ICT in Education

A sunny start to the day was followed by a downpour on the way to the Riviera Centre. With a sopping umbrella and drenched trousers I sat down ready for the first session.

Are VLEs up to the Job of 21st Century Learning?
The lead presentation was from Professor Steven Molyneaux, Director of The Learning Lab.

This was an interesting and at times challenging keynote. At least that’s what I think. My colleague Ian Usher seems to disagree though!

Some of the things Steven said:

• Predicting The Future – the point is not to predict the future but to prepare for it and to shape it. I guess so.
• The pace of change is accelerating. There will be more change in the next 20 years than in the last 100 years. Unless we all blow ourselves up, of course. Or get bogged down in government red tape.
• Web content doubles approximately every 30 days.
• Internet usage is increasing at the rate of about 200 new users per minute – 105 million users a year.
• Web 2.0 is about The Social Web – “Web 2.0 is much more about a change in people and society than technology.”

I’m not sure where these figures come from – I’ll have to assume they are correct for now.

Some questions Steven raised:

• Education – are we automating or innovating? Steven says we are still automating (an existing process).
  To some extent I agree with this. Some ICT work could be done just as well away from the computer.
• VLEs re-publish existing content in electronic format. We don’t innovate with web 2.0 e.g. forums, blogs, wikis etc.
  I partially agree with this. Some content on VLEs could simply be printed and given to pupils in paper format. However, some schools are being innovative and are using forums, blogs and wikis. More work needs to be done in this area to ensure all schools using VLEs make the most of them by using these tools.
  
• VLEs first designed in 1994 – for adults by adults. We need to redefine what a VLE is for today’s learners. I need to ponder some more on this one. True, VLEs don’t look like My Space or Flickr and are more formal-looking environments. However, would making a VLE that looked like My Space or Flickr encourage pupils to use it or to turn them away from it? One of the attractions of My Space is that it doesn’t look like ‘school stuff’. If ‘school stuff’ started looking like this, would pupils be put off it because it would no longer be ‘cool’.

Certainly something for me to think about – is the Moodle VLE we use really suitable? Or maybe a better question is whether it is the most suitable design for a VLE in the long term as undoubtedly it is suitable for its purpose at the moment.

Becta Vision for Learning Platforms
This themed session was from Robin Ball, Manager Learning Services and Andy Tyerman, Assistant Director Content, Becta.

An uninspiring session (for me at least). After some quotes from the Gilbert Review it seemed to me to be typical Becta waffle and I didn’t really hear anything new. I did switch off during the session so may have missed something useful, although I doubt it. In my opinion the Learning Platform Services Framework is a 20th century solution for 21st century schools.

The only interesting thing to come out of this session was a video on “Web 2.0 in 5 minutes”:

Web 2.0 Technologies in the Classroom
This themed session was from Steve Beard, School Improvement Consultant (ICT), Shropshire County Council.

The session was billed as “demonstrating practical uses of Web 2.0 technologies in Shropshire Schools.”

Some information:

• The Shropshire ICT Team has a blog, now others in the LA have started blogs.
• A teacher is using a blog and pupils are commenting on it.
• Lots of pupils’ blogs were shown (but were unreadable from the back of the room).
• Blogs hosted by eThink.
• Blah blah blah about blogs – yes, let’s move on.
• Flickr used to show pupils’ work.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets and del.icio.us were also used and some podcasting was done.

This was an uninspiring presentation, not helped by the fact that the presenter ‘winged it’. I hoped to be shown a web 2.0 technology that I hadn’t seen. Sadly nothing new was shown and little practical use of web 2.0 technologies was discussed.

Conference Exhibition
In the afternoon the exhibition from Naace sponsors and ICT companies took place. I finally got my hands on a copy of Podium, podcasting software from Softease. I had seen this at BETT and it looked very interesting and easy to use for primary pupils. Now I can have a play with it myself. Following this I had a useful conversation, along with Mike Woods, with Atomwide who provide broadband, email, web hosting and Moodle to Buckinghamshire schools. It looks like we’ll be getting a podcasting server for schools to use, which will be great if Podium is as good as I hope it is. and I collected a Lumens DC160 Digital Visualiser on loan from Matrix Display.

After a 4 1/2 hour journey I arrived in rainy Torquay (“The English Riviera” or, as some locals more appropriately call it, “The English River Area”), venue for the second year running of the Naace Conference. Having enjoyed last year’s conference I have been looking forward to this one. So will it live up to expectations…?

After settling into the hotel (The Livermead House) and having a very pleasant meal, it was off to the Riviera Centre for the initial keynote speeches of the conference.

ICT Challenges and Expectations
This was the opening address from Jim Knight, Minister of State for Schools and 14 – 19 Learners. The session was a videoconference, as Jim was clearly too busy to leave London and travel to Torquay to be with us in person.

In the speech he commented on the postcode lottery of education and that, for example, there were 25 percentage points between 5 A* – C GCSEs in Bristol & Buckinghamshire (Buckinghamshire being the higher, of course – let’s hope that the county council remember this fact during the School Improvement Service Review!)

