Category Archives: ICT

Using Glow Meet (Adobe Connect)

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I had reason this week to set up a three-way video conference with two other directors of education from other parts of Scotland.  I have to say that this was my first experience of using such technology for such a purpose and I’m now officially a fan.  If they had come to visit me it would have taken the best part of day’s travel time and a combined journey distance 0f over 900 miles.

I asked my colleague David Gilmour to describe the techie bit; but I’m seriously thinking about using this for some face-to-face meetings in East Lothian. Anybody out there interested in taking part in my first GLOW MEET Listen and Learn?

GLOW MEET

It’s a very up-to-date, good quality web conferencing system which enables Glow users to hold online meetings between any number of participants, in any location. It’s used to link classes hundreds of miles apart, offer national teacher CPD sessions and simply to share events and performances within individual schools. It can be used from any computer on the web, in or out of school.

Often people think it’ll be awkward to use, but the new version, based on Adobe Connect, is proving easy to use and popular with staff. There’s no longer any need for special software to be installed, and no complicated start-up wizard to get through.

Most of the time, people just use it in a Skype-like way, with voice, video and perhaps a simple chat box. But it’s capable of much more than that: participants can share presentations, sketch on a whiteboard and even share a view of applications running on their desktop. The meetings can be recorded, too, for replay in the Glow Group or for sharing more widely as a simple video.

What do you need to take part?

You can join a Glow Meet with as little as the URL of the right Glow Group, and your Glow username and password. If you want to talk, or to be seen, you’ll need a microphone and webcam, but they’re not essential. You click a link, Adobe Connect starts up, and you’re in.

Here’s a “Getting Started” guide: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/GlowingHelp/?p=3079, or contact David Gilmour or Shirley Lawson in Curriculum ICT at East Lothian Council.

Twittershare: Using Twitter to improve education (Part 1)

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We held a brainstorming session on Thursday with a view to exploring how we could maximise the potential of Twitter for teachers, learners, parents and other stakeholders. The initial thoughts we explored on Twitter – see #twittershare

What follows is a thought-piece (Part 1) on suggestions which emerged during the course of the meeting with a view to helping us establish an implementation strategy.

It’s important to stress from the outset that Twitter is only one tool in the box, and as such, regardless of it’s potential benefits, should always be seen as part of a wider systems based approach to educational improvement.

1. Give Twitter A focus; don’t make Twitter THE focus.

Ironically when attempting to promote the use of Twitter there is a tendency to focus upon the tool itself – as opposed to what the tool can do help us achieve our educational objectives. These objectives could be: improving student learning; creating a network of collaborative professionals; promoting partnership and understanding between parents and schools; involving stakeholders in creating new policy; sharing valuable experiences, ideas and sources with others; etc. The list of objectives is only limited by our imagination but the basic point remains the same – “Don’t make Twitter THE focus, but give Twitter A focus.”

2. Look beyond early adopters or willing volunteers

If you look at the profiles of many Educational Tweeters they often profess to have an interest in technology. That’s probably to be expected and yet to base a strategy on people’s passion for technology is to alienate a huge swathe of the population. I’m sure there are lessons to be learned here from the likes of Steve Jobs who tried to focus on making his tools align with the needs of the user – even if the user wan’t initially aware of their needs.

The second element of this principle is that so many educational initiatives across the globe have foundered on the forlorn belief that we can create change by growing beyond a band of willing volunteers. It was Professor Richard Elmore who most eloquently identified this fundamental flaw in the majority of educational change strategies. For the reality is that such change models rarely extend beyond that self selecting group leaving the majority of professionals to continue with their practice relatively unscathed. The unspoken philosophy adopted by such individuals can be captured by the phrase “I won’t get on this one as there be another one coming along soon”, i.e. if they keep their heads down their practice will go unchallenged.

3. Help leaders to lead by example

This is an imperative for changing the practice of the profession yet all too often we (leaders) expect and even encourage others to adopt practices when our own continues to conform to what we know – “don’t do as I do, do as I say”. It’s difficult to work out exactly why this is the case and it must be something to do with the fear that we may be perceived by our employees to be wasting our time on something which perhaps appears to be peripheral to the “serious” business of management.

The second obstacle is the legitimate concern that many leaders just don’t feel they have the time available to engage in anything new and possibly tangential to their central function. This concern will only be overcome if leaders are able to see that the tool can actually allow them to achieve their goals in an even more effective and time efficient manner than their current practice – if it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be used.

