Latest post from my ICT blog
Calling all teachers interested in web apps!
Date: 6th February, 2010
I’ve come across a Google Docs spreadsheet by way of Tom Barrett, one of the more prolific education twitterers out there. The aim of the document is to collect data on what services are blocked or unblocked by all the LAs in England and Wales.
This is important! As teachers excited by technology many of us are being prevented from innovating because our LAs are blocking everything we come across. I’m fascinated by this document. Already I can see that Norfolk LA is stricter than all the others completed so far, whereas Notts is the least restrictive.
Please, if you are a teacher in England or Wales, could you have a look and contribute. All you need is a Google Docs account. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/bEwfsb. This kind of information is gold-dust and would make an ideal discussion for NAACE, provided we can complete it of course…
…so please help!
Belated thoughts on BETT 2010
Date: 5th February, 2010
It’s coming up for a month since BETT 2010, and a few days off work sick gives me the opportunity to gather my thoughts…
Without doubt, Microsoft had the most impact for me. They seemed to have more prominent stands this year, in the prime spaces on the ground floor, near the centre. What struck me? Their vision of cloud computing for education, named live@edu, and the fact they were actively encouraging people to use Office 2010 beta.
So, what is live@edu? It’s a free resource provided by Microsoft for educational institutions. With it you get student email, access to collaborative Microsoft tools like Office Live, help with keeping students’ data private, 25GB of online storage per student and a few other things.
I’m excited by it because I see it as the ideal future for the VLE. It’s free, which is very desirable considering the potential cutbacks to education funding due to the recession, and, it’s secure, something which concerns me with the VLEs procured by LAs in England. Then, purely from a learning point-of-view, it’d be exposing children to real applications rather than products designed to mimic such applications in a school environment (although that’s probably only relevant in KS1 and KS2).
I noticed 2009 brought some changes to Microsoft’s attitude towards Beta testing. I don’t know how they did it before, but it seems they have been very positive in encouraging home and small business users to use beta versions of Windows 7. I downloaded it in July, for example. At BETT 2010, they were actively telling people to donwload the Office 2010 beta, although I’d actually done that in December.
Anyway, I really like Office 2010, and have no intention of going back to Open Office. Office 2010 just works, and we’ll happily pay for whatever licences we need come the Autumn when the beta runs out.
NAACE publication: ICT and the London 2012 Games
Date: 27th November, 2009
I gather this document has been sent out to schools. I think it’s early, so should be repeated closer to the time, but it is a lovely piece of work. And it’s only four pages long!
For those of us who sometimes find our colleagues not as inspired by ICT as we are, I think there’s a lot of relevant content, not just explaining the importance of ICT to the Olympic Games. It also suggests lots of opportunities for effective cross-curricula uses of ICT to to with the Games.
I recommend this document be printed out and shown to all the teaching staff in every primary school, just not yet! It’s too far in the future for me to be making use of this right now, but I really do intend to use it. Hopefully, I’ll either remember it nearer the time and remember it was a NAACE publication, or it will be mailed out again.
Staff meeting 5: a school vision for ICT
Date: 3rd November, 2009
As promised earlier, I’ve held a staff meeting and discussed coming up with a school vision for ICT. There weren’t as many parents as we’d have liked and we haven’t involved the children (not sure we want to), but I presented an edited list of bullet points from a previous post and we went through and got rid of what we didn’t like, edited, added and so on. The results are the points below. The next step is to (hopefully) get some feedback from other people (eg, you!) before turning this lot into paragraph form. So, feedback through comments would be very, very welcome!
Technology for learning should:
- promote social interaction and collaborative working
- support inclusive and innovative approaches to learning
- allow learners access so that they can study at any time and anywhere, e.g. using a range of devices and/or wireless technology
- provide access to high quality learning materials
- provide a safe environment, preventing access to unsuitable material and preventing inappropriate use of systems
- motivate children who lack enthusiasm for traditional methods of learning
- enable opportunities for work to be produced, submitted and marked electronically
- enable learners to track their own progress
- enable parents to engage with their child’s learning.
Technology for teaching should:
- ensure that all staff are motivated and skilled in the use of technology
- enable a culture of continuous development of technical skills
- enable teachers to access a wide range of multimedia and digital resources
- enable technology to be used in a wide range of learning spaces in the school and with variety of different group sizes
- enable teachers to create, use and adapt teaching resources created by themselves and others
- involve the use of virtual learning environments for sharing planning and resources with other educators outside school
- support work planning and monitoring, for groups and individuals
- enable planning and assessment to take place electronically.
Technology for management should:
- be secure and integrated with curriculum and student recording systems
- allow for efficient administrative and financial systems including electronic filing and cashless financial transactions within the school
- provide for electronic subject-leader portfolios
- provide access to achievement and target-setting data for individuals (including data about lesson attendance and behaviour)
- enable the aggregation and analysis of data to provide information about course effectiveness, staff and learner performance
- enable the use of pupil performance data to inform decisions about staff development and deployment
- enable the use of video recording evidence as a means of self-led professional development
- support communication with parents about students’ attendance, behaviour and attainment
- enable secure transfer of data with other schools, local authorities, and children’s services
- be accessible to all who need to use it – including school governors.
Childline website – it’s rather good!
