Tag: education

Embedding WordPress across a school district: some eduBuzz.org stats

What might take-up of WordPress across a 40-school local authority look like?

Monthly Visits Dec 2009 to Oct 2010

October 2010 web server summary stats for East Lothian‘s eduBuzz.org system (visitors and page views) show that the current levels of use this year, a traditionally quieter time, are already similar to the last school year’s peak period of May/June.

Monthly Page Views Dec 2009 to Oct 2010

The pattern each year has been similar, with usage at this time of year approximately doubling by May/June.  Together with steady recent increases, this is a year-on-year growth rate of well over 100%.

The eduBuzz.org WordPress site now has 1,161 sub-sites (blogs) and 2,336 registered user accounts.

21st Century Education: A Canadian Perspective

As pressure rises on education budgets, some powerful voices are starting to question the costs and value of ICT in schools.

In Scotland, teachers are often finding that the more they understand Curriculum for Excellence, the more important technology seems to become. ICT is key, for example, to personalisation and choice; providing engaging, relevant learning experiences; collaborating with others, in and beyond the school, and creating authentic learning tasks.

Sometimes, though, it can be hard to bridge the gap between the two world views. In New Brunswick, Canada, the Department of Education has produced a 5 minute video to help.

This video was produced by the New Brunswick Department of Education to stimulate discussion among educators and other stakeholders in public education in the province of New Brunswick. The 21st Century presents unique challenges for education worldwide. In order to keep pace with global change we must focus on 21st Century Skills and public education must adapt to keep students engaged. Rigor and relevance are key,

The parallels with our own Curriculum for Excellence are striking.

Via caross on the Glow Futures Forum.

Edinburgh Chamber Looking to Glow to Improve School Links

Glow Meet could soon be enabling new links between schools and industry across Edinburgh, thanks to Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Education Policy Group.

At today’s meeting of the Group, chairman Ray Harris of Edinburgh’s Telford College identified the development of school / industry links as one of the key themes to be progressed this year. This links strongly with the Curriculum for Excellence principle of Relevance.

Children should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future.

Earlier discussions on this had flagged up that many of the barriers to developing links were associated with the overheads involved in organising the physical travel and supervision.  Not only does this present difficulties for schools, there are similar difficulties for organisations faced with hosting school children on their sites. Glow Meet offers the possibility of developing virtual links at much lower cost, so I’ll be meeting with Roger Horam of the Chamber to explore the possibilities and get a pilot link-up organised.

Possibilities discussed included:

  • Link-ups with a experienced professionals, to allow students to find out about their jobs
  • Link-ups with recent school-leavers, to find out what was and wasn’t useful from school
  • Link-ups with specialised people, of interest to only a few students, which could be advertised to schools Edinburgh or Scotland-wide
  • Recording of these Glow Meet sessions for future careers staff use

It was also agreed to set up a blog to record progress, which will be set up on edubuzz soon.

“One Netbook Per Child” Project Now Started

Now that netbooks offer low cost, portable computing – and will only get better – how can schools best exploit them?

That’s the question behind a new East Lothian project starting this term.  There’s been a lot of discussion of the potential of these technologies over the last year or so and we now aim to make a start on learning about the real-world possibilities. We’re deliberately trying to push this as far as we can beyond what we already do to improve the chances of identifying new benefits – and force ourselves to learn our way past any barriers that emerge. That’s why the project willinclude, for example:

  • a focus on web-based collaborative working, using services such as Glow and edubuzz
  • issuing netbooks on a one-to-one basis to every child (92) in the Primary 5 cohort
  • giving children ownership of the devices, and allowing them to take them home
  • encouraging connection to home or other wi-fi networks, such as in libraries, where possible
  • encouraging multimedia use through provision of a few Flip video cameras in each class

We have been fortunate to have full support from our IT department for the project. The arrangement is that they will enable wireless network access for the netbooks in the school, but cannot offer software support – if any configuration problems arise, the devices will simply be restored to factory settings by the teacher.