4. Overcome the fear factor

We must never underestimate the fear that people have for exposing themselves to the public on an open network. Most professionals have been brought up within a highly hierarchical system where communication is decidedly up-down in nature and just as frequently controlled by others. This is not necessarily a bad thing as teachers, and even managers, can be protected from themselves, and others, in such a controlled environment.

The idea of sharing one’s thoughts, or being immediately accessible to young people or parents can be enough to put off even the most intrepid professional.

That’s why training must accompany any attempt to encourage teachers and leaders to use Twitter. That training should be aligned with the focus (see point 1) and should happen in conjunction – as opposed to the “here’s a Twitter course”.

5. Hand over the training process to our students

Teachers and school leaders are used to the traditional top down, cascade model of training which has been the dominant training approach for the last fifty years. However, by encouraging our students to become the teachers we achieve two things. Firstly, we model to students that we are also learners and that no single group has a monopoly on knowledge. Secondly, the training we would receive could be collaborative and once again model the kind of learning and teaching approach we would hope to promote in our classrooms.

6. Seek out the Ryan Giggs effect

It’s a sad fact that Twitter use exploded in the UK when people wanted to find out information about the mystery footballer at the centre of a news scandal. Not that I’m suggesting that we mirror Mr Giggs’ behaviour but that we look for events, news and possibly personalities that people can only get access to through the medium of Twitter.

7. Create the tipping point though lots of tiny steps

Promoting Twitter use will never be achieved through the traditional single BIG project approach. The approach we should be taking is to build its application into everything we do to the extent that it eventually permeates everyone’s practice. By seeking to achieve that tipping point, the group of “late” or even “never” adopters – as described in Point 2 – are much more likely to begin to make of use of the tool and, in so doing, achieve the more important underlying objective of improving educational practice.

Twitter: Confessions of an unjustified sceptic

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I joined Twitter 60 days ago today. I’d put it off for nearly two years as I thought it was either a vehicle for shadowing celebrities, or a mindless activity in which people spent their time telling each other what they had for breakfast.

How wrong I was!!

In the intervening period I’ve come to realise that it’s a unique learning resource – and I talk as someone who has written over 900 posts on my Learning Log. By discovering others throughout the World who share a passion for education, tracking their thoughts, following their links, and engaging in productive conversations – I have been inspired, challenged and professionally invigorated.

The other – possibly most surprising outcome – has been that it has proved to be an engine for policy development. This happened in a completely organic manner yesterday morning. Sitting over a post-breakfast cup of coffee I spied an interesting tweet from that dynamic educational practitioner and thinker in the form of Fearghal Kelly. The tweet pointed to his most recent post on A Framework for Learning and Teaching.

Over the next hour I engaged in a conversation with Fearghal and others from throughout the twittisphere which culminated in the #Learnmeet concept being identified, agreed and committed to action. Not bad for a Saturday morning.

Added to that are a series of conversations which helped to shape a first draft of a senior high school curriculum policy – which is now about to go out for consultation using more traditional lines of communication.

Taken together these examples have shown me that we must embrace Twitter and encourage other colleagues to engage in the dialogue about our practice which can have such a positive impact upon our work, the quality of education we can provide, and – I would suggest – our well being. For too often professionals who wish to engage in professional dialogue can be isolated in their work setting if no-one shares their enthusiasm. With the use of Twitter we have the opportunity to challenge that sense of isolation and create a tipping point where dialogue about education becomes the norm.

To all on Twitter who have made me feel most welcome, thank you.

Educational Leadership and social media

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I first started using social media in 1997 when I was part of an online community which provided great support to me when I was engaged in a school transformation process.

Since that time I’ve continued to use social media networks, more particularly a blog as a secondary school head teacher, a learning log as head education and then director, and most recently a twitter account.

I think I’ve only come to realise how important such engagement is to me in my leadership role in the last few months.

Last year I decided to take time out from social media. So from the 10th May 2010 – 10th May 2011 I didn’t write or post to my own or any other network.

My reasons for stopping included the fact that a number of my colleagues in schools didn’t appreciate the manner in which I explored ideas in public without having first shared the ideas with them. Out of respect for them and to see how it might affect my work I decided to take the year out.

So what did I find out?

Perhaps the most surprising consequence was that I found my day to day work to be much harder and all consuming – I hesitate to use the word stressful. Looking back I think it was because my mind was completely drawn into operational matters.

