#PedagooLondon2015

Very swift blog post following on from a session I delivered to this year's (inspiring!) #PedagooLondon2015 conference...

Apart from the sheer joy of getting to meet forces for positivity such as the likes of @Kevbartle, @hgaldinoshea, @Edutronic_Net, @joeybagstock and several other personal heroes(!), the conference gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own practice, collect my own thoughts on how well it was going, and be realistic in my appraisal of the major obstacles I was facing. Through the ensuing debates about the validity of what I was proposing as a pedagogy on Twitter, you'll see there were plenty of questions which are hard to answer over 140 characters, so if you would like to engage in debate and discussion, please feel free to email me, or leave a comment.

If anyone wants some practical help with implementing the nitty-gritty of this stuff in their school, I'm sure mine will be happy to release me. Probably for a fee. Don't go thinking I get a cut of it neither!

Anyway, here are the slides...

Flippin gthe classroom using mobile technology - #PedagooLondon2015 presentation from Mike Gunn

Flipping the classroom using mobile technology

BYOD In Schools - Part 4: Student Engagement

This year has seen our school begin the process of implementing a Bring Your Own Device Strategy (BYOD) across the whole school, notionally led by me, which is somewhat worrying. Fortunately my erstwhile co-leader @Gripweed1 has made up for my many deficiencies in the process, and we enter the final half-term of the year, 6 months after starting, having successfully negotiated the first stage of the process. I've blogged about the different parts of Stage One before, but a quick recap may save you trawling through all that:

We started by mapping out the route we would take, looking into other schools which had gone down similar or alternative roads, and identifying areas of planning and infrastructure issues we had to address first before moving forward. We then began involving students with @Gripweed1 leading a highly successful Safer Internet Day, where students were consulted about the rights and responsibilities of them being able to use their own devices in school as a learning tool. Their input was critical in allowing us to develop a BYOD policy, and the intention is to have students review this annually as part of our PHSE programme, to ensure it remains up-to-date and fit for purpose. While our focus shifted on to a small group of "dangerous teachers" who were conducting class trials with the students, we realised that the students were going to be the key to the success or failure of the whole process, and it is this student engagement I want to address today.

So far, we have engaged different sections of the student community at different levels. All were involved in the development of the Acceptable Use Policy, and several classes across different year groups have been involved in exploring the technologies through trials. Now we're looking at the issue of digital leaders, and the contributions they might make to moving the process forward. There is a great deal of talk across the Twittersphere about digital leadership: Some of it is little more than a nod towards it, as I've seen in several schools where student leaders are more or less teachers' assistants. However, there are many other schools where it is clear that students are genuinely leading not just other students, but also the teaching and learning process through mobile technology, and here they seem to be driving the idea forward almost more effectively than if the process were top-down. Mark Anderson (@ICTEvangelist)'s work at Clevedon in the South-West is a case in point, and we have learnt a great deal from his generously shared expertise.

Our initial discussions for the roles of digital leaders looked at a variety of potential roles Digital Leaders could undertake. These ranged from having

• FROG champions who would train students and teachers in the use of our FROG VLE
• Technical support leaders who would almost be apprentice technicians 
• E-Safety Specialists whose job would be to advise and monitor e-safety across the school
• Device Specialists whose job would be to look at the way certain device workflows could be translated to other devices without causing problems 
• We even then started thinking about having specialists in different types of software as these need considerable training too, for example Adobe specialists, Microsoft Specialists, Android Specialists etc

You can see that the lists eventually became far too cumbersome to be workable! We were ourselves in danger of losing sight of "the main thing" and turning our digital leaders into glorified Techies, so we changed our focus back to Teaching and Learning, and this proved far more fruitful. All aspects of the role can now be clearly related back to leading, enhancing or supporting teaching and learning, and we have also looked at how digital leaders can be used to smooth the transition of students coming up from primary schools so that they are confident and ready to meet the challenges of secondary. Equally, we would like Digital Leaders to be able to use their experiences to gain accredited qualifications which would help them further a career in this sector if they so wished, and we are currently exploring the sorts of qualifications on offer.