He stated that it is “…essential we use technology in schools because it makes a difference not because we can” and went on to talk about personalised learning. He spoke about technology reaching out to parents (but what about those who can’t afford the technology?) and commented that VLEs save teachers time – half an hour a day (but how exactly? How was this measured?) He also went on to say that an ICT diploma (one of the first five diplomas) would be available from next September and that Universal home access was being looked at – this was announced at BETT.

Then came the questions and Jim’s answers:

• How will teachers be supported in costs of home Broadband? Basically none! A tax break would have been nice, especially when there’s bound to be some support for the less well off for universal home access.
  
• KS3 on-screen tests? Says not abandoned! Tell that to some schools who have already deleted the test!!
• Message to LAs about reduction of ICT support? Basically down to SIPs!
• ICT funding and schools not spending it? Guidance from Becta issued for schools to follow.

In all I felt the speech was uninspiring and the answers to questions and his delivery gave me the impression that Jim Knight isn’t fully clued up in what’s going on now or in the future in education!

IT Culture is Changing Children’s Brains
This was the first keynote from Dr Martin Westwell, Deputy Director, Institute for the Future of the Mind, Oxford University.

This was a very interesting presentation, if a little high-brow at times. Basically Martin said that today’s pupils think and learn in a different way to those in the past due to IT and the multimedia world they live in.

There was just too much talked about to note it all down and record it here. However, here’s a few things I picked up from it:

• A study of 48 undergraduates. Two groups, A & B. One group played the standard violent version of Doom (with weapons) whilst the other group played a non-violent version (without weapons). $100 at stake for each group to be the best. Afterwards in a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma those playing the violent game were 7 times more likely to exploit than those that played the non-violent game.
• Compare Medal of Honor to Tetris – games which demand high capacity for attention, develop attentional capacity (!)
• Brain Gym – no scientific basis that this makes any difference! VAK was also rubbished.
• A talking story for Year 2 children with “Read to me” and “Let me play” modes. Those who chose “Let me play” mode had worse recall of story.
• Deep brain stimulation – can control Parkinson’s Disease (a video of this was shown and it works!)

An excellent keynote and just what was needed after Jim Knight.

Making Space for Learning – Creating Physical and Virtual Environments in Schools of the Future
This was the evening keynote from Steve Moss, Strategic Director – ICT. Steve talked about BSF and the money for this:

£45,000,000,000 over 15 years
£4,500,000,000 for ICT

He talked about how the integration of physical & virtual spaces makes a 21st century learning environment and Learning Platforms were mentioned several times.

An interesting thought – in the future could a student be ‘present’ in school without attending? Could logging onto the Learning Platform from home and doing work count? A change in the law would be needed, not to mention a change in attitude. How would this work for some children when their parent(s) are at work during the day?

Steve felt that many VLEs today are not actually VLEs but VTEs – Virtual Teaching Environments – as they just replicate electronically what is already done in class (worksheets etc). To some extent I agree although schools who use forums, wikis, blogs etc are moving beyond this and are beginning to change the ‘T’ back into an ‘L’.

Wolverhampton’s ‘Virtual Workspace‘ VLE was shown. Basically Steve showed forum discussions – a student-mentor discussion and then a pupil-pupil discussion with their comments on a student’s poem. This is already happening in Bucks schools on Moodle.

Lots of nice pictures of innovative environments in schools were shown. The key message to me was that virtual spaces e.g. learning platforms should be considered as well as physical spaces.

Apart from the ministerial address it was a good start to the Naace Conference 2007.

I’ve had a personal blog for I while now and thought it was time I started a more serious work-related blog. So, here it is.

Unfortunately, this is an uncertain time for me job-wise; Buckinghamshire County Council, my employer, are going through a re-structuring process which has been brought on by the Children’s Act 2004 and the Every Child Matters agenda. There is restructuring and as part of this, the School Improvement Service is now one of the three divisions in Children’s Services – Achievement and Learning; Safeguarding and Commissioning & Business Improvement. The School Improvement Service sits within the Achievement and Learning Division. A review of School Improvement is taking place and two models for the future of the service, based on sustainable service delivery, are being considered. In both of these models, there will be some loss of fte posts.

So, will I still have a job in a few months time? On the one hand there’s still a lot to do in ICT – schools continue to need support in purchasing new hardware and software, training on software and interactive whiteboards is required and e-learning is just taking off, with schools beginning to use Virtual Learning Environments (Learning Platforms) such as Moodle in Buckinghamshire. On the other hand, other authorities have already been down this route and in some cases they have got rid of their ICT Consultants – it seems they think that the ICT box has been ticked and any further ICT development can be done by the Primary and Secondary Strategy Consultants.

Ultimately I believe the decision will be made primarily on one factor – money. The question yet to be answered is whether sufficient ICT Consultancy in Buckinghamshire is considered to be value for money…