The other element which was missing was the opportunity to reflect upon my work – to be able to try to make sense of my world and to be able to share and check that meaning out with others.

Another simple difference was the opportunity to learn from others. This has recently become even more apparent as twitter has opened up a completely new world of links and perspectives on the world of education.

On reflection my year out was a year without learning. I did my job, I solved problems, I led the service, but I didn’t learn – and without learning we are not professionals.

So at a recent meeting with colleagues I made it clear that I was going to recommence my learning log and redefined my reasons for doing so, which are to:

– scan the educational and children’s services horizon;
– research and examine international policy and practice;
– generate, explore and develop ideas for school and service improvement;
– collect and manage knowledge relevant to service development;
– consider how we can better integrate education and services to support children and young people from pre-birth to 18;
– engage in a transparent and accessible manner with colleagues and service users;
– promote and model the leadership behaviours and values  of our service; and
– take time to critically reflect upon issues of topical interest.

The underlying question which remains for me is if such a discipline can make such a difference to me, in my role as an educational leader, then how might it benefit colleagues in similar roles – and I would include teachers in this?

Of course, the normal response to such a query comes in one (or more)of three forms:

A) I don’t have time
B) I’m not into technology
c) I don’t see the point

The bottom line here is that the decision must always lie with the individual but ironically one of the safety valves that could make a difference to an over-worked and stressed profession is to begin to develop a routine which includes a moment of public reflection.

I’ll leave the last words to a paraphrase from John Dewey, which I use as my strap line for this learning log:

“we learn from our experience…..if we reflect upon our experience.”

Edubuzz – half a million page views in one day!

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Edubuzz.org is a learning network for learners in East Lothian, Scotland.

Set up by David Gilmour and Ewan McIntosh in 2006 it opens a window onto education in East Lothian, and enables a wider range of learning approaches, by providing staff and learners with some extra low-cost tools for web publishing, collaboration and communication.

It currently hosts over 1000 blogs for over 2500 registered users. The system is owned and managed by East Lothian Council Education & Children’s Services, and used by staff and students in the county’s 40 schools and central offices. Users also include parents and staff from other services.

Usually visits to the eduBuzz server are around 10,000 to 15,000 per day. During the snow closures we saw it reach 25,000 visits per day for the 5 closure days.
 
Last week it reached a new peak of 37,623 visits and served over half a million (545,479) pages in 24 hours.

The Death of Distance

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It was the economist Frances Cairncross who coined the phrase “The Death of Distance” She used this to demonstrate how the concept of distance has been annihilated due to modern communications technology.

This was brought home to me recently when reading my grandfather’s journal. Douglas James Gibson fought in the First World War 1914 – 1919, survived typhoid in 1921, went out to Malaya in 1923; and by 1942 was managing five rubber plantation estates until the Japanese invaded and captured Singapore. He was taken prisoner and held in Changi Jail as an internee from 6th March 1942 until his release on 3rd September 1945 – losing 90 lbs (41 kg) in the process.

Over his three and half years in incarceration he kept a meticulous diary in his passport, in almost microscopic writing. Looking at this diary seventy years later it’s hard to relate to how communications have so shrunk our world.

When my grandmother Jess boarded the Empire Star, one of the last boats out of Singapore, my grandfather didn’t hear if she was safe until 14 months later. The letter he received to give him the news of her safety had been dispatched nearly 9 months earlier. In the course of this period he was aware that the Empire Star had been struck by three directs hits in the Straits of Durian,  just off Singapore, although he never gave up hope of her survival. 

He started sending letters to her immediately on his internment and continued to send these off into the ether – not sure if they would get there or if there was anyone there to receive them.

Through the lens of 2011 it’s hard to believe that we would have to wait 14 seconds – never mind 14 months to hear the news of a loved one. With mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, 24 hour rolling news we expect to be informed immediately – and there’s hell to pay of we aren’t.

Yet who am I to criticise? For in one of those lovely quirks that happen in life I spoke to my son yesterday, via Skype, nearly 66 years to the day that my grandfather was released. And where was he calling from?……………………….Singapore.

What would my grandfather have given for such an opportunity?

Douglas J Gibson, Changi Jail – sketched by Rupert Pease (Died Changi 1944)

 Diary entries March April 1942

TESS Article 12: Giving Up Control

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I was chatting recently with a former colleague about “A Curriculum for Excellence“. He has responsibility for developing learning and teaching at his school and was telling me that they are going to give every pupil comprehensive course support materials for each of their certificated subjects – once the course has been completed. The teachers didn’t want to put it out before they taught the course as they wanted to “remain in control”. For me it was a timely reminder about how much work is still to be done in terms of changing our approach to learning.

In the past week I’ve come across three personal examples of how the delivery of learning is changing – firstly, my brother is taking a work related course at St Andrew’s University – he will be following the entire course on-line; secondly, I’ve just started a on-line course to improve my French; and thirdly, I was speaking to the one of my son’s friends who just got a an “A” in one of his Highers and had to teach himself two of the units, which had not been covered by the teacher, by accessing materials available on the web. If these examples seem anecdotal and hardly scientific then I plead guilty but perhaps it is their very ubiquity which lends them weight in supporting a growing realisation that “we” can no longer remain in control of the learning process.

The common arguments against such a phenomenon are that “children can’t learn by themselves” and “You can’t transfer university type learning to a school environment”. However, to accept such statements is to accept the status quo where the learning process is essentially controlled and governed by the teacher – especially in terms of the content, rate of progress and depth of content.

If we are going to change the way in which we work then perhaps we need to destabilise the status quo thereby freeing teachers to adopt different roles and engage learners in learning as opposed to absorbing information?

Keeping this in mind I wonder if David Eaglesham, the General Secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, perhaps provides the catalyst when he said he doubted whether A Curriculum for Excellence could live up to its aims without the provision of curricular resources.

I agree that there is a need to provide resources but I wouldn’t provide them in the form that they have come in the past. My alternative approach would be to create a virtual learning environment for every certificated course provided by the SQA. These course materials could be accessed by students at a place and time of their choosing – I’d like to think GLOW could play an important role here. The key point here is that the materials are for the student – not the teacher.

Over the course of the last year I’ve spoken to senior students from many schools and without exception they all said they would have welcomed the chance to access their entire course on-line. That’s not to say that they didn’t want a teacher but that they wanted their teacher to work in a different way.

So what would be the outcome of such a step – surely it will replace one form of spoon-feeding with another? Well not if we prepare for such a change in a gradual, well managed and progressive manner – the teacher would take on much more of a tutor’s role where students have to use their tutor to expand and deepen their knowledge. In so many ways this ties in with what Jerome Bruner spoke about recently at the Tapestry Conference in Glasgow when he said that educational systems were “too easily routinised” (sic) and that there were too few opportunities for students to “share hypotheses”, “reflect upon alternatives ” or “reflect upon controversy”.

Bruner wants teachers to seek out “inter-subjectivity” (I think I prefer this term to inter-disciplinary) by contextualising their subject within the wider world – but how often do teachers manage to do this in the pressure to get through the content of a course?

Such a shift in the model of certificated course delivery would also influence the type of learner that a young person would need to be before commencing such courses. The requirement for children to be ready to operate as independent, metacognitively aware, and technically able learners will in it’s own way provide further impetus for the radical changes that are required in the first three years of secondary education.

You’re Welcome

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East Lothian Council, in partnership with Lothian and Borders Police, will be hosting a series of Internet safety and responsible use training sessions for parents with pupils in P5 – S6 across the county.  This is in response to growing concerns, expressed by individual parents and parent councils, about how to make sure young people use the internet safely and responsibly. The sessions are also designed to show parents how they can protect their youngsters from on-line dangers.

The training sessions will be led by Ollie Bray (Depute Head at Musselburgh Grammar School) and PC David Gunn from Lothian and Borders Police. Both Mr Bray and Mr Gunn are accredited Ambassadors of the Child Exploitation Online Protection Agency (CEOP).

The training session has already been piloted within the Musselburgh Cluster and received positive response from over 200 parents. The content of the evening includes background information on new technologies and information about computers and mobile phones and the law. But the main part of the presentation involves Mr Bray taking the parents into some ‘real’ social networking spaces that young people use. This includes Habba Hotel, Teenspot, MSN Instant Messenger and Bebo. The session also gives advice on how you can protect your home computer and advice on on-line gaming.

Everybody who attends the training will have access to a comprehensive on-line handout.

The sessions will be held at:

    ·       Preston Lodge High- 3 June 2008
    ·       Ross High – 10 June 2008
    ·       Dunbar Grammar – 11 June 2008
    ·       Knox Academy – 18 June 2008
    ·       North Berwick High – 24 June 2008

All training sessions will take place between 7 – 9pm.

Ollie Bray, Depute Head at Musselburgh Grammar School, says:
‘This is a very exciting time for East Lothian to be leading the way in Internet Training for staff, parents, families and pupils.  We are going to use the feedback we gain from these sessions to inform good practice nationally through the Scottish Learning Festival.’

These evenings will start promptly at 7pm and have a limited availability. If you have any queries or you would like to book a place on one of these sessions, please email Tess Watson, (Acting Education Support Officer) at twatson@eastlothian.gov.uk or log onto http:www.edubuzz.org/blogs/internetsafety

Games up…

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I met this morning with Chris Mullender, a games developer from Dunbar,  Ollie Bray, Graham Sales (a student of gaming technology at Abertay University) and David Gilmour to explore how we might make better use of gaming technology within the East Lothian education system.

I was intrigued to find out that schools would be much better making use of gaming technology – both hardware and software – than the expensive education specific alternative. Chris made a very powerful point that gaming technology has been tested to the nth degree and is designed to meet the needs of children in a manner which is beyond the smaller educational bespoke companies. We should be seeking to make use of this knowledge – particularly in times of financial pressure.

We explored two separate dimensions in our conversation:

  1. Using gaming technology as a learning tool; and
  2. Engaging students in the development of gaming software.

Musselburgh Grammar School  and some of  our primaries are doing some great things in relation to the first theme but very little is being done in the relation to the second. We wondered if there might be some potential to organise a competition for primary pupils in the first instance to receive some specific tuition in games development before they tried to create their own games and then submit them for judging by their peers.  Each team would have a combination of skills such as programmers, artists, producers, writers, etc – a real collective approach.  We wondered of there was a potential sponsor out there who would like to help us begin to stimulate an East Lothian gaming culture which might in the longer term have economic spin-offs for the county. 

Apparently many of the games developers which have given Dundee such an enviable reputation in this field initally developed their skills and interest at a school computer club.

Last observation – and new one on me – one of the big challenges facing the gaming industry is to link up developers with artists.  We have fantastic artists in our schools – why couldn’t we link up senior student programmers and artists in our schools and create real companies in our secondary schools?

Destabilising the status quo

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I recently bumped into a former colleague and briefly chatted about “A Curriculum for Excellence”.  My friend has responsibility for developing learning and teaching at his school and was telling me that the school are going to give every pupil comprehensive course support materials for each of their certificated subjects – once the course has been completed.  The teachers didn’t want to put it out before they taught the course as they wanted to “remain in control”.

For me it was a timely reminder about how much work is still to be done in terms of changing our approach to learning.

If we are going to change the way in which we work then perhaps we need to destabilise the status quo thereby freeing teachers to adopt different roles and engage learners in learning as opposed to absorbing information.

Keeping this in mind I wonder if David Eaglesham, the general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, perhaps provides the catalyst when he said he doubted whether ACfE  could live up to its aims without financial input.

“It is almost inevitable to say it is the worst-resourced initiative we have ever had, because there is nothing there in the way of resources,” he said.
“It is not that people don’t want to do it, but if they don’t know what they are doing or have the resources to implement it, it could be disastrous.”

I agree that there is a need to provide resources but I wouldn’t provide them in the form that they have come in the past.  My alternative approach would be to create a virtual learning environment for every certificated course provided by the SQA.  This course could be accessed by students at a place and time of their choosing – I’d like to think GLOW could play an important role here.

I’ve been speaking to a number of my son’s friends who have just finished school and without exception they all said they would have welcomed the chance to access their entire course on-line.  That’s not to say that they didn’t want a teacher but that they wanted the teacher to work in a different way.

So what would be the outcome of such a step – surely it will replace one form of spoon-feeding with another? Well not according to my son’s friends who are now at university – the teacher would take on much more of a tutor’s role where they have use their tutor to expand and deepen their knowledge.  In so many ways this ties in with what Jerome Bruner was talking about yesterday when he said that educational systems were “too easily routinised” and that there were too few opportunities for students “share hypotheses”, “reflect upon alternatives ” or “reflect upon controversy”.

Bruner wants teachers to seek out “inter-subjectivity” (I think I prefer this term to inter-disciplinary) by contextualising their subject within the wider world – but how often do teachers manage to do this in the pressure to get through the content of a course.

Put it this way – there appears to be an appetite amongst young people for such a change.