This is what we came up with in the end...

Digital Leadership at Finham Park

Job description

Digital leaders will...

Be able to support teaching and learning through SMART Learning
Be able to support the use of mobile devices by teachers and students
Be able to support and develop the use of VLE
Be able to assist specific departments with the acquisition of teaching and learning resources (apps, websites, software)

Be able to develop outreach programmes
Be able to liaise with primary schools to promote digital transition
Be able to manage the digital leaders' social media presence
Be able to work with collaborative networks in order promote and share best practice

Be able to support the development of e-safety training across the school
Lead assemblies to whole school on e-safety
Lead lessons to students in e-safety
Lead whole staff training on e-safety
Be able to promote the use of digital technology at whole-school events (e.g. Genius bars at Year 7 parental events)

Be able to offer basic technical support to teachers and departments
Checking computer power, peripherals, sound, mice and keyboards
Helping teachers to use iPads with AppleTV
Clearing a printer jam
Checking toner and paper
Projectors and connections
Problem diagnosis?
Management of school computer screens, uploads and podcasts
Preparation of machine images through FOG
Device usage (ipads and other devices, especially help for staff)

Person Specification

Digital Leaders should...

Be dedicated to this single area of student leadership (there are many other areas of student leadership around the school, but we feel this role is so big it will be time-consuming)
Be a positive role model to other students
Have an interest in developing digital technology skills further
Be responsible users of technology
Be keen to learn to work with other people involved in the creation of a digital environment
Show tenacity and commitment
Be able to demonstrate prior digital skills
Have a clear understanding of safe and responsible social media use
Be willing to foster leadership skills

Our second draft of a job description has yet to be approved, so I put it out here for discussion: Have we missed anything? Can you help us to tweak it further? If I've learnt anything from blogging and tweeting, it's that no idea I've ever had couldn't be improved by somebody out there, so we very much welcome any input here via the comments section below.

The class trials will report back at the end of the year, and hopefully we will have enough evidence that mobile technology can have a tangible impact on teaching and learning to move the project forward across the whole school. At this point, the role of the digital leaders will become crucial in the process, and it is more than likely that they will be leading teachers as much as students. This gets us to a stage I think many schools and SLTs are nervous about, namely where the students' expertise begins to overtake that of the staff. I can empathise with this to an extent, although I have to say that mobile technology is one key area where, if teachers don't learn to step outside of their "sage on the stage" role, we won't move forward very fast. As an old t'ai chi teacher of mine once told his students, "if I don't train you with the aspiration of becoming better than me, who then will I learn from?"

Only if we can get over this psychological obstacle in how we see our role will we truly begin to create a collaborative learning environment, where teachers and students move each other forward.

http://ui.asu.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/cartoon1.jpg

Fostering independent learning through mobile technology

Today's blog post was inspired by a talk I was asked to give at #SSATeachMeet on how mobile technology can foster independent learning in our students. It wasn't a great talk to be fair. The speaker was knackered from an observation by the Head in the morning, a full day and a break and after school duty, had tried to cram in too much to his 7 minutes, and then garbled his way through most of it when the tech gave out (the irony is lost on nobody), and consequently, had anyone tried to get a question in edgeways, they would have been greeted by the old Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now" (though the second line would have been omitted for obvious "bricking it"reasons). Well, that's the last time anyone asks me to do anything like that again.

I've already written about how to use some of the apps I talked about here, so the purpose of the talk wasn't to re-hash old ground. Rather, I wanted to try to pick apart some of the key aspects of independent learning that mobile technologies can help us with, to provide a solid founding rationale for anyone wanting to move in that direction. It's a huge step, and long before you start thinking about when, how or what you're going to do, you need to ask yourself why you think mobile learning is the answer: What is the problem you are trying to solve?

In my case, I tend to get a lot of students come to my A level Film and Media classes who have ever studied the subject before. We never turn them away, but it has come to my attention that they have often scraped through their 5 A*-C grades, and been heavily supported especially in their English. Which is great to get them through the GCSE hoop, but unfortunately now I need them to start thinking for themselves, and very few of them are capable of doing that. So my original rationale for looking at mobile technology in learning, the "gap" I'd identified (to use the jargon), was student independence. I looked at many solutions, including SOLO taxonomy and flipped learning, as well as mobile technology, and ended up using a combination of all three to get my students thinking independently of me. These are my conclusions...

Mobile Learning Gets Students To Take Responsibility For Their Learning

In itself this is a huge step. A student who has a list of excuses for why they can't do something is a student who spends more time thinking up the excuses than doing the work. Mobile learning turns the onus onto them to get themselves organised. At the start of their courses, my students get a Google mail account so they can create and share Google Docs, and they create an Evernote account, so they can make their notes. I've blogged elsewhere about these apps (here and here, if you must), and I've even put tutorials online for how to use them on our Youtube Channel, so forgive me if I don't dwell on the "how to's" too much. Suffice it to say that an Evernote account allows my students to access learning in several new ways:

1. By allowing them to supplement written notes with pictures (often of what I've drawn on the board), audio notes and attachments;
2. By allowing them to organise these into subject files, and topic sub-folders;
3. By allowing them to tag their files, and cross-reference them
4. By allowing them to be stored on the cloud

There was an understandable sound of "whoop-di-doo" as I was talking about this, until I pointed to the  fact that a student who arrives at his terminal exams two years down the line with a full set of notes intact and cross-referenced was already at an advantage to probably well over two-thirds of the cohort. We seem to take loss of learning material as an occupational hazard in Sixth Form, but it's tantamount to prolonged absence in some cases, so I felt that this was a great starting point when discussing the advantages of mobile technology in developing independent learners.

The Big Picture

The second area in which students benefit from the use of mobile technology is in the ability to simply and quickly create permanent mind-maps and brainstorms which allow them to think about the bigger learning picture. Right from the start, students will use Popplet or one of many other mind-map apps to think about what they know about the topic before we start, to think about what they want to know, and to think about knowledge and skills from other subjects which they might be able to use in the one they are about to tackle. These types of connections are crucial, as they encourage students to think outside of the usual boundaries of subject areas, and to see how the world really works in an inter-connected way. Moreover, they can start to explicitly think about the big picture, and get a sense of how the topic they are about to embark upon affects the real world. In itself, this one change in outlook can provide students who are used to learning topics because "it's on the syllabus" with a much better notion of why it is important to study them, and what use they will be to them later on.

Applied Learning

The next benefit I've found in using mobile technology is in the way it facilitates flipped learning. I've talked about what flipped learning is before, and in many ways the idea isn't revolutionary (last century  it was simply called "prep", but I like the fancy new pseudo-pedagogibabble!). But the world of homework research is made immeasurably easier and more interesting when combined with mobile learning. Not only can we set learning from a variety of different sources and source types, matched to the students' ability levels and the types of material they access most easily, from videos to online powerpoints to audio podcasts, but we can also use some great online tools to set associated quizzes for our students to try at the same time as the learning, in order to allow them to judge just how good their understanding or mastery of a concept is. I talked last night about TED-Ed as one such resource. It has allowed me to find some great videos, and flip them by creating quizzes for each one, as well as flipping some of my own Youtube tutorials: Here is an example of one I got my A level students to do, with initial quick-fire recollection and deduction questions (to make sure they'd watched it and learnt the facts!), and other more open-ended questions which prepared them for the sorts of issues we'd be talking about in the classroom.

What that means is that I could come into the classroom, look at the test results, and straight away split my students into differentiated groups on the basis of how well they dealt with the material: Groups needing more support get extra scaffolding, groups who clearly dealt with it easily get stretch material, and off we go. Tick the OFSTED boxes about personalised learning at the same time. If that's your cup of tea.

Inter-Dependent Learning and Collaboration

If mobile technology does one thing, it allows students to share and work together in a much more meaningful way than ever before. Apps like GoogleDocs and Evernote are great for sharing over a variety of platforms, including Twitter, e-mail download etc. With GoogleDocs, students can even work simultaneously in real time on the same document from different locations, whether that be classrooms in school or from home. Not only that, but they can comment on each other's work. While at first one area of mobile learning I struggled with was showing evidence of self, peer and teacher assessment, this kind of sharing makes that easy and permanently recorded for them to refer to, unlike the sticky notes I used to find lying around my classroom after an über-fruitful peer assessment session, where the fruits had clearly fallen on stony ground!

Recently, however, I have seen others extend this idea even further by publishing essays and research online via Twitter or other forums, and asking the outside world for feedback. As I mentioned in my talk, a couple of weeks back some students of mine had been researching, discussing and writing about the problems facing the UK film industry. When we put their essays out for public critique, can you imagine the level of motivation they got when they received two comments from two British film producers? "Quite chuffed" doesn't really do it justice! But this invitation to outside experts to scrutinise our work grounds the students in the real-world context of their learning, and gets them already engaging with the issues and the people they aspire to work with in the future. Do they really need me any more?

The Meta-Cognitive Dimension

The real benefits for me of using mobile technology to foster independence are about the meta-cognitive skills the students develop. A mobile device, with an array of apps which do similar but not identical things, gets students really thinking about learning itself, and selecting the tools by which they learnt best*. They have to think about how they will research, assimilate, learn, remember and revise their work. They have to think about a way of presenting their learning to me which most clearly demonstrates their understanding and their progress. So I could end up marking an interactive book with videos and full glossary in it (Creative Book Builder), or an animated walk-through of a process or timeline (Videoscribe), or an interactive whiteboard presentation which is narrated (Explain Everything), or even a simple collaborative pin-board where all the students have collated their ideas (Linoit). To be honest, as long as the focus remains on the learning and not the tools, then I don't mind what they present to me. But the very fact that students have to think carefully about this aspect of their learning clearly leads them towards greater autonomy.

A Changing Role For Teachers

Finally, I ended with the contention that this direction I had been talking about necessitated a change in the way we as educators view our role in the whole process. I think everyone on Twitter would agree that the idea of teachers as the sole repository of knowledge within a classroom is bunk. We have to get away from that notion of "sage on stage" and move towards being the "guide by the side", no matter how much this might threaten our little egos. "Grow a pair and get on with it!", as my mother would never have said to me, ever. It is in fact much easier to play the role of guide given the time freed up by students not needing us any more thanks to mobile learning devices! It allows us to get stuck in to some seriously timely and highly effective personalised interventions (OFSTED box-tickers: Fire away again!). But we can only do that if our interventions are informed by a system of diagnostics which is highly accurate, targeted and instant in its feedback. I've used simple apps like Traffic Lights for a quick RED/AMBER/GREEN response from students (this often tells me more about their confidence levels than their levels of understanding), as well as Socrative, an instant quick-quiz app which allows you to set multiple choice or open-ended questions, single or multiple question quizzes, starters or plenaries and even hinge questions. Each one an opportunity to change the direction of the lesson for any individual who looks like they need a bit more guidance.

The results for me have been really good, if anecdotal as yet. My Year 10 class now moan that I don't test them enough to check their understanding, or if I tell them a particular way to do a task. "Can't I do it this way?" they will ask, before justifying their request with a perfectly cogent reason why they would present their learning more effectively a different way.

It's enough to make a bloke of my age need a long lie down. Which is easily done now that I've got all this spare time...



If you're interested, the original prezi from TMBrum2 is here, in glorious techni-thingy. I'm sure you'll agree from above that I did astonishingly well to get it under the 6-minute limit, even though I do say so myself. @Danielharvey9 may have a video that tells a different story...


* If that sentence sounds wrong, check it again. It's right, I promise: The plural "do" refers to the multiple apps, while the singular "gets" accords with the "mobile device". But it took me three read-throughs (should that be reads-through?) to see why it was right!

Simple ways to use iPads in lessons

So a few weeks back I blogged about a lesson we'd done using the iPads, and tried to give the impression it happened every lesson when clearly it doesn't! Fraud that I am, I got away with it, to the tune of nearly a thousand hits apparently. Next step: To set up my own religion.

I got several nice comments, and realised that a few people were interpreting this as a failsafe lesson using iPads, which wasn't quite the way I'd intended it. It worked for those students at that time of day. My point about iPads is really that they enhance learning if used as a tool, and in the same way that there are thousands of ways to skin a cat (or eat a horse apparently!) when it comes to teaching a lesson, so the variety of ways in which an iPad can be used is likewise pretty much infinite. Today, I tried another way...

Stage One:

We started the lesson with a quick Socrative quiz to see if we could establish prior learning about some of the concepts they would be encountering during their unit on representations across different media platforms, which yielded surprisingly little. Spot check number one told me I needed to cover the basic concepts and get some definitions first...

Stage Two:
We then divided the class into random groups of four using a fab little app called RandomMaster: I've pre-entered the students' names in there, and it simply randomizes them as necessary, in front of their eyes on the AppleTV, and there's no arguing, and no bloody lollipop sticks! Into groups they go, which they're more than used to by now, and to each group I assigned Expert status. I assigned each group to research and define two key terms for the rest of the class (though I didn't tell them who would be presenting the definitions), and emailed them a variety of documents which were differentiated to help with their tasks, though they were free to search for additional or corroborative material on the internet. One student I kept out of the fray. She is one of the bright ones in the class with a knack for clear, student-friendly explanations, so I gave her the job of putting together the final document which we would share as a result of the lesson. While the students were researching and formulating their ideas and definitions, she was preparing to put the final document together by interrogating each group's ideas, working out if she could understand them, asking questions if she couldn't understand etc. All in all, it helped her clarify her thinking and theirs, by getting rid of some of the vaguaries that they are prone to settling for in Year 10.

Stage Three:
Another random selection picked out the people to present their definitions to the class, and off they went. Some good, some not so good. Time for another little cool app: Traffic Light! A nifty simple little app that lets students tell me whether they understand or not immediately. If they don't, I want a question out of them. Several questions later we had refined the definition, addressed several misconceptions, and had a class full of greens: Huzzah and hurrah, as the writers of Blackadder would have said. We can move on. Our basic concepts covered, my assisting student finalised her note and tweeted it to the class using Evernote, and they then simply integrated it into one of their own notes for the lesson. Evernote is another of those fabulous apps which has been spread ad infinitum on Twitter, but for those of you unaware of its fabulousness and potential, here are a few of the basics it does superbly:

1. Cloud-based apps, accessible on any device which connects to the internet
2. Note-taking can be done through typing or dictation
3. Pictures from the computer, camera roll or camera itself can be fully integrated, as can audio recordings, word documents, PDFs...
4. Notes can be shared across a variety of platforms, including Twitter, and then integrated into your own notebooks
5. Notes can be put into specific notebooks to help organisation, or tagged to appear when searching for a number of different topics

And that list comes nowhere near doing it justice.

Stage Four:

Extended learning work: Each student has to exemplify one of the key concepts we've just defined to show how well they understand it, by finding an example and analysing it. They are helped with cue questions which are differentiated so as to provide writing frames for some, and extension questions for others, and again these are emailed out to the whole class. They choose which resources will help them most effectively. Students undertake the task using whatever apps they feel work best for them, and today they went for a variety, from Evernote to Popplet to Explain Everything, all of which I have blogged about elsewhere, and all of which allowed them to show learning in a way which suited them individually. Did they all make progress? Certainly. Was it an easy lesson to set up? Yes. Once the students are used to the tools, I'm finding this sort of thing gets easier and easier as we go, as does the ability to change course in the middle of the lesson. And at every stage, the variety of AfL tools available help me ensure that nobody is hiding, and that everyone has to understand. A quick Socrative plenary, an Exit Ticket today (single thunk question to test the depth of their understanding, plus a feedback mechanism telling me how well the students feel they managed to understand the material themselves), and I'm ready to diagnose the answers quickly, and plan the next lesson...

For anyone interested, here are a few quick tutorials about some of the software mentioned above. If it's not here, it's so easy my mum could work it out!

Socrative tutorial

Popplet tutorial

Explain Everything - Forgive the video: Boring I know.

Bring Your Own Device in schools - an implementation strategy Part 1

Forgive me in advance, this might be a long one. Cartoon at the end for your efforts? Deal...

The following describes our arrival at a scheme for deploying SMART Learning across our school, a scheme to use mobile devices as a learning tool. But it might need some context first. Quite a lot of context actually. Bear with me...

(Quite a lot of) Context

As part of our ideas for moving the school I work in beyond its current "Outstanding" I have undertaken a project as part of my ASLDP course. We were asked to identify "gaps" at the start of our course, which we would have to close with a whole-school project. This isn't so much a gap as an area where students cannot always move beyond at present. We have really good, keen students in general, but very often they are not as independent as we want them to be. There is some excellent practice across the whole school, but not consistency. One of the things we are hoping to achieve is a level of student autonomy and independent thinking which will free them up to work at their own pace, to their own potential.

I've talked about the idea of "flipped learning" before, as it caught my eye a year or more ago. While I don't subscribe exclusively to Salman Khan's methods, I think the principle of getting students learning content at home and putting it into action in class is a sound one, as it allows the teacher to look at how well learning is applied, and to address misconceptions more individually, and more quickly, thus keeping students all moving forwards, albeit at a pace which is appropriate to them. I also think the idea of using videos is a good one for many students, but I'd be foolish if I told you it was the only way to do it (and who am I to tell you I'm not a fool, eh?). Some students work much better from reading material, others from videos, with examples and short tests, while others prefer something more auditory like a podcast.

At the same time I have been exploring the fantastic opportunities to work with iPads in my classroom, and I could see immediately the potential they had for integrating with flipped learning and enhancing it further. My early attempts were limited, but at least I could see the potential, so I started using the iPads in class, and invested in them within the department so that each student could have one whenever they were in my class. This has been a huge step forward, as the quasi-ownership of the devices has allowed students to store some work on there, but there are limits to this when other students come in for the next class, and want to use the same apps. Sign the last student out, sign yourself in, yada yada, faff faff faff. Not a good use of "bell work". Ownership is definitely key when it comes to using mobile devices in schools, so it soon became apparent that we would need to get a device into the hands of every student if we were to move this forward. We started talking about iPad roll-outs, leasing schemes, BYOD, and pretty soon were lost in device considerations, and getting into pointless Android vs iPad vs Microsoft Surface (obviously that last is a joke) arguments. At the end of it all, we've had to remind ourselves that the learning is the key goal here, so our iPad or BYOD scheme ideas have now given way to SMART Learning (© Jason our fab techie)...

SMART Learning:

SMART Learning is predicated on the idea that we can use mobile technology in classes in order to achieve the following aims:

• Increase student motivation and engagement in class, especially boys
• Stop students relying on teachers as their first recourse
• Promote student independence and inquiry
• Allow for personalisation within class, and more individual and effective interventions by teachers
• Remove the ceiling over highly motivated students' heads
• Get students ready for the demands of the future workplace

Following on from this, we have discussed ideas for overcoming key obstacles which present themselves to us currently. The key areas, and our solutions for them so far, are as follows...

