teaching and learning ... I would love to know how much it all costs ...

PS I was in a school yesterday and had a good look at the KS2 Science SATs ... I thought that they were really quite clever in the way they were put together and the questions they asked. Talking to the teachers quickly showed me that the science understanding was masked by the pupils' ability to read and then understand the question ... there were times that it wasn't science that was being tested.

PS.

25th May 2008 ... a report just in concerning '8th Grades in New York refuse to take the test'

Will Richardson in Brisbane

Well worth a listen ... here it is ...

Reading Recovery

Early morning tea and television (just look at the title of the article ... Scheme helps bad readers catch up ... and wonder at the word 'bad') must be bad for me ... seems to raise my blood preasure and indignation levels. Today I learned that six year olds need to go on 'reading recovery' programmes to get them up to speed. The first question that comes to mind is ... who decides what 'speed' is? ... and what about reading readiness?

Is it really necessary to put in the minds of young children and their parents that by the age of six they are in danger of 'falling behind' ... behind what? In our seemingly 'one size fits all' plan how does personalisation stride forward?

I read again and again that Finland lead the world: Attendance is compulsory for 9 years starting at age 7, and free meals are served to pupils at primary and secondary levels. In the OECD's international assessment of student performance, PISA, Finland has consistently been among the highest scorers worldwide; in 2003 Finnish 15-year-olds came first in reading literacy, mathematics, and science, while placing second in problem solving, worldwide.

If children in Finland do not start their compulsory education until they reach seven there seems to be little chance that they will be put into 'reading recover' at six years old ... so how is it that they appear to lead the world?

Have we something to learn here that we are not learning or is reading a political pawn that i have missed?

Cyberwellness

I have been alerted by a post from Martin Owen concerning the Cyberwellness program operating in Singapore. In the 'Teaching and Learning' section there is a step-by-step planning guide to the development of a 'cyberwellness' programme:

The Framework focuses on developing the child’s instinct to protect himself and empower him to take responsibility for his own well-being in cyberspace. Thus, this framework highlights two principles to guide pupils in their actions, describes a 3-step process to explore cyberwellness issues and encourages schools to partner parents in promoting cyberwellness among pupils.

Well worth a look ...

Chooser Charts - do you know what's there?

Reading Ewan's post 'We don't know what we don't know we don't know' reminds me of the last session I had with my students before they embarked upon their final teaching experience of the crowded year called 'PGCE'.

I spoke to them of embedding ICT in curriculum contexts and reminded them that they couldn't hope to do this effectively if they were not aware of the tools that they would have at their command. I urged them to get in there and seek out the tools, both hard and software that the schools had available and then, as they planned their programmes, begin to look for opportunities where ICT was going to enhance the teaching and learning. I commented that it wasn't all 'whiteboards and PowerPoint'!

In a way this, is what Ewan is saying about the 'stopping and blocking'. Teachers can't hope to know what is there if they can't, in the first place, access it to find out. Whitelisting is all well and good but does not take into account the spontaneity of great teachers teaching and wanting immediate access to the things of 'today'. If great teachers planned everything down to the last click then they would not be great teachers and the creativity that makes them great would be lost.

Whitelisting will only provide access to the normal and usual, not the exciting and tenuous. It will have the ability - like the Readers Digest - to dumb everything down almost to a precis level - like watching the cartoon video of Macbeth rather than reading the play. It is like using a vocabulary from a wordlist so that all the writing becomes the same. It is utilitarian, not creative and very, very sterile.

A teacher was heard to say in a history lesson recently ... there are some great videos about the Blitz on YouTube. Go home and watch them! ... Even more recently I came across a group using a Vodophone dongle to access sites on one personal laptop so that they could then copy the bits they needed to a USB key so that they could use the information in a lesson in the afternoon ... this was done on the field, at lunch time.

Teachers, educators, children and students are beginning to develop a 'thing' about doing their learning and preparation 'out of school time'. This surely cannot be sustainable. Soon the 'buyers'(the learners) in this deal will be bypassing (if they don't already) the institutions. There could be a real market here for companies to develop to support independent learners!

There is no quick, simple answer to this in the present climate in schools but as Ewan again notes: Elsewhere, such as in the schools I saw in New Zealand, the politik might be to filter after the fact, and use the Acceptable Use Policy for what it was designed: to pull up those who abuse the freedom the net (should) offer. Around the world there are many, many dedicated teachers doing everything that they can to open up information for education. The institutions must, more clearly, play their part. Learners should not be tethered by their geography nor by decisions made 'protect systems' rather than to facilitate learning.

We are already into the eighth year of the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child which states in Article 13:

1. The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.
2. The exercise of this right may be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:

(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; or
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

The key to implementation of this is at the end of the first bullet: 'of the child's choice'.

All of the things we discuss are in the name of the child ... time to make it work for them. It is their lives, their world, their choice. We are privileged to be there to help.

Podium Podcasting in Luton

The sun shone on us on Friday in Luton where, in the ICT suite of the Luton Learning Resource Centre a group of primary consultants gathered to podcast using the Podium Software from Softease.

The idea was for these professionals to discover both the functionality of the software and the curriculum implications behind its use. Able users they were, with lots of enthusiasm and interpretive minds to see challenges and advantages. The software proved itself on all counts, being simple to use and safe and secure in its operation. The key thing was the application of the concept of recording sound and syndicating it so that subscription meant continuity.

Ideas flowed thick and fast as the consultants worked with the software.

The use of the podcasting as an audio record of reading was developed and as one professional said: 'Rather like and audio blog with each book read being a blog post.' ... and so it was. In Podcasting terms each episode of the podcast of a reading record was associated with a specific book on a specific date with room for comments and 'book review'. The idea that this meant that there could be a wider audience for reading progression and that this could engender a sense of ownership and audience was not lost on the group.

As they mastered the software the consultants worked with multi-tracking ... recording a story on one track and adding sound effects on another. 'Rosie's Walk' by Pat Hutchins was a favourite text here with some very inventive animal sounds produced.

We looked at, and experimented with, the idea that podcasting was a great revision tool and examined its application in teaching and learning languages.

Finally the group looked at the 'scripting tool' and examined how its use to practice and refine speech before publication with its manual autocue could be a real 'tool' for developing the links between reading, writing and speaking.

By the end of the two and a half hour session the consultants had loaded the software onto their laptops, set the systems up to 'ftp' their podcasts to the server, sampled and experimented with the functionality of the software and discussed the contexts.

A great afternoon in the sun in Luton.

Help is at hand ...

Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed that the number of web sites/blogs etc to help and support teachers seems to have grown sort of exponentially...or is it me that just finds them?

Three that have caught my eye specifically are:

TeachToday

escholarteacher

School leader

Each has its own flavour and each gives lots of information ... of the three I think that 'teachtoday' looks most interesting but I intend to keep my eye on all of them ... just to make sure that I don't miss anything. Problem is that my feeds grow daily and expand across the world. The question is how much information can one person take in and how do you sift for relevance without missing that, tucked-away important idea.

Listen to the whispers !!

PGCE Students go from Horizontal to Vertical

Just had to blog about the wonderful PGCE students at Leicester University School of Education. Here they are getting their fill on robot control at KS1 and KS2 before they go out onto their TE3 experience in schools ... lots of good ideas and lots of fun in a crowded 3 hour session.

Does institutional education serious damage minds?

The question was just meant to be an eye-catcher rather than a serious question but I note from my readings over the past few days that the US 'No Child Left Behind' which comes with the strap-line - promoting educational excellence for all Americans - may not be so good at doing just that as it thinks it is. The Boston Globe gives an indication of the problem and it is picked up by the Open Education blog which comments: Hidden beneath the surface was yet another subtle demonstration as to why the No Child Left Behind Act may actually be acting as a deterrent to improved educational outcomes.

This is quite a worry as the English version - 'Every Child Matters' has certain synergies with its American 'name sake'.

I think that the gist might well be that massive, institutional systems have a unique way of levelling down rather than, as the rhetoric hopefully suggests, levelling up. I have no answers to this, but intend to keep my eye on this ball to see whether the move from 'Department for Education and Science' to 'Department for Children, Schools and Families' has the effect of achieving the aim ...to make England the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up ...and to give them a top class education .

capitalisation without the capital

When the group who formed ictopus were deciding on the name, the subject of whether or not it should begin with a capital letter came up ... in the ensuing discussion it was decided that 'no' ... ictopus would be ictopus. Which caused some confusion when writers began to use it at the beginning of a sentence. Which rule took precedence ... the non-capitalisation of a proper noun or the beginning of the sentence.

This came to mind when I was readin John Connell's blog today. This is what he said, quoting from the report indicated:

"I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

From a report in the New York Times called, Informal Style of Electronic Messages Is Showing Up in Schoolwork. Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project in the USA says: “I think this is not a worrying issue at all.”

As he points out, when a teacher comes across the use of SMS shorthand, for instance, in a school assignment, it creates an opportunity to discuss the contextual use of different kinds of language.

The study itself is called Writing, Technology and Teens - from Pew Internet, and is actually an encouraging read. It suggests, for instance, that young people today are writing more than their parents did when they were children. It also indicates that most young people are very well aware of the difference between formal writing, for instance for a school assignment, and informal, or ’social’ writing. (the bold bits are mine not John's)

I found it a highly readable report.