Today Elizabeth Cowan and I met with the Primary 5 teachers at Kings Meadow Primary who will be involved to make a start on planning.  The day included an intro to Glow from Ian Hoffman of the Glow team which included useful examples of work going on elsewhere.

Curriculum for Excellence: Building the Curriculum 3

Building the Curriculum 3, a recent framework for developing learning and teaching approaches to Curriculum for Excellence, is a thought-provoking read. For those keen to get on with it, it provides a very comprehensive checklist of dos and don’ts, and it’s generally quite readable.

That’s not to say it would win any prizes from the plain English people. Some parts would have benefited from more ruthless editing, such as this on Principles of Curriculum Design:

The principles of curriculum design apply at all stages of learning with different emphases at different stages. The principles must be taken into account for all children and young people. They apply to the curriculum both at an organisational level and in the classroom and in any setting where children and young people are learners. Further consideration to applying these principles is given in the sections of this paper looking at the different stages of learning.

There’s much less mention of vocational education than I’d expected, but maybe my expectations had been raised by recently reading the OECD report on Quality and Equity in Scotland’s Schools. The OECD’s recommendation for a bolder and broader approach to vocational studies in schools is mentioned, and the entitlement specified. But as it’s almost completely absent from the rest of the paper, the net effect is to tilt the status balance once more towards the academic subjects, which is a pity. Peter Peacock was right.
The biggest concern with it has to be, though, where the resources are going to come from to get the planning done. The paper makes it clear that the responsibility lies with schools and partners to produce these programmes, but this is happening just when schools are under more efficiency pressure than ever.

Perhaps one way to square this circle might be to break with our normal practice of a few expert people doing most of the work, and engage a lot of people in doing a small amount each, using collaborative software such as wikis? That would reduce the barriers to involvement to an absolute minimum. Wikipedia, after all, started out as the expert-written Nupedia. After only 12 articles were published in the first year, the wiki was introduced to help create content more rapidly.

OECD Review: best primer yet on Curriculum for Excellence?

Jobs growthIf you’re interested in understanding Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, take the time to read the recent OECD Review of Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland: it’s available on Google Books.

It’s not a quick read, at 167 pages, but reading it is time well spent. When I changed career to education over 3 years ago, I found it was relatively easy to find out about the individual parts of the Scottish education jigsaw, particularly from web sites, but hard to get the big picture. Even Moray House’s excellent Returning to Teaching Course, although it got me hooked on a new career, just made me realise how little I knew about the way the bigger picture had changed.

I can’t recommend this paper enough to anyone who wants to know the full story, and maybe gets a bit frustrated reading the kind of “bite-sized chunks” typical of web sites and marketing materials. It is an excellent help in making sense of Curriculum for Excellence, particularly by putting it into an international context. It doesn’t pull any punches about the urgency, either.

If you’ve not heard of it, there’s a one-page summary on the OECD site.

A number of challenges remain, however. Notwithstanding the overall success rate of the Scottish educational system, gaps in achievement have opened up, beginning in primary education and widening throughout junior secondary years. Another concern is the increasing number of young people leaving school with minimal qualifications, a tendency found amongst students from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The OECD report, by an international team of examiners from Australia, Belgium, Finland and New Zealand, gives a series of recommendations on how such challenges can be met.

For this to be freely available to everyone working in Scottish education is wonderful, even if it’s not possible to copy text or print it. I hope as many people as possible take the time to read it.

Of course, it’s very unlikely to be read by students in schools. Yet there’s a lot in it that could be of huge value to many. But how do we bridge that gap?

How will schools educate for Science2.0?

Looks like Web2.0 is now impacting science in radical ways. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about recording those experiments on-line, and not just in private jotters? Via Slashdot:

Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways. “Under [the] radically transparent ‘open notebook’ approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication… The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.” One project profiled is MIT’s OpenWetWare, launched in 2005. The wiki-based project now encompasses more than 6,100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. Last year the NSF awarded OpenWetWare a 5-year grant to “transform the platform into a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT… the grant will also support creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that other research communities can use.” The article also gives air time to Science 2.0 skeptics. “It’s so antithetical to the way scientists are trained,” one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert.