24 hour School

After all the excitement of SETT and Teachmeet, I was very pleased to see that somebody with the clout to actually make changes has started to do so.

Cheryl Heron, the principal of state run Bridgemary Community Sports College in Gosport, Hampshire has decided that pupils should take charge of their learning and that the college will therefore be available to them from early morning till late at night and the online part will be there 24/7.   And amazingly the Secretary of State for Education is in favour.

Meanwhile, I am off to France for a fortnight!

Teachmeet06 and SETT06

I am going to need time to digest what I came away with from SETT and more especially from Teachmeet.

But Chris, Ewan’s mom, said probably for me the most significant thing at Teachmeet; “These are only tools” referring to Web 2.0. I have been around long enough to know that some of the things being achieved today are re-inventions of something similar many years earlier. For instance I hosted a “What the local papers say” weekly discussion between several continental schools and a Dundee secondary on The Times Network for Schools back in the late 80’s. Its objective was also to enthuse pupils to write, to discuss, to form opinions and be creative. Anyone using Web 2.0 tools should have similar objectives.

That is not to decry today’s efforts. It was fantastic to feel the buzz of a brave new world in the Orkney room on Wednesday night.

Micro and Macro Management of Education

John Connell’s post which briefly touches this subject gives me a chance to suggest that, in spite of the upsurge in ideas here in Scottish education , we should probably pose some practical questions.

Glow will provide us with the national framework for ICT in education, but it will not provide hardware in the classroom. I believe we do have most of the hardware we need in schools. We just need to deploy it differently. Subjects which now control the bulk of the computers do so for historic reasons which do not really apply any longer.

There are some pioneering teachers in classrooms actually using Web 2.0 tools and proving that blogs and podcasts can inspire the curriculum. We need to make it easier for more teachers to follow in their footsteps; perhaps by freeing up the curriculum and assessment requirements. Will a Curriculum for Excellence deliver this?

And finally can our National Qualification system move fast enough to reflect the real world?

Explosive Upsurge

Trying to keep up with the discusssions just in the Scottish blogosphere is becoming a full-time job. There seems to have been a sudden surge in ideas, as though a damn has burst. Ewan McIntosh and John Johnston has been joined at least in my ken by a raft of other people including John Connell, Don Ledingham, Andrew Brown etc. Inverting the Core, Extreme Learning are also bringing together strands that have been floating around for a while. It’s a very exciting time in Scottish education and I hope that Glow will provide the infrastructure to make it all work.

I do fear that the Masterclass online community will need to run very fast if it going to remain a player.

Podcasting Directory

Congratulations to David Noble and John Johnston who have created between them this interesting and very relevant educational list of podcasts. I for one will certainly be taking every opportunity to publicise it.

In that vein it is well worthwhile listening to David’s own fortnightly podcasts, also linked from his home page.