Postscript - if you don’t have time to read the whole report, I came across a reasonable summary here.

This all seems to fit in very well with the 'draft experiences and outcomes' for the Literacy and English section of Curriculum for Excellence ... doing it the Scottish way. It is a long, long way from the literacy framework in England.

Rockford's Rock Opera

Some time ago I drew attention to 'Rockford Rock Opera' an exciting and innovative idea that you can sample free of charge from the web link above. I am really interested in what teachers and educationalists make of the story and the way it is presented and the potential for educational development along this theme. There is so much here, from a superb storyline developed in an exciting way, to environmental and ecological undertones that come through quite dramatically.

"This extraordinary story spreads a most important message in a mysterious and magical way. Rockford's Rock Opera has been created and produced with love, passion and great skill and will endure as a classic to be enjoyed by the world's children and adults for generations to come." Susan Stranks



There are many more references and clips on YouTube ...

Textease in Trafford

Two super sessions today with ICT subject leaders from Trafford near Manchester. They were interested in getting the best out of Textease Studio CT and I was there to show them some of the things I was thinking of and where ideas were going next.

We spent a good deal of the time looking at how sound input has the potential to enhance teaching and learning and how it could make a significant difference to how teachers keep 'reading records'. This led to discussions and practice of ideas to support writing multi-modally and how this could have a significant input into concepts of inclusion.

Using prepared examples I broached the idea that professionals should take examples given and firstly 'adopt' them ... then, when they were ready they should change them- 'adapt' and finally when they were confident they should innovate their own ideas. this trilogy seemed to fit in well with current practice.

Small pieces of kit made big impressions from the TTS Easi-Speak to wireless keyboards.

Scotland's 4 Ds

Dumfries (and Galloway), Dundee, (West)Dumbarton (well nearly) and Dingwall ... a Scottish tour !

Monday with over 100 teachers in Dumfries. Their first day back after the Easter holidays but what enthusiasm. We explored the changing definitions of text in educational contexts and looked at the wider picture illustrated by Article 13 of the UN Charter for children. This led us to look at the way Textease Studio CT handles multimodality, in particular the power of adding sound to text in a variety of ways. Keeping reading records as 'live' sound recordings was the innovation here as many teachers had not imagined that they had the technology to do this simply and quickly. Tuesday in Dundee with 60 or so enthusiasts in a fantastically impressive hall with a huge presentation screen. Again we looked at the way Curriculum for Excellence had a clear focus towards the future and how the definitions of text opened up opportunities to look at multimodality, blogging and social networking.



One of the many things that struck me in both of these sessions was the absence of men. Out of about 160 odd teachers who turned out for the sessions I think I counted 4 men. Come on guys where are you?

It hasn't all been ICT and work. Just north of Dumfries, up a narrow valley, if you know where to look, are some fabulous sculptures ... just sitting in the environment.



In West Dumbarton teachers gave up a half day of their holiday to come and work with me (WOW!) and we talked much about creativity and listened to part of Sir Ken Robinson's presentation at TED ... we talked about 'white space' in teaching and learning ... the necessary gap between doing one thing and then doing another so that each experience has time to root and grow before you dash on to another. And we spoke of the idea that boredom might well be a catalyst for creativity (interesting idea). These teachers were also taken by the idea of having a dynamic reading record which was multimodal ... containing a visual record of the book or story read, a sound file of the experience and perhaps text to review the book. We also spoke of the possibility of children listening to their own reading in this way and taking some level of responsibility for their own improvement and progress.We also experimented with making videos of signing to go along with words and picture for those who had hearing impairments.



We also took a brief look at the latest output from Curriculum for Excellence - The Technologies. An early view suggests to me that this is a sensible document which will give professionals breadth and scope for creativity as well as ongoing development. It will, however, need supported interpretation to assist teachers with the development of their curriculum and classroom context.

All set up now for the last of the '4 Ds of Scotland', two sessions tomorrow with SMTs from the Highlands and Island. The session is being held in Strathpeffer where I have learned that the Kaiser Chiefs will be performing in May !! Perhaps they could see me as a 'warm up act'!

A super session with two different groups of SMTs in the fashionable Spa town of Strathpeffer ... we were not overwhelmed by groupies rushing in to buy their tickets for the Kaiser Chief concert but I was amazed at the distances some people had travelled to get to the sessions. Two teachers had driven down from Thurso ... well over two hours away ....

Alan Stewart ( many thanks Alan) documented the sessions on the fly using a very nifty piece of Web 2.0 technology called Drop.io ... a simple private exchange which enables you to create simple private exchange points called "drops." The service has no email signup and no "accounts." Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. To make a drop just click the big red button that says 'drop it'. If you haven't experimented with this yet it really is well worth the effort.

PS

Alan Stewart reports on his blog what I said and did ...

21st Century Students Deserve a 21st Century Education

Following up on my 'What do teachers want?' question how about the 'What do children/students want?' An interesting report has come to light (for me anyway) from many sources as part of Project Tomorrow . This US project has the following aims:

The vision of Project Tomorrow is insure that today’s students are well prepared to be tomorrow’s innovators, leaders and engaged citizens of the world. We believe that by supporting the innovative uses of science, math and technology resources in our K-12 schools and communities, students will develop the critical thinking, problem solving and creativity skills needed to compete and thrive in the 21st century.

The participation in the project's survey called 'Speak Up 2007 for Students, Teachers, Parents and School Leaders' was impressive:

Participation Overview: Surveys submitted from schools in all 50 states, American DOD schools, Canada, Mexico and
Australia. Top participating states in 2007: TX, CA, AZ, IL, AL, MD, NC, PA, FL, MI

319,223 K-12 students - 25,544 teachers - 19726 parents - 3,263 school leaders

3,729 schools and 867 districts

About the 2007 Speak Up schools:
o 97% public schools – 3% private schools
o 32% Urban – 40% Suburban – 29% Rural
o 43% Title I eligible; 29% majority – minority student population

The results give an interesting overview of the state of play in the US. You can access what was said here.

There are many items worthy of thought and comment:

Students are very interested in making better use of the “computers in their pocket” for learning and particularly to assist with communications, collaborations, creativity and productivity.

Students’ frustration with school filters and firewalls has grown since 2003, with 45% of middle and high school students saying now that these tools meant to protect them inhibit their learning.

When asked how their school could make it easier for them to work electronically, almost 2/3rds of middle and high school students said “let me use my own laptop, cell phone or other mobile device at school.”

What teachers really want

I haven't got the answer to what teachers really want but my questioning and the responses given over the last two weeks tell me that it is not complex ( or even simple) Learning Platforms or VLEs or portals ... it is not integrated systems that allow them to store/share/access materials, and it does not appear to be more kit or software.

Now whether this is because they want a quiet life and just to get on or whether they just don't get it. The idea that a little time an effort invested in new technology and new ideas might just make a whole lot of difference to their teaching and their children's learning is not new but the back to basics is seductive in its naivety.

Some interesting comments cam out of my questioning ... I leave them here without personal comment, hoping for yours ...

Simple to use software that meets real needs in their own particular subject area and preferably free

What teachers don't want: Student information management systems... which they can't understand and/or operate

Easy to install - no complicated systems needed to get it ready for use - last one I installed involved registering it, getting an emailed code back to activate it - too long/fussy!
Easy is the key word to start with on most of it!
Easy to use
Easy to adapt for different purposes
Easy to differentiate for different outcomes/pupils/tasks

...some programs already developed for my purpose, one which I won't need to read a 100 page manual before I can use it. I need it to be teacher and pupil friendly and have both explanations and fun applications.

... a course/inset where someone passionate about the subject exposes me to fun, exciting websites which will enthuse both staff and pupils rather than me spending hours, days, weeks finding one or two myself. Teacher enews would be good. Once a month stating cool website - something short and concise would be great. i would subscribe.

...on going training when updates are introduced
- training for class teachers outside of government initiatives e.g. look at the differences in the skills of Orchard's KS2 teachers to KS1 with whiteboards because KS2 were part of the initiative
- tips and suggestions and training as to how generic software can be used in all curriculum areas
- More training to move teachers on from the use and apply software to the create stage.

I’m not sure that teachers have a view on software priorities: most teachers only become aware of new software as it is presented to them and are not actively going round saying “I wish I could find a piece of software that did this...”

Teachers appear to want things that affect them now on a day-to-day basis ... their medium and long term view does not seem to be part of the agenda. Is this a surprise?

Next week I am in Scotland working with a wide range of teachers and senior managers ... I wonder if the answers will be the same?

"Teach Less, Learn More:Re-igniting Passion and Mission"

This is the strap line of the Ministry of Education Singapore ... exciting times ( thanks to the Kent Teachers Blog for the link)

TLLM calls on educators to go back to basics and it outlines what those should be. The three phases discussed are:

1. Remember Why We Teach
2. Reflect on What We Teach
3. Reconsider How We Teach

I won't spoil your vist to the site to find out more by revealing the meat behind the titles ...but I can't resist copying this quote ( in case you get no further)

As part of the blueprint on holistic education laid out by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Minister for Education, in a Parliamentary speech, we “will seek to cut back on quantity… so as to provide more ‘white space’ in the curriculum, space which gives schools and teachers the room to introduce their own programmes, to inject more quality in teaching, or give students themselves the room to exercise initiative and shape more of their own learning."