Date: 1st November, 2009
I’ve just been adding some information to the Useful to Know section on my homepage, and thought it would be good to link to the Childline site. It’s actually a really good site – nowhere near as dry as I’d expected.
One game I was playing requires you to burst some bubble wrap in order to type out the phone number for childline. It’s called Bubble Wrap, funnily enough. Let me know if you score over 165 points as I’m sure that’s the maximum. Well, I couldn’t get any more…
Creating an acceptable use policy
Date: 19th October, 2009
Creating an acceptable-use policy? If you follow Becta’s advice, you’ll be presenting your children with a list of examples of IT use and asking them to arrange them into piles:
a) Acceptable activities/things we can do (green background)
b) Unacceptable activities/things we can’t do (red background)
c) Activities which need further consideration before making a decision (amber background).
I tried this last year, and became quite unstuck because the correct pile for an example was so dependent on context. There were many clear-cut examples which were obviously unacceptable, but the majority of the examples were entirely variable on the situation and could be argued as either unsuitable or suitable. I felt the resultant message was something like, “You definitely can’t do this or this, but most things are allowed if you ask me first,” which isn’t particularly helpful.
This year, I’m drafting a rough acceptable use policy myself, usin guidance elsewhere on the Becta site. Sometimes it is entirely appropriate to say to children, “This is what you can and can’t do. Now, get on with it.” And that’s the approach I’m going to err on the side of this time. I do, however, intend to discuss the draft policy with the staff, and then with my class (the oldest children in the school), before coming up with the finished product. And, of course, it will be a forever working document which I/we will adapt as things change.
Free Anti-virus for Schools?
Date: 19th October, 2009
I’ve been considering buying the AVG security suite for the school’s computers, but today came across something which looks even better value. It’s called Panda Cloud Antivirus, and it’s free, which is great news. It’s even got some good reviews, comparing well with the household names in anti-virus, which often seem a little expensive to me.
It operates from the cloud, which means it needs to be connected to the internet to function properly. I’ve just installed it without problem on my laptop, at school, so see how I get on and maybe even try installing it on a few of the kids’ machines.
New initiatives in schools: caution, please!
Date: 12th October, 2009
I’ve been looking at some research on the Norfolk schools website, into using a multi-sensory approach in KS1 maths. I’ve got a research background myself, and, although it had nothing to do with educating children, I think I’ve got a solid grasp of what good research looks like, and I feel the need to caution other teachers into reading too much into this research project.
There are a number of concerns I have: firstly, the alarmingly low sample-size, just 43 children. Statistically, this means the finding can only be taken with a pinch of salt. Secondly, any improvement observed during the study cannot be solely attributed to the techniques being investigated. In fact, it may be possible that simply playing music in the classroom would be just as effective. Thirdly, this research has not been peer-reviewed.
I have nothing against the mechanics of the project. I am sure the teachers involved did nothing wrong and that even the lead researcher acted in best faith. And, as part of a larger research project, this research might prove significant. But in the absence of any of the above concerns being mentioned within the report, I must advise all teachers and LA advisors to treat the findings with caution.
I’m not going to comment on that particular project further, as it would be unfair to the participants. What I would like to say is that I think it is about time that teachers and schools stopped putting so many initiatives into practice, without first looking for reliable evidence the initiative is the best tool for the job. Brain Gym was a classic example, with numerous headteachers falling over themselves to bring it into their schools, unaware is was simply pseudo-scientific claptrap they were spending tax-payers money on.
Adobe Contribute
Date: 10th October, 2009
Earlier today I was contacted about building someone a website which they could access using Adobe Contribute. I have it on my PC as part of Adobe Creative Suite 4 but have never actually used it. The aim of the software is to be able to update websites, blogs or not, through the Contribute interface. This is the first post I’ve written using the method, so this is more of a trial than a post, but so far I’m thinking it is going to be a lot quicker posting through Contribute than through the WordPress back-end.
Staff meeting 4: tracking children's progress
Date: 5th October, 2009
I mentioned somewhere how important I felt it was that change is monitored and reinforced regularly for it to happen. This is the second staff meeting using the local authority’s tracking tool that we’ve had in two terms, which suggests the headteacher feels the same.
The tracking tool we are using consists of a suite of spreadsheet macros, which work through a standard spreadsheet program. You open the files just like any other Excel document, for example. Unfortunately, some of the functions are unavailable when using OpenOffice Calc, as the macros have been specifically written for Microsoft Excel.
For someone like me, who loves data, there’s plenty to get stuck into. This afternoon, I was setting level targets for my class. Having their past performance data in front of me was really useful and it has resulted in me raising my targets for some children, where, for example, they have shown a dramatic improvement last year, or where, children’s personal circumstances have since improved.
A boon from using this tool with the whole staff is the amount of ICT it involves, particularly addressing the assessment area of the ICT Mark. A year ago, we weren’t using tools like this because the headteacher and the assessment leader weren’t confident enough with IT. I’d used something similar in Hertfordshire, but needed support to introduce it; fortunately, I’ve not even had to help do that.
The next step is to ensure the teaching staff make good use of it and don’t just look at it during staff meetings. The headteacher is keen for everybody to reap the benefits and with OFSTED looming, it can only be good thing…