Scottish Education III

Judging from the deafening silence, my previous post has left the subscribers godsmacked… or bored to tears. But I will persever.

A Curriculum for Excellence will require pupils to have time to work on their own or in teams. Projects cannot be teacher dominated. So somewhere in the school day time must be set aside for these activities. One solution is to provide all classrooms with the necessary technology. This technology provides the motivation, the research facilities, the editing capability and the publishing incentives all of which are documented daily by John Johnston, Ewan McIntosh, David Noble and others here in Scotland and many more across the Atlantic. But every classroom does not have the necessary hardware. You will notice that I do not specify this hardware as, over time, this may well change. In fact, most classrooms will not be so equipped in the foreseeable future.

All I am suggesting is that in secondary schools there is actually adequate hardware if it is redeployed. As a computing teacher I cannot really defend the hogging of the bulk of the hardware in a a school by two or three departments. In fact, I might dare to suggest that these subjects might be better taught if pupils did not always sit in front of computers in every lesson.

Glow’s new leader

I have just read John Connell’s blog announcing that Marie Dougan is to take over the reins at Glow. I am sure she will be good for it, but I cannot help wondering what about masterclass?

Inside Scottish Education II

Following on from my last post, my final assertion about computer numbers leads to the idea of radically altering the school day. How about a five period day, four in front of a teacher and one in front of a computer?

The period with computer access is there to allow students to do research, to be creative, to write creatively, to collaborate, to work in teams, to undertake projects etc., all good Curriculum for Excellence type things.

Stephen Heppell has many things to say on alternative classrooms, which I will not attempt to summarise here.

Inside Scottish Classrooms

For most of the summer, I have been attempting to assemble my thoughts about changing the way we teach. I have not found it easy to create anything coherent and readable so am going to post a series of smaller articles aimed at particular topics.

SSDN or Glow as it is now called will give the opportunity for Scotland’s teachers to re-assess their practice. However my post about this on the Masterclass site has so far not caused the slightest ripple. There is an article on futurelab which pulls together much to support the need for change and Clarence Fisher did start a wiki on change which has not really flourished.

In spite of this I think that technology be it Web 2.0, or in a few years Web 3.0 or whatever will not of itself make any difference to Learning and Teaching unless what actually happens in classrooms changes. In some senses the changes are necessary anyway and are only facilitated by new technologies.

The first issue is one of time. Any teacher anywhere in the world will say they do not have enough time for the existing syllabus let alone adding anything to it. Time is linked to resources. Students must have time in class organised for them to take advantage of what technology offers.

Simplistically most secondary schools in Scotland have a ratio of at most five students to one computer. Doing the Maths tells me that all students could spend 20% of their time using a computer in school, assuming all computers were readily available. How many students actually get regular access to a computer at all? Assuming, teachers let students spend 20% of their time using computers, then teachers have 20% less class teaching time. How do we square the circle?

SSDN Delay

I gather that there is to be a delay in the training of mentors for SSDN, of some four months. If this is the only hold up it may not be too bad a thing as we might be that much nearer having Web 2.0 incorporated.

I have been asked to go to SETT as a mentor. I hope this does not interfere too much with TeachMeet06.

Squeet

I have been using Squeet for some weeks now. It is an alternative way of getting RSS alerts as I wrote about in an earlier post. I have certainly found it handy, as it emails me changes in any of the blogs I am watching.

I still use Bloglines for a more systematic review of what I should be reading. I say should because at the moment I have to confess to being nearly a thousand post behind!

PR for Blogging

Ian Delaney has made several interesting comments about my earlier post. Now John Johnston has come up with this additional piece of information supporting blogging.