The Kent Teachers Blog goes on to ask a key question about what titles say about National Strategies ... in the US - No Child Left Behind, in the UK - Every Child Matters and in Singapore - Teach Less, Learn More ... I think it is time I did some world wide research to add to this list and then give them some careful thought. I wonder what Finland says? (this after reading Ewan's post last week)

Emerging technologies for learning: volume 3 (2008)

From Becta: Emerging technologies for learning

... aims to help readers consider how emerging technologies may impact on education in the medium term. The publications are not intended to be a comprehensive review of educational technologies, but offer some highlights across the broad spectrum of developments and trends. It should open readers up to some of the possibilities that are developing and the potential for technology to transform our ways of working, learning and interacting over the next three to five years.'

Volume 3 contains some really 'up-to-the-minute' stuff so some good bedtime reading here ...

Growing up with Google - what it means to education (Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE)

Mobile, wireless, connected - information clouds and learning (Mark van't Hooft, Kent State University) -

Location-based and context-aware education - prospects and perils (Adam Greenfield, NYU)-

Emerging trends in serious games and virtual words (Sara de Freitas, SGI)

'If it quacks like a duck...' - developments in search technologies (Emma Tonkin, UKOLN)

Interactive displays and next generation interfaces (Michael Haller, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences)

New wave publishing

A brilliant day today with a group of interested and enthusiastic publishers and editors from Collins Education all gathered together in Hammersmith to listen to me talk about the state of ICT in education today and where it could be going.

Ken Robinson's TED talk was a highlight with the ideas of creativity leading rather than following and this towards the new wave of Web 2.0 applications for use across the whole range of educational curriculum.

The strength of this day was that here were a group of people who wanted to know and wanted to be a part of the digital world within education for their own purposes and for their company's. It bodes well for a digital publishing future.

Guardian April 1st

I read this article A Step Too Far in the Guardian and then realised what date it was. Nice one Guardian ... great scam !!

Today is the last day to have your say ...

... for submissions to the DCSF consultation document 'Home Access to Technology'.

This consultation seeks views on the proposed Home Access programme that aims to ensure that every family with 5-19 year old learners in England has access to learning where and when they need it through access to ICT resources and support at home.

The executive summary is worth a read.

One of the key aims of the proposals is that:
...This will allow all learners to engage with the curriculum beyond the school day and extend their learning into areas that match their interests, abilities and aspirations. Also learners will develop the skills they will need to pursue and drive their learning and participate fully in the digital world.

The major worry comes from sustainability and support.

Becta have said:
Becta is currently undertaking its third devices mini-competition on behalf of the Access to technology at home initiative. From the information provided by LAs about their requirements and initial feedback by suppliers, particularly at BETT, Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) will feature quite strongly in the mini-competition.

To assist LAs and suppliers in this process Becta has produced a brief technical overview about the suitability of UMPCs as part of proposed solutions for Access to Technology at Home. This information is provided as a generic technical overview and is as far as is practicable independent of brand, instead focusing on key features; the benefits and the challenges that present themselves when considering large scale roll outs of such technologies.

This looks like a big opening for the Asus miniBook, Elonex ONE etc but what a weight of expectation will be places on LAs to administer.

The Functional Expectations of the programme are interesting:

Learning experience

Home Access users shall:

• be able to use solutions to access information on their personal learning goals and progress against them
• have access to a wide range of online learning resources
• have access to a wide range of tools that allow the creation and manipulation of multi-media texts
• be able to access multiple applications and services simultaneously
• have access to a range of collaborative tools and opportunities to share and work with others.

Users should feel ‘ownership’ of their personal educational experiences and the home access solution.

Home access should deliver benefits, especially to families and the community, beyond involvement in the formal educational experience.

Learning environment

Home Access users shall:

• have access to the online learning platform services used by the establishment(s) the learner attends
• be able to continue learning experiences begun in-school when out of school, and vice versa
• be entitled to a solution that protects the user from inappropriate contact and content and ensures data security and integrity regardless of location
• have access to solutions to recover data in event of failure or disaster and restore their ability to engage in their learning in a reasonable time frame.

Home Access users should:

• be able to experience high quality online learning experiences both in-school or college and out-of-school or college
• experience a familiar set of learning experiences over a reasonable length of time
• have a wide choice of home access solutions.

Learning support

School, college and other educational infrastructure shall be capable of supporting a variety of services to all home access users concurrently.

Educational establishments shall be supported, motivated, and measured against changing pedagogy to take advantage of home access.

Home Access users shall have access to formal user support (educational and technical) when needed and within a locally agreed time frame.

There is this bit tucked away at the bottom of the above section:
Educational establishments shall be supported, motivated, and measured against changing pedagogy to take advantage of home access. Notice the word 'measured' in there.

It is fairly obvious to me that there is going to have to be a real shake up in how children/parents/students/teachers access what they want where they want and on what their preferred tool is. Many will have mobile kit that they simply want to use to access a variety of networks. At the moment few schools encourage students to bring in their own equipment and many positively ban usage because (and I hope that this is the reason) their systems can't cope.

I sense exciting times ahead.

So ... back to the Byron Review

I read and read again the exec summary and was taken by some of the analogies which I thought would make sense to parents and teachers and then I looked at the summary of the report for children and young people (The exec summary didn't appear to have a cover)


What is that cover about ?
What image is it trying to put over?

The title says 'BE SAFE, BE AWARE, HAVE FUN' ... great ... a screen tells me that 'I know who you are and where you live' another exhorts the reader to 'Shoot them all' ... A weird individual pops out of the screen saying 'I'm coming' and a hand reaches for a throat... wonderful ... HAVE FUN !!

What were they thinking of ?

I noticed later that the cover was the same for the main report !!

PS

My Google Alert for 'Byron Review' has reported 17 separate mentions over the last two days ...

Youngsters taking risks

You may not have caught this on BBC Breakfast today but there was a feature on :Tiger Cam - The latest instalment from the people who brought us dung-cam, snowball cam and salmon cam… trunk-cam; where elephants carry disguised cameras to bring us closer than ever before to tiger cubs in the Indian jungle.

The camera showed closeups of a growing family of young tiger cubs. The point here is that from the very first moments they could walk they explored and took risks in their investigations of all that life had to offer. Standing by to retrieve them when they became stuck and to watch over them was their mum. Always ready to help, she let them explore and investigate for themselves.

Isn't this what we are saying about e-Safety and young people growing up in an institutionally contrived 'risk-free' world? Will this fit in with the findings of the Byron Review?

Young people's reading

It is the National Year of Reading but there are many definition of reading. It is with pleasure today that I read on the web site 'Read Up, Fed Up' that:

Compiling their own online blogs came fourth in the Read Up rankings and 80% of those taking part said they had written their own story, film, play or song.

National Year of Reading director Honor Wilson-Fletcher said: "Young people are web natives - exposed to a wider variety of reading material than any previous generation through the explosion of digital media.

"It seems not all adults are comfortable with this shift, and are often discouraging teens from taking advantage of this new reading landscape.

"Accessing the digital universe is absolutely central to life's opportunities for teens.

"We may be only just starting to understand the dynamics of online reading, but adults need to feel more positive about it and to learn more about it."

and that:

The National Year of Reading report shows that more youngsters are choosing online sites as a reading source.

This is student voice in operation.

You can read a BBC digest of the report here.

Podcasting in Spondon

With 32 excited Y1 children, 10 laptops and assortment of microphones, 2 teachers and myself we embarked on a podcast of what each of the groups thought of the story of Cinderella.

Firstly we had to set the kit up over lunch time and check that the laptop batteries were charged and that the mics worked ... well that took some time ... but in the end we were there just in time for the children to come in.

We began,(after the niceties) to have a look at the Podium software. I demonstrated on a SmartBoard (bad move - explanations later) how to open the software and where to click to record. We had a class go at 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' and the playback sounded really good as my laptop has a great in-built mic and the speakers on the SmartBoard did the job well.

We reviewed how to make the recording, talked about not chewing the microphones and not fiddling with the wire while speaking and then the children went to their tables to speak and listen to their voices. It was wonderful ... 32 young voices with no problems about what to say. We paused and spoke of 'sharing' and 'taking turns' and then we were off again. These were Y1 children many had never used a laptop before and certainly had not seen a trackerpad and so some of the pointing and clicking was a bit hit-and-miss but they soon got the hang of how it all worked. Small problems were found listening to playback as the laptops had really low volumes which I could not seem to change. Perhaps that was for the best really as they had to listen carefully and quietly. Oh ... and the SmartBoard bit ... well, because I moved things around my screen with my finger they thought that they could do that on theirs ! They soon worked out that it didn't happen!

I then showed how to import MP3 sounds into Podium (just for fun) and they made up lots of sound jumbles. Then we got down to the real stuff.

The group had listened to the story of Cinderella in a literacy context based on the idea of 'traditional tales' and had gone on, in small groups, to write their ideas about the story. These ideas they had 'carved up' so that in the speaking rehearsals they knew who was going to say which bit. And they had practiced their parts.

To set up the podcasts the children had to type in the podcast title, who would make it, the name of the episode and their initials. this took quite a while as keyboard familiarity is something that they are working on.

Once that was done with papers at the ready, the red buttons around the room were pressed and the recording started. Some stuttered and stopped and we restarted ... some spoke loudly and softly, some repeated. But, after all the trials were done they were satisfied with their own individual bits.

