I had the pleasure of spending some time in Birmingham last week with Colin and Angela from Ninelands Primary school in Garforth. They have been contributing to QCDA's Primary Curriculum review and in particular the guidance on using technology for learning. When it's published, I'll post the link as there's plenty of interesting an innovative ideas and examples of how technology is being used around the country to give rich, high quality, engaging and memorable learning experience to children and young people. There's a whole page dedicated to the fantastic work that's going on at Ninelands.
The highlight of the day (Angela and Colin's company aside) was a series of inspiring presentations from teachers and students involved in the project.
The first presentation was from Dawn Hallybone, an amazingly enthusiastic, passionate teacher from Oakdale Junior School in London. Dawn spoke about the commitment made by her school to using technology in all it's forms to provide a rich and memorable learning experience for their children. She described how a games based approached to learning was used by staff at Oakdale to provide, what the children called "secret learning" opportunities. She showed how technologies, such as Ninteno Wii and Nintendo DS, which are familiar to students from their life outside school, can be brought into the classroom to enthuse students and engage them in play based learning. She gave a number of examples of games that she used successfully with students such as Myst, Curious Village and Brain Training, but stressed that it was not the game specifically that made the difference, it was the approach of putting the tools for learning into the hands of the children. She used quotes from children in her class who described this approach as "plearning" and Brain Training as "Maths in a 12v blender !".
Dawn also explained how she used web based resources to extend learning beyond the limits of the school day and beyond the walls of her classroom. She talked about her use of:
All of the above are free to use and accessible from home or school for the students. Dawn's classroom sounds and looks like a vibrant, exciting and fun place to be and she is a great sharer of her experiences through her blog and through a twitter feed.
The next two presentations were both from secondary schools, were very different in focus, but were equally inspiring. The first was from a teacher (sorry, name escapes me) from the Blue Coat School in Oldham. He talked at length about how they have developed the use of their VLE (Moodle in this case) to provide rich and extended learning experiences for their students. He described how they allowed students to use their own technology, such as ipod touch's and mobile phones to access the VLE and participate in learning and how they tracked the success of the courses they ran online through usage and access statistics. He described how this system had allowed them to continue to support students in the run up to exams, despite the school being closed during the recent winter snows. The school also uses the VLE to post video tutorials of hard to teach concepts and collects student voice through SurveyMonkey a free on line survey tool.
The final presentation was deliver entirely by three year 11 students from Saltash.net Community School who spoke very eloquently about how ICT is used in their school to engage, inspire and challenge them in order to maximise their learning opportunities (you can read what they thought of the experience here). They explained how allowing them to use their own devices in school, saved the school money and extended their opportunities for learning and how they were often given a choice in the way in which they were asked to respond to tasks, giving them the flexibility to use technology (or not) or choose an appropriate medium that they enjoyed using.
The school has it's own social network as part of the web based tools provided by the school which allows students to communicate in a familiar digital environment, through a medium in which most of them are happy using, but which is safer and more secure than other social network sites such as Facebook.
Alex, Lewis and Adam then set out a list of the web tools they see as integral to the way in which they learn:
The students also spoke at length about the range of technologies they use everyday to access learning, such as their own phones, ipods and netbooks and the tools they use for producing work including as flipcams and sound editing software such as audacity.
They gave a very clear message about how they learn best -the tools they are comfortable using and the sorts of approaches they really enjoy. It appears that Saltash school have listened to these messages and embraced technology for learning as the way forward. These three young people were fabulously engaging, clear, concise and entertaining. They were also passionate about their own learning and how they learn best. They were also very clear of the role that their teachers had to play in their learning. They said "trust us to use the technology" but teach us how to use it safely, something Saltash clearly have done well.
On reflection the main things I took away from these three sessions were that, we can really engage with the young people we teach by using the tools and mediums with which they are familiar and comfortable. This means finding ways of safely allowing students access to tools which motivate them and inspire them to actively participate in learning. These tools may already be in their pockets in the form of mobile phones and ipods. This is their comfort zone, this is where they feel at home and these are the methods that this generation use to engage with the world. In order to stay relevant in their eyes, we should be taking advantage of these tools and exploiting them to extend learning beyond our classes and schools.
It is also clear that the range of tools available is rapidly increasing and as fast as we get to grips with using one tool another may become available. The good news is that many of these tools are "free" to use and don't require anything more than internet access and a web browser to start to use them. Keeping up with these developments is a massive challenge for teachers and staff in schools, the good news again though is, finding out about useful tools and resources is becoming easier and easier and using them once you've found them is becoming easier and easier. Tools such as twitter allow a resource and it's description to be shared with the speed of a text message and blogs such as Dawn's, Mark Wilson's or this one mean that a single resource or idea can be shared with thousands of people at once.
These technologies may not be a natural choice for some of us to use and integrate into our practice, but it's clear that planning learning opportunities that involve moving out of our comfort zone and into that of the learners there are positive and rewarding consequences for both teacher and learner.