These Podium files were then saved as Podium MP3 files so that I could collect them and stitch them together to make up the final Cinderella Podcast.( They did not publish their individual files as the network was going a little slowly)

When all the files had been collected on my portable hard drive we did a final class podcast on my laptop of 'Heads and Shoulders, Knees and Toes'.

The whole thing took the best part of two hours and the children did not appear to flag once. They stuck to the task and appeared to have had a good time. The quality of the literacy was also good and the 'soft' curriculum aspects of sharing and collaborating were well to the front.

You can listen to the Cinderella podcast by clicking here or by pasting this address into iTunes:
http://www.podiumpodcasting.com/~182812/PSLiteracyGr260308182321/rss.xml

Tanya Byron Review ...

Today's papers and the News channels are full of reports of the review by Dr Tanya Byron into 'the effects of online content and video game violence on children and young people'.

The BBC featured it on their early morning Breakfast programme and bloggers (!) have been recording sightings of the information for the last four hours or so.



You can read the diverse views in the National press here: The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times (The Independent chose not to feature it)

You can listen to a Guardian interview with Dr Tanya Byron, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham here.

Ewan Mcintosh has come out up front commenting on the dilemma of allowing children to take risks without them actually being exposed to any. We have over the last thirty or so years gradually reduced the area of risk taking for our young people until, frightened by the paranoia into not playing out they now seek to risk take in virtual worlds ... if we stop this where will they go next to grow up?

I have just been informed of the link to the report (thanks Pete) and am reading ... so more here when I have digested bits of it.

PS

Unusually for me (you might say) I feel that this is not the time to comment rather a time to read and reflect on what has been written but (I can't resist) I like the way the case has been presented for children and young people and love the analogy about road safety in the exec summary (especially as it is one I have been using for a long while now)

The teacher challenge

I spent a very pleasant day yesterday with teachers from a development group in North Derbyshire. It was their group's 'teacher day' and they had gathered in the splendid surrounds of the Hayes Centre near Somercotes for a day of stimulation and conversation. There was real meat in the day which opened with a presentation by Will Ord called 'Philosophy for Children'. The teachers then broke into their various groups to pursue activities ranging from photo orienteering to digital alchemy.

My sessions were called ... 'Podcasts, blogs and that sort of thing' ... I had prepared a set of ideas which included an opening on Web 2.0 and then a work through of the sort of things that people can do and how this affected or would affect teaching and learning. It didn't work out quite how I had planned it. The teachers, in this first group, had come to listen because they wanted to know for themselves so that they could make sense of what was going on and what it might mean to them in the future. My careful preparation went out of the window as I answered their questions... 'Well what is a blog then?'... I explained and then showed them Common Craft. I ran a video from YouTube and the discussion began about stopping and blocking and how schools could get the best out of the resources available. I showed how to unplug the videos and run the flv files on their own. I talked about RealPlayer11 which does the job neatly for you and how this worked with FireFox. I did a podcast using Podium having been asked about podcasting and I built a blog in Blogger to show how quick and easy it could be.( You can see it here)

Forewarned I waited for the second group to arrive. I asked what they wanted to know and took it from there. I don't know what they got from their 45 minutes with me but I was left with the impression that we needed to go on and explore what could be and what could happen.

These professionals needed time to consolidate information and help and support in getting to grips with changes and challenges. It seemed to me that the session was a start but by no means an end ... almost like booking the tickets for a long journey and then having to wait to get on the plane.

I ended by showing Honeycomb as a way of making the connection between what they needed to know and what they might use ... thoughts for the future... and suggested that they kept their eye on it.

We talked of mobile phones, Asus miniBooks, Nintendo DS and all other tools that children will be bringing to the school party and tried to make sense of them in a world driven by targets, tests and standards.

Right at the end of the last session two teachers approached me ... 'Thanks heavens,' they said, 'We thought it was us! ... It transpired that they worked in a secondary school with challenging pupils who needed support to move through their institutional world and these teachers had been trying to make the connections between what their students do and want to do and where the system leaves them. They could see that Web 2.0, for want of a better title, could be part of this and that schools needed to move forward and not worry so much.

It made my day ... I gave them my card and offered help ...

Just like buses ...

I wonder what the collective noun for a lot of mini handheld computers might be? Having put out a Google alert for such things I am beginning to think that there will be no end to the set/group/mash/??

And I managed to miss one ... Following up a lead led me to the Gizmodo site where I discovered:



Innovations for Learning just announced a blue GameBoy-like handheld computer designed for schools. It's got directional buttons, a few face buttons, a 2.5-inch LCD, USB sync, SD card storage, AC/USB charging, and a 3.5-hour battery life. Inside the teachermate is a "complete reading and math curriculum that is aligned with all of the major reading and math programs," which means it can help substitute the learning a K-2 school student already receives.

They're a non-profit company, which means they only charge the cost of manufacturing the device, $50, but the reading and math programs cost $20 per student. The initial rollout will be at 500 Chicago elementary schools.

I am sure now that I have missed others ... imagine Bitesize running on one of these !

Dr Kawashima rules okay

Last week Derek Robinson, from LTS, did an excellent job in saying on a variety of interviews on television what was really happening in a project he is involved with in Scotland at the Consolarium .He explained the use of games and games machines having value in educational contexts but the protagonists, on the whole, just didn't get it. You can read more about this on Ewan's blog here.

Well a week has passed and Derek has had time to think back on the impact of what he was saying. You can read this better from his blog than me reiterating it.

But a number of things come out of this for me, the main one being his assertion 'good teachers will use good resources'. Of course they will and many good teachers will take a variety of resources and make them good and useful by the power and excitement of their teaching. It is the teacher that 'does the stuff' ... the resources help and support.

As I have just commented on Derek's blog:

I am totally sure that you are right... I am just curious what the definition of real impact will be and hope that it will not just be a measure of improved performance. I don't believe in the quick fix ... I think that things happen in learning over a much greater time scale than we imagine ... the impact may be years ahead and will not be down to one idea or thing or lesson or experience.

Education ... the key

There is no doubt, for most people, education is the key. But we do not have a collective intelligence about what education is or how best to go about getting one that is fit for purpose. And do we mean purpose now or purpose in the future about which we can guess so little. Did any of you watch the film 'Water World'? It was slammed by the critics but did open up the idea that things could happen which would change the concept of an education fit for purpose beyond anything that we could think of. And who should be the judges of this fit for purpose?

Over the last two days four interesting things have caught my eye in the educational arena. (Sort of like the Coliseum in ancient Rome ... a place where some come to watch others fight for their lives!)

Firstly there was the story of schools putting CCTV cameras in all of the classrooms and the headteacher who explained that it was a security issue about equipment not a tool to watch what was happening. Did the teachers protest about this? I know some of the students were bothered.Watch this here. When I searched for the story on the BBC web site I found that this was not isolated. There is an interesting bit on the CBBC site.

The second issue is a reason for celebration as it is about the use of computer games etc to improve learning. In typical form the BBC wheeled out the pro and con brigade. The con group (they seemed to swap them round) just didn't get the picture at all and managed to argue off the point most of the time .. typical back to basics and teachers should be making their subjects interesting (well of course they should) and the pro candidate Derek Robinson, from LTS, did an excellent job in saying what was really happening in the project he is involved with in Scotland at the Consolarium. Learning and Teaching Scotland's. You can read more about this on Ewan's blog here.

The third thing was the excellence of some of the young people who took part in the BBC's School Report initiative. Who says our young people are not highly motivated and highly talented.'Chapeau' to those teachers and students who had the sense and the purpose to take part in 'real world reporting'.

The final thing rests with the thorny subject of handwriting and what it has to do with literacy. Again its the BBC (Haven't they got better things to do?) who run an article on Technology and the death of handwriting . The article neatly slips from handwriting to learning and the state of everything:

...Meanwhile, one in five parents surveyed for My Child magazine's Write a Letter Week said they last penned a letter more than a year ago. If the figures are representative, this apparent demise of handwriting could have serious implications for educational achievement

These serious implications are based on the premise that we 'test'/'examine' our young people by getting them to write on paper. No thought that this might not be the best idea in a developing digital world.

Professor Rhona Stainthorp, who is conducting research into children's writing abilities, says there is growing evidence those who write faster and more legibly get better marks.

Is this a surprise to anyone ... but so what? My question is: 'Is handwriting going to be a key skill the the future of the children being educated in our schools today? Or isn't it time we began to see it just as a personally useful tool and that the vagaries of it don't matter?

11th Annual ICT Conference and Exhibition

Sitting in the auditorium of the Rheghed Centre near Penrith listening to the Cumbria Awards for ICT being presented by Dr Baldev Singh.

Baldev is now starting on his 'keynote': The changing face of technology and its implication for teaching'.. I note that the audience are here to listen, not to interact (see my post of yesterday).

Here are my notes made on the 'fly' during his presentation:

Global drivers push new learning technologies
The timing is perfect for the developments of new technology
We need to debate the terms digital immigrants and digital natives
How do we take these things into account and also satisfy the OFSTED inspectors?
Input>process>output
Let's make it input> processprocessprocessprocessprocess>output
Innovation leads Globalisation
Children like to make things not just consume things
Interacting is the key word
Baldev explains RSS ... he talks about 'collective knowledge' and 'empowering students' and how they allow students to find information quickly and then synthesise it.
In a Global World ... we should not be tethered by our geography
The 'knowledge economy' is a driver in third world countries
Students need to learn how to filter the information that they find so that they can make sense of it
Baldev introduces 'Google Docs' and other Web 2.0 tools to develop collaborative productivity
Google map of the future ... influences education
Model of sustainable innovation in 4 quarters
Innovation allows us to work smarter and get higher output
He uses 'We didn't start the fire' to discus a history project and the effect of smart technologies on motivation ... transformational use of ICT
The next clip was 'Animator .V. Animation'
Students do not want to be passive consumers of information ... they want to be creators
We need to think about appropriate or inappropriate use of technology ... teachers need to know the differenceFuturelab
We need to bring the world outside into the classroom ... and we need to take the classroom outside into the world
Connectivity is important, Content is king but context is emperor
Kids acting as amplifiers of information and learning
Should we be digitising the curriculum? ... or creating a new one.
We need a model of curriculum that embraces flexibility ... ICT used in a context
Baldev introduces 'photostory 3' as a way of creating ... simple technology, multimodal presentation on the fly...students personalise quickly and simply
Voice Thread ... peer review of personal context ... enriching a curriculum ...
Higher order thinking
Use of Microsoft Producer to stitch video with slides
Use of Zentation.com for a similar thing
The power of Flickr and Bubbl.us to move things forward motivationally
Podcasting as a tool for learning ... download into iTunes
Baldev gets involved with 'mashups'...walkit.com as a way of mixing tools together
He finishes on the Utube video 'Did you know?'



Then came the Cumbria Animations Awards ... children being crative and exciting ...some working in groups , some on their own ... some with a text story line, some with music ...watch out for these on the Cumbria Grid for Learning web site.

The audience at the conference used the 'Activote' system to decide the winner. Real use of appropriate technology.

Getting onboard ...

Over the last couple of weeks I have presented in various venues and lectured to different groups in University education settings. The one thing that is coming over to me at the moment is that everyone listens and nods and gets enthused but I just don't detect things happening.

In a huge lecture theatre with over 250 students I noted that not one one them had a laptop or any other device switched on to take any notes (let alone Twitter) ... they all had pieces of paper to write on ... I asked them how they were going to share their thoughts with others in the room, put that did not seem to be part of their learning agenda. They had come there to listen and absorb not interact. Similarly with a largish group of ICT coordinators at a conference ... no sign of anything but the pads provided by the organisers. It was the same on a course for heads. It is as if the message of sharing/collaborating and the read/write nature of the next stage is out there but it just isn't happening.

If our training teachers and our teacher leaders don't respond and model what chances further through the system? I note that on the Naace Conference blog from Torquay that there are almost NO comments at all on any of the sessions ... even the foremost ICT educators in the country don't appear to make their thoughts known so that they can help to shape the thoughts of others. I posted a comment straight after listening to a recording of Ewan's address, and there mine sits, all on its own.

Will Richardson in a post on his blog highlights a similar issue:

I feel like it sometimes when I go to an education conference with 6,000 attendees and virtually no Internet access where almost no one who is presenting is modeling anything close to great pedagogy with technology.

He goes on:

...how in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we’re not talking 21st Century skills for educators first? The more I listened, the less I heard in terms of how we make the teaching profession as a whole even capable of teaching these “skills” to kids. Sure, there were mentions of upgrading teacher preparation programs and giving teachers additional time in the school day to collaborate, etc. But the URGENCY was all around the kids. Shouldn’t the URGENCY be all about the teachers right now?

Barack Obama using a quote from Dr Martin Luther King calls for the people of USA to pay attention to 'The urgency of now'. It makes a good rallying cry for the moment!

The longer it takes educators to develop their own ICT capability to support what is happening, the more young people will be leaving formal education without having been able to take advantage of the technology they deserve.

The rest of the post on Will's blog tells the story well as do the comments on the post.

In Torquay last week on Tuesday evening Ewan McIntosh said at 9:06 Don't think - try! ... we need to make a move NOW.

PS

There are now 138 comments to Will Richardson's original post and heaven knows how many people have linked into it on their own blog ... the Twitter lines have been burning.

Using Comic Strips to give a sense of narrative

For the TES magazine of 29.02.08 I wrote an article on using Comic strips to give pupils a sense of power over narrative writing. Many kind people have mentioned the article and have taken up some of the ideas. As is the nature of writing in this way the original text was cut down to fit the magazine's format. Below I have included the whole thing for those who wish to read more (with my thanks to Simon Mills for his original idea):

Bring it to life!

Back-reading through my Internet ‘feeds’ I came across some literacy work by Simon Mills that really attracted my attention. Amongst many other things there he was talking about multi-modality and punctuation and there was this bit about:

‘…pondering on how the use of comic strips might help with this, and how in the process I might also encourage colleagues to see this undervalued literary form as a potential tool in supporting engagement with texts and literacy development.’

This got me thinking about narrative and the way that comic strips could be used to engage different people in different ways. In other words, how a single story line might be accessed from different directions. This especially worked for me as I was thinking that comic strips were great multi-modal representations and the whole thing fitted into a ‘design and build’ context. The images chosen and the captions created carry both the narrative and the story and different people focus on different parts to begin with and then ‘blend’ or ‘mash-up’ to imbibe the whole context. I feel that writing narrative succinctly could be really well facilitated by using comic strip format. Really I was getting to grips with ‘storyboarding’!

So I began to look for an electronic format which would help me to do just that.

During October I spent some time in an Online Conference called ‘K12’ and there I came across a presentation by Wendy Wolfe from Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, where she detailed the use of some free Web 2.0 tools. Her presentation, ‘If All My Class Did This’ was both entertaining and engaging. It introduced me a number of potentially useful Web 2.0 tools that I had not come across before. It was the easy way that she adopted and then adapted the tools that were available to fit in with her curriculum that impressed me and determined me to look at ToonDoo, a cartoon creator.

This free Web 2.0 software enables users to create simple one, two or three panel cartoons quickly and simply with supplied character sets (there is a really large fantasy range) and supplied backgrounds etc but it is also possible to upload photos from your own computer for use in your cartoons. There is also a function which allows you to build your own characters. To get to use it you have to fill in a simple form and register online (as with most of these applications).

The implications of using this technology are exciting for children as they begin to take control of their writing and also how they develop their sense of audience. Web 2.0 technology opens up a developing idea of communicating and review that has not really yet been explored in a school setting. The usual audience for children’s work is restricted to the class or occasionally home and the close community. Using tools, such as ToonDoo, opens up the possibilities of collaborations around the world in formats that are engaging and creative. There is no need within this environment to be tethered by geography, it is as open as users are prepared to allow. And it is this allowing that we all need to come to terms with within our various institutions.

Once your film strip has been created it can be saved, kept private, shared with friends or even published to the world. This opens up enormously the concept of ‘sense of audience’ for published creations and all of the exciting things that come with giving children the power to go outside the school environment with their work.

When you view the finished work it looks like this ...


(and there is a comments box at the bottom for people to give you feedback on your work - provided that you shared it with them!)

It is also possible to combine ToonDoons to form ToonBooks which work terrifically electronically with virtual page turning. This function means that groups can combine strips to make a series. After a few exploratory goes, the whole thing is very intuitive and simple to use allowing the users to concentrate on the quality of the literacy involved rather than getting bogged down with the operation of the software.

Contextually you can use the visualisation through the different formats of the speech bubbles to easily differentiate between speech and thought … as Simon notes: ‘With thought bubbles we can think, reflect, look back, imagine or visualise... with speech bubbles we can shout, cry, whisper, whimper query, say and exclaim’ . The shape and size of the bubbles and their position on the pager can also play a part in the inference of the ideas. If you have ever ( and who hasn’t) read any of the ‘Tin Tin’ books you can see how this works with the first part of the dialogue/idea always on the left of the picture and any action moving with the eye line from left to right . Even in some cases, going out of the frame.

Using these ideas young writers can explore the difference between thoughts and speech and can develop ideas of how to track the narrative of a story in a variety of ways – comic strips being one of these. The Express Newspaper’s Rupert Annuals of the past are excellent examples of this whereby the narrative is carried by the title of the page, the four images and the rhyming couplets and the narrative text (which also involves speech). At this point it is about experimentation and almost the ‘breaking’ of conventions to see the effect that they have on writers and readers.

Simon notes:
‘The narratives presented within comic strips are layered or textured and in constructing meaning as intended by the author must be accessed on multiple levels. When I read a comic strip I often begin with the visual elements, and then use the captions to set context before following the speech, linking the pieces together to construct my own version of events, in using the text in this way I am take personal control of the meaning I am making, designing my own story from what is being presented as I go.’
It is this sort of experimentation with writing that we should be encouraging so that it allows the audience of the writing to construct their own version of the author’s narrative.

Point to Ponder

There are numerous ‘comic strip’ generators sitting on the Web that can easily be found by any quick search. Before you consider using such an application in a classroom context or as a home/school idea check carefully. Really work through the options. Remember, these sites were not, on the whole, designed for education purposes and there may be things lurking you would prefer not to be associated with.

Other software to explore.

Plasq (works with Mac or Windows) – is a download rather than a Web 2.0 application
Comic Creator - from readwritethink

Brain Box

My wife has always been a 'puzzles person', from word searches (and I suspect earlier join-the-dots) through crozzles and crosswords followed by sudoku and even every IQ test thing that she sees in newspapers, magazines and on the back of packages ... she is a puzzle player, a 'Countdown' viewer and switches, when the time is ripe, to the quiz channels on television. Her mind is honed so sharply to these things that it cuts the air with the speed of response... and I've forgotten to mention University Challenge (me too).

She sits later in the evening with her Nintendo DS open and trains her brain ... finishing with the question ' So how old do you think I am today?' For a women who did her teacher training in the early 70s, the answer '26' leaves me a happy man!
Tessa Watson (of GLOW fame and a strange car) has started doing dsome work with children using the DS and a summary of this can be found on her blog.

Just now, in the evening, the warm up might easily be general knowledge with ( hold your breath) the black clad witch of the quiz, this followed by pitting wits against the best brains in Britain on 'Egg Heads' and now ... the BBC has launched us into Brain Box Challenge.

This, in my opinion, slick programme hosted by Clive Anderson is well worth talking to children about. It is a:

...challenging brain boggling quiz in which contestants battle it out to win money from the ‘Brain Bank’ by proving themselves in a sequence of brain games which test their memory, language, visual, numerical and spatial skills.

... and the accompanying web site (not just because it is free) is the sort of site that you could strongly want to identify with if you were a teacher committed to developing home/school links.

There are three interesting sections on the site: The science behind learning when you play the games, a link to the BBC2 area where you can catch up with programmes you have missed on BBCi, but most importantly ... the games themselves.

The games come in six categories: visual, spacial, language, dual task, coding and memory ... together with a warm up area to get you ready. The warm up is at three levels and the games come in at ten different levels of difficulty building one on one. At the end of it all you get a 'Brainbox quotient', and an explanation of what it all means.


Can't wait to get started (and pass it on to your class/friend/family). Just click here.

RM Inform Conference, Birmingham

I spent a very interesting day at the Motor Cycle Museum in Birmingham as a participant in an RM Inform Conference. Lots of interesting and provocative ideas and lots of interesting people to talk to about them.

Dame Mary MacDonald, Head of Riverside Primary School,in North Tyneside led the way with an impassioned plea for putting the fun back into the curriculum and children's lives in school. She argued that the current curriculum was too academic and much too prescriptive and that in following the 'given' lines we stifle fun.

Speaking to a partisan audience, Mary found empathy with the group who recognised her style and 'up-frontness' ... she castigated inspections, strategies, targets and most current institutional initiatives and carried her audience with her in her rallying cry of the fact that 'every child certainly did matter'. The group consciousness oozed from the assembled teachers who you could feel really wanted to have her as their head teacher.

She hid the underlying issues of government interference behind the 'no fun in school' banner and declared that 'fun' should be in. She was and is right. Childhood seems to have become a precursor for something else that we are not sure of. We test, target and measure our young people as if progress through and artificially prescribed system in the key to life. What is left out is the fact that each and every moment of each and every day is of tremendous importance and that today is not just a rehearsal for tomorrow but an entire , exciting 'moment' in its own right and needs to be celebrated and safeguarded.

You got the sense from listening to her that she was there and would drag others, if necessary, kicking and screaming towards the recognition that every child matters.

She commented that we could be a load of 'Strategy delivers and creativity crumblers.' ... such was the strength of her conviction that if I have it wrong I feel sure she will let me know!

She ended her 'set' by saying: A classed bewitched by learning ... fizzes'. We all knew what she meant.

Stephen Heppell spoke with his usual laid-back passion about 21st Century Learning and called for a mashup of wisdom with wild enthusiasm. He illicited a concept of 'in betweenies'... those places between 'now' and 'not now'. He argued about the divide between the 'banners, and the 'doers' and gave many examples of young people being the teachers and commented that learning was a ubiquitous commodity.

He had observed, he said, that it was now 'cool to be brainy' ... just watch kids with Nintendo DSs !

...and at the end of the day there was Gervais Phinn. If you have never seen him or listened to him then if you get the chance ... do so ! Anecdote with reality and above all children in mind ... that is what you get.

I obviously didn't get to see all of the break out sessions but those I did see were excellent and left food for thought. The session on 'Primary Schools of the Future' had a terrific lead in video put together by Jon Sparke and Andrea Carter... and here it is -



There was so much more than this in the day and all the details and downloads of presentations etc can be found here.

Speaking Freely

This blogged by phone by Stephen Heppell at the RM Inform Conference at Birmingham today:

"Doug hi, it's Steven Heppell. I've just had a really interesting lunch time chatting to people actually but must admit that I'm amazed that how good all this is getting you know, ... but this is a technology. We've got inflatable stuff here, we got pocketables here, we've got wall shape stuff here man. Really, really, really ... times that we're always ready to demonstrate those showing some of that from around world, but I tell you what there's some fabulous stuff here."

spoken through SpinVox

Speaking Freely

This blogcast was recorded and translated by mobile phone from the RM Conference in Birmingham today.

"Hi my name is Andy Fisher, I'm the manager from the City Learning Centre in Middlesborough. We're here at the RM Conference in Birmingham, demonstrating a 3D steroscopic system we doing a lot of work with. We've been looking at applying this technology in the classroom for 2 or 3 years now. I know about 60 of these systems out there... in the 3D space, we'd also created a number of software and environments to go in to this"

spoken through SpinVox

Andy Fisher was demonstrating an awesome system of 3D projection where two data projectors and a clever bit of software combine (with a pair of specs) to give a great 3D experience. You can read all about it here... and check out Reach Out Interactives - the 3D Experts.

Broadband Consortia, Networks and YouTube

It is apparent that many (most) broadband connections in educational institutions, for reasons of 'safety' block certain web site which can (or could) have positive educational use. FaceBook and YouTube to name but two of the likely suspects.YouTube has many videos that can help and support teachers by making connections with quality materials that are difficult to find elsewhere.

I have spent some time over the last six months or so explaining to teachers and educationalist how to extract the useful videos so that they can be used in a stand alone format.

This post is to explain a number of these because the job is getting easier and easier.

Firstly there is 'Unplug', a Firefox Add-0n that does just what it says ... unplugs videos.

Then, recently, I upgraded my version of 'Real Player 11' to discover that it was most efficient in allowing me to download any video that I came across in my browsing. There is a very good guide on how to do this written by Mike Trodd of Cecil Road Primary school which can be found here.
... just as I thought I had learned lots I looked at Joe Dale's Blog and noticed that he had others.

No excuses then about good material being blocked from use by the school's firewall etc . All you need to do is go home, extract the video you want from its blocked source and play it in its original form ... Oh ... you will need to download an FLV player to do this.

Watch out for an article on some of the useful things to be found in YouTube in the ictopus Sharing Good Practice number 23.

Visuwords

I really do need to pay attention to the things I read on blogs and in my feeds. Each are a facinating source of information and are wonderful at keeping me (and anyone reading this) up to date on the world and everything else.

So for those who don't read Ewan Mcintosh's Blog (why?) or John Connell's ( again ... why?) here is a rerun of what they said ...

Way, way back in the dark days of October, Ewan noticed a lovely app while he was in New Zealand and today I noticed that John Connell had picked it up for comment.

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary similar to Visual Thesaurus but needs no log on and no subscription. Just go there and use it.

Thanks again to Ewan and John for this and note to myself to pay more attention in the future.

A Black Swan

A change in education is on the way ... it will be a Black Swan !

A Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
Second, it carries an extreme impact.
Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

From Pedagogy through androgogy to heutogogy we need to pass on the responsibility of learning to the individuals and groups who are 'in' the process. The institutional nature of our schools and educational environments is counterproductive in this aim.

At TED 2008 on 29 February 2008 Nassim Nicholas Taleb the author of 'The Black Swan' spoke of these cataclysmic changes that we all recognise retrospectively.

In education terms, now, we have the chance to be ahead of the game. The digital environment in which we all live is sweeping chages over us by the year,month,week, day, hour, minute and second - changes we often don't recognise until we can't function the way we wish without them - just think of mobile phones, word processors, 24/7 online shopping ...

The secret is not to watch the big issues - Building Schools for the Future - but to listen to the whispers - Second Life. Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know... Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than try to predict them). There are so many things we can do if we focus on anti knowledge, or what we do not know.


Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week - on Monday 3rd March interviews Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the podcast is now available at here):

'We are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate and categorize – and we don’t even realise it. What we should understand, argues the academic and city trader NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, is that our world is dominated by 'black swans', highly improbable events that have a massive impact and are nearly impossible to predict. Black swans, he says, mean we should ignore ‘experts’, stop reading newspapers and learn to take advantage of uncertainty. Nassim Nicholas Taleb will be delivering lectures on The Black Swan at the University of Oxford on Wednesday 5 March and at the London School of Economics on Thursday 6 March.'

Asus competition? The Elonex ONE

Just when you thought it was safe ... the competition has only just begun.

At the Education Show Elonex showed their Elonex ONE a sub £100 laptop.
I know nothing more of it at the moment except that it could likely rival the RM Asus minBook which ships in at £169.

The new Elonex ONE also has a Linux OS, WIFI and all of the sorts of things we will begin to expect from these new generation machines. It seems that they expect 200,000 of these ready for shipping in any of five different colours. Yours can be pre-ordered on the web site for a mere £10.

This small laptop was also the device reported by Ray Barker, Director of BESA as one of the main stars of the show. You can hear his comments on the Teacher TV programme here.

I wait to hear what other think of this and to see who next will get into the frame.

Any chance of a £75 laptop ... is it a 'dutch auction'?

PS

Quick Tech Spec Comparison

ASUS miniBook
7" TFT screen
Mobile Intel Celeron-M ULV 900MHz processor
512MB Memory or 1GB Memory (Windows version)
2Gb, 4GB or 8GB (Windows version only) Solid-State Hard Drive Integrated IEEE 802.11b/g wireless
Integrated LAN
3 USB ports
Integrated microphone and speakers
Ports for external microphone and speakers or headphones
Lithium-Ion battery
Asus-developed Linux-based operating system or Windows XP Home with Works and Live Services
Integrated webcam (4G and 8GB model only)
Option of wireless 3G dongle
VGA-out port
SD card reader

Elonex ONE

7” High res TFT LCD; 800 X 400
0.95 KLXN Code 8 mobile 300 MHz processor
Linux Memory 128 MB DDR-II SD RAM
Onboard 1Gb Flash Memory
Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Ethernet ( wired)
USB 2.0 X 2
Built in speakers
3.5 mm audio in/headphones
3 cell battery – 4 hrs
Linux – Linos 2.6.21 OS
Pre-installed software bundle
QWERTY keyboard ( removable)
Mains Power adapter


It seems to me, at first glance, as is usual in these things , that you will get what you pay for ... time and usage will tell.

PPS

Already the comments are coming in re the Elonex ONE read here from Ian Usher of 'Changing the Game'. (Thanks to him for the video at the top of this post)

The Times Online reported a sighting of the ONE back on February 17th (and I missed it !) and this was also picked up on the same day by 'engadget'. Other sightings were on 'jkkmobile' who come up with a Chinese connection.

PPPS

If you want more just run a Google Alert for the Elonex ONE. At 19.00 on Sunday 2 March there were 13 'mentions'.

School Matters - Online Social Networks - Friend or Foe?

Teachers.tv has tonight (Thu 28th Feb 20:00, Thu 28th Feb 23:00, Fri 29th Feb 05:00) a programme concerning the use of online social networks and their implication for the future of teaching and learning.

The synopsis reads well:

The rise of online social networking has brought a new dimension to social interaction. In this programme, we look at the technology behind sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, exploring the issues that they raise for teachers.

This is the first generation that has the technical means to offer a running commentary on every aspect of their lives. This fact has sparked a debate on whether this technology, an ever increasing part of children's lives, is a force for good, or an opportunity for cyber-bullying to proliferate.

If negative aspects can be dealt with, these technological advances could potentially alter the dynamics of future schooling; transforming the traditional lecture model into increasing group interaction and dialogue, into learning that's "caught rather than taught".

Experts and users explain how social networking is affecting the way this generation relates to each other in and out of cyberspace, and how the technology can be harnessed to benefit learning.

I am particularly interested in the section I have made bold. I wonder how long it will take for the institutions and the writers (me included) to stop highlighting the issue and simply get on with living with its evolution? The things we are doing now and the perceived problems will soon be reshaped and reused.

PS

Just listening and watching the video at this moment. So far it is putting over exceptionally positive messages. It appears that the adults seem to feel that they have to regulate use on the basis of 'too much of anything isn't good for you.'

The teenagers seem to feel confident about their use of social networking and it has certainly increased their self image. They have identified with a connection that is not necessarily governed by their geography. It is the extension of the human concept of personal networking and also considers the idea of 'trust'.Lyndsay Grant from Future Lab comments that many young people are well aware of the pros and cons of the way things work ... but there are always those who aren't. Neil Selwyn adds that ' Young people have always behaved in an inappropriate manner ... the difference now is that they have a much wider scope.

On the bullying issue there seems to be a recognition that cyber-bullying is on the 'up' ... but then it would be wouldn't it ... like road accidents when traffic increases ... I am interested if the online bullies are also the offline ones ! The programme points out the very worst of bullying ... it is awful ... but the adult comments that the onlineness of the action brought it to the fore. Good from bad.

It appears that there is not much different taking place in terms of bullying but it is that the media and the population at large get to hear about it and see it almost every day. This is not to excuse it but it does highlight it and it is at the front of people's social conscience.

John Potter highlights again that all of the 'bad' things existed before the medium of social networks was developed and he points out that the things we can/could do with them are so valuable that we need to work out ways of making everyone safe. It is an education thing.

Stephen Heppell expounds on the powerfulness of the tools that are available to all of us.

Teachers need to take on the mantle of engaging with young people in their place (we used to do this by watching Blue Peter!)The problem seems to be that they are one step (or more) behind.But one teacher uses the fantastic phrase; ' ... the children can have the voice to express ...' We ARE getting there, we are !! And she picks up on the idea that the children are not just being consumers but are now also the creators of content.

John Potter highlights the problems for teachers that are posed by new technology in that the systems need to be adjusted to take onboard the innovation ... He indicates that Scotland might well be leading here!

Stephen Heppell finishes off by saying ' Tomorrow's school is a place with a lot more joy.'

Phrasr

Creativity, in all of its forms, is never far away from my mind and I often show Ken Robinson's TED clip to people who 'don't get' what I am so passionate about.A quote from Pablo Picasso I picked up today on Tricia Neal's site “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Looking at some of the tools available to get people on the road to creativity I came across another of the Flickr apps that I had seen and neglected and just wondered (yet again) whether this might be the spark that lights someone's fire.

Phrasr works with Flickr. You type in a phrase or sentence and it selects pictures from the Flickr galleries that it has access to and produces a montage (?) to illustrate the text. Is it creative ... well I think it is possibly a good start to getting young people to express themselves in a bi-modal way.

It is FREE and there is no sign up ... you just do it. (There are, of course, safety issues here as once you have published you can see what anyone else has written.)

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY LITERACIES

This is a straight quote from the website of The National Council of the Teachers of English based in Urbana, Illinois, USA ... picked from the blog of Will Richardson the writer of Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts. Will has written extensively about the 'read/write web'.

Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee
February 15, 2008

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Will the New Framework for Literacy in England and the collected guidance on literacy in other countries manage to reflect this quickly enough to fit our young people for their demanding futures in a digital world? Or will the learners simply plot their own pathways through the institutional maze?

This has a direct link into Ewan's post today about 'The outcomes for Literacy in Scotland'. He picks out all of the best bits ... thanks goodness there are some really good bits ... and the definition of what makes a 'text' is little short of wonderful to my way of thinking to my way of thinking. Might have to buy a kilt soon !

Speaking Freely

"Sitting at the Learning Support Services ICT Conference in Stockport. Terrific reponse to the concept of using Web 2 applications. Very enthusiastic group of people. Going to carry on this afternoon to do another session getting people to move forward with Textease Studio CT."

spoken through SpinVox

The future for our kids

I have long ( and often hard) struggled to come to terms with the institutional nature of our education systems and establishment. One particular theme always come back to me and that is that of 'learner reponsibility' (never mind learner voice for the moment.) I have always opted for change by revolution or productive cataclysm ... think of Noah and the Flood ... sort of what I had in mind for education. A world sized skip so that we could begin again.

David Warlick comments to a post on Will Richardson's blog: 'that the best thing we could teach kids today is how to teach themselves ... in a response to David's:

Our kids’ futures will require them to be:

• Networked–They’ll need an “outboard brain.”
• More collaborative–They are going to need to work closely with people to co-create information.
• More globally aware–Those collaborators may be anywhere in the world.
• Less dependent on paper–Right now, we are still paper training our kids.
• More active–In just about every sense of the word. Physically. Socially. Politically.
• Fluent in creating and consuming hypertext–Basic reading and writing skills will not suffice.
• More connected–To their communities, to their environments, to the world.
• Editors of information–Something we should have been teaching them all along but is even more important now.

The comments to this post (What Do We Know About Our Kids’ Futures? Really.) are well worth spending time on.

Further reading along the theme took me to Don Ledingham's Learning Log where he outlines the potential of 'Curriculum for Excellence' and sites 33 ideas which could together turn evolution to revolution.

They are worth a read in themselves to focus the mind but some in particular stick out to coincide with previous comments:

Young people over the age of 16 may devise their own curriculum by accessing courses available at their own school, other schools, further education and higher education institiutions learning and on-line learning environments.

Schools can use voluntary mentors who - following appropriate disclosure - can support the independent learning of students

All learners will have their own personal computer with wifi capacity which they can use at home and at school to access their learning.

Read about a maths lesson in 2020 ...

It seems to me that we have reached a sort of Tipping Point and that the way forward is to take a gigantic leap not based on all of our previous knowledge and experience but based on a leap of faith. We have too much information to compute quickly enough to make the radical changes that our young people need as they grow up in the digital world. (read about thin slicing)We are held back by our own fears ... it is time to grasp the light sabre in our hands and ...

Creativity, innovation, drama, collaboration ...

Not new but ...Tricia Neal sent me a link this morning to a video that really got me thinking about the power of drama and sense of audience that can be developed collaboratively. Shot in Grand Central Station, New York the drama reminded me of the 'Flashmob Opera' I saw in the shopping centre at Meadowhall in Sheffield. Awesome audience contact and high culture brought out of its power base.

I feel sure that inspired, innovative and creative teachers will take on board the incredible strength of such performances and, in keeping with the agenda to 'get out there and do it', will invoke groups to connect ! Me ... forever the optimist !

Where USA leads ...

Are we short of teachers? Are not the 'right' people applying for the jobs? Is the TDA recruitment programme in total disarray? It must be tough if the Government have decided to bring the armed forces in.

'Former soldiers should be retrained as teachers and used to bring military style discipline to tough inner city schools, a think tank has said.
The government is being urged to adopt a US-style programme ( I do hope you notice the url of this site !)which brings ex-servicemen and women back to school.' I can't think of an educational trend or aspiration that has come from the USA that I ever thought was a good idea and I don't think this will change that. I do hope someone will be able to put me right on this. You can read the full transcript of how it all works here.

I am just thinking about role models at the moment. The report suggests that: 'the fact that ex-soldiers had a macho image could help engender respect - particularly among boys.' I appreciate the word 'could' in there. The report goes on to add: 'Whether we like it or not, children from more deprived neighbourhoods often respond to raw physical power.'

If the stress was on the experience that the ex-service personel had to offer then that would be great but it all seems to be based on the miltary concept of discipline. I am just unsure how this fits with my concept of the personalisation of education and young people being responsible for their own learning.

I could be just getting this out of proportion. How many other professionals who, on the whole retire young, would make admirable teachers? I seem to need to review my concept of 'role model'.

Applications to help your day

I have recently blogged about teachers spending time extracting videos from Youtube and other sources so that they can 'safely' be used in a classroom to support a curriculum context. I have use 'unplug' - a FireFox plugin to do this and this has been successful and not too time consuming.

Today, reading through my feeds, I have come across iDesktop.tv in a post on Nik Peachey's Quickshout blog. It does the job quickly and simply ... no need to register or subscribe, just type in what you want and have a look to see if it is there. If so click on the 'save as flv button' and it will download to your desktop. What could be easier? I tried a number of searches ( Sir Ken Robinson, Oh Laura, cup stacking ...) and although the search was perhaps a little slow, it certainly came up with the videos I was looking for.

For those presenters of you this is another of those things that you can quickly see a curriculm application for. It is an autocue or teleprompter. Called The Online Teleprompter it is so simple to use it is hardly worth explaining. The instruction for use are: Write or cut and paste your script to the form below. Press the button to start the prompter.
If text needs editing, just close the prompter window and restart with the new script. Thats it ! This again from the trawls of Nic Peachey ... I wonder what he will find next?

Let's hear it for culture

On 10th December I posted Mr Ball's offering on the primary curiculum:

A root-and-branch" review is planned into what is taught in English primary schools to allow more time for reading, writing and maths .... some set subjects and "clutter" would be cut to allow more flexibility and all primary pupils to be taught a foreign language.

The general outcry at the time, from the education world, was 'Please leave us alone to get on with what we are good at ... stop fiddling !'Now this morning I read from the BBC (it was their top morning news item) that our young people are now being promised access to high-quality cultural activities and the chance to pursue creative careers. This is just as it should be and something educationalist have been calling for ... I just wonder what Mr Ball's considers to be 'clutter'.

But where does it all fit? I feel sure we will hear more about this later today.

The way the primary school day is currently structured (constrained) by the National Frameworks really legislates against good primary practice. Those who can remember 'spider diagrams' before they became 'mind-maps' will be more than aware of how inspired teachers can develop awareness through a vast range of curriculum initiatives that centre on pupil involvement. There is no need for extra time for this initiative. All that is needed is for teachers to respond to the growing awareness that there is more to be developed in teaching and learning than the ability to manipulate text and numbers.

I feel confident that if left to their best devices practitioners will embrace this 'new' cutural initiative.

One of the problems that faces the initiative is in the text: "at least five hours of high-quality culture per week". We really don't have a shared definition of what 'high-quality' might constitute no more than we have a definition of 'good art' ( see the Turner Prize for the last few years ... particularly Mark Wallinger's bear.)

Did you know ...

There is to be a New Inquiry into the National Curriculum.

The Children, Schools and Families Committee is to undertake an inquiry into the National Curriculum. Written submissions are invited for the inquiry.

The inquiry will consider:
*the principle of whether there should be a National Curriculum
*how the fitness-for-purpose of the National Curriculum might be improved
*the management of the National Curriculum and its articulation with other policies and strategies with which schools must work.

Submissions should arrive no later than noon on Monday 17 March 2008.

This is a chance to have a say in what will happen ... if teachers and parents do not take this opportunity then 'they' will not be in a strong position to argue that no-one asked !

Were you listening? ...

Those of you who have been listening to me for any length of time will know what I feel about the moment our children begin their institutionalised education programme … they go to school. I have always said that it is too, too early for the formalisation that is foisted upon them and, in the end, it does harm rather than good.

The Cambridge-based Primary Review's report suggests starting school at the age of five may be too early and questions provision for the very young Our European neighbours have known this for a long time and their children begin their formal education at a ‘readiness’ point for most more than two years down the line.

Now this reputable report has been released saying the same thing! The BBC reported it this morning (as did The Independent, on their front page).
The report by the National Foundation for Educational Research will be widely regarded as positive by most educationalists. It is called:Primary Review: The Structure of Primary Education: England and Other Countries (Primary Review Research Report 9/1) by Anna Riggall and Caroline Sharp and asks the questions: When should children start compulsory schooling? What should they be taught? What is the impact on children's learning of different schooling structures? It is well worth reading section 6.1 The impact of age of starting school.

It is hoped that the conclusion from the report (one section of thirty-two) will influence the Government in the development of education provision especially in the early years. For me, one of the key things that come from this report are the comparisons with countries around the world and the use of the word 'assumption' in the way that we have developed educational provision.

After examining the research evidence Primary Review Research Report 9/1 concludes that:• Since the 1967 Plowden Report there have been a number of significant structural changes in English primary education, many of them initiated by or as a consequence of the 1988 Education Reform Act. These have resulted in an increased standardisation of primary school curriculum,teaching, assessment and inspection arrangements across the country.
• There has been an increased participation in educational provision among younger children. The number of small primary schools has decreased markedly during this period.
• A comparison of structural features across the six countries included in this study shows considerable variation in such features as age of starting school, length of the school year, average size of school and length of primary schooling. This diversity may be of potential interest to those wishing to consider alternatives to the prevailing structures in primary education in
England.
• While it has been relatively straightforward to collate information about elements of primary school structure, it is much more difficult to find evidence to evaluate their impact and effectiveness. One issue that has received greater attention from researchers is the impact of school starting age on attainment. The assumption that an early school starting age is beneficial for children’s later attainment is not well supported in the research and therefore remains open to question, while there are particular concerns about the appropriateness of current provision for four-year-olds in school reception classes. (the emboldening here is mine)
• The general lack of evidence on impact does nothing to reduce the relevance of structural issues for children, parents, teachers and decision-makers. Further research may help to illuminate some of these issues. It is, however, inherently challenging to identify the influence of specific structural arrangements when considering the many different factors that influence learning and teaching in
primary schools.

It is interesting to read details of the Compulsory age of starting school in European countries, 2007.

Add to this the article by Jenni Russell in the Guardian of Thursday February 7, 2008. Read down to Michael Rosen's comment and then on and on to the others ... several comment: How did it come to this? How indeed?

17th Shambles Newsletter

For those who want to keep up with what is happening in the Far East (from UK that is) the 17th Shambles Newsletter has just been published online.

The main 'feature' is the opening of the International Schools Island in Second Life. The slurl for this is here. If you already have a 'body' in SL then it is just a matter of click and go.... happy teleporting !

The Lost Gardens of Heligan

What a brave project for Cornwall LA, led by Linda Prideaux, for late January ... but the spin off was enormous.
On Thursday 31st January with the heavens bucketting down a group of teachers met to work with a group of children (and it was the children who were mentoring the teachers here !) in an exciting project in the Lost Gardens of Heligan. This will certainly, for me be a place for a future visit and I fancy for a good number of the participants too.

Wonderful ... you can follow the minute by minute blog of the whole event here.

Deepest Cornwall ...

An exciting day set up for tomorrow ... I am in deepest Cornwall not far from 'The Lost Gardens of Helligan' where I, a large group of Cornish teachers and another large group of Cornish children (The children come from the Bishop Bronescombe School in St Austell.) are going to use some advanced ICT to investigate invertebrates and plot their positions on EDA machines and upload the data to Google Earth. The engine that will drive all of this is called WildMap ( with its partner WildKey). As well as this the children ( and their teacher helpers) are going to be recording sounds and impressions of what they find as .wav files so that they can be used for podcasts which will be developed during the afternoon using the Softease Podium software.

All very exciting ...real datahandling for an authentic purpose.

PS Weather Update for Cornwall 31st January ( near here ) is rain and a bit more rain.

McAlevel

'Please can I have a McChicken Sandwich, Medium Fries, Fresh Orange and two 'A' Levels'.

Hmmmmm !!

I suspect that Man United will be the next to offer , followed by ***** ( just fill this in for yourself).

It reminds me of the 11 life rules ( though I am not sure why!!) attributed to BG but really ...it's an excerpt from the book "Dumbing Down our Kids" by educator Charles Sykes. It is a list of eleven things you did not learn in school and directed at high school and college grads.