Cost:
We live in a relatively affluent catchment area, but the recession is biting everyone, and now isn't the time to ask everyone to pay for new devices, to lease them, or the like. However, the key factor of ownership must still be tackled, so we have opted for a system where we allow students to bring their own devices (BYOD) over a roll-out of one particular type of device. While it is true that in my media class we use iPads only, that is largely because of the productive rather than consumptive nature of what we do with them, and I have to acknowledge that many teachers will not need as much out of the devices being brought into their classes as I will. Students already own their own phones, and bring them in every day anyway (because as we know, and contrary to the evidence of hundreds of years of children getting to and from school without them previously, the poor darlings can't be without their phones in case of an emergency). Why not make use of what they already have? Indeed, many of them also own tablets, or laptops, and feel eminently more comfortable working on those than they do on school PCs. Cost bullet dodged...

Technical Obstacles:
The right infrastructure is key to enabling a solid, reliable use of mobile devices in all lessons. The whole advantage of mobile devices over computers is the fact that I don't have to set half an hour's worth of bell-work just to kill time while the damn things boot up! Why would we then negate that with a network which slows to a crawl when all the students are on it? Besides, if we save money not issuing all students with devices out of our own pockets, then we can afford to invest in the best servers, bandwidth and access points to ensure full coverage anywhere in the school.

Technical obstacle number two is app incompatibility. "Sir, I can't get that app on Android", that sort of thing. When you're used to the iPad, the limitations of other devices can be a pain. But there are two answers to this. The first is to use web-based apps as much as possible: Popplet, Socrative, Prezi, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, Evernote are all excellent web-based solutions which cover all sorts of key workflow areas, from mind-mapping, to document creation to storage and sharing: They have the advantage that once students get home and need to access what they've been working on that day, they don't have to do it on the phone, they can do it from their laptops, computers or whatever.

A more intriguing second argument for a "deal with it" attitude to incompatibility issues was put forward to me a while back when someone suggested to me that different devices forced students to examine the needs of tasks, and to find different solutions for themselves. They then often ended up engaging in meta-cognitive discussions about the relative merits of different apps, and by extension different devices, to assist their learning. The creativity and awareness of their learning needs which this generates are perhaps a price worth paying for the odd compatibility issue.

Test, Test and Test Again:
A new idea is hard for many people to accept. In the ever-changing world of teaching, it is too easy for teachers to dismiss new ideas as "yet another initiative" in an already over-initiatived system. Any technical difficulties presented by new technologies are the perfect excuse to ignore the idea, so you have to make sure that issues of workflow, technical problems etc are ironed out well before everyone gets into the training phase. We are going to run a variety of class trials by teachers who are more tech savvy, who can try to raise the technical issues which were unforeseen, and get them dealt with promptly. God knows, in the last year, I've come up with a lot of them, and it's important to overcome them, and give the technical teams time to get to grips with these issues. We assume that because they're techies this should all be easy for them, but this technology moves them largely out of their PC and network-based comfort zone, and that can be hard for them. In my case, bringing in iOS devices alongside a PC system has raised some issues (as well as hackles!), but better they're raised now than when every single student and teacher in the school is using them.


The limited class trials I'm running will be accompanied by student voice surveys to measure the initial impact of the technologies on learning. So far, I can tell you that it started as a distraction, and sometimes an obstacle whenever technical issues occurred, but students are now reporting that the technology is almost a non-issue for them, and talking about the learning opportunities they have offered, and the efficiencies they have brought into the classroom: There have been plenty of cheers for the "photograph the notes from the board rather than copy them down approach" for a start. Students have appreciated the ability to dictate notes sometimes, to share their work easily, to show work to the class through the AppleTV, and to collaborate on projects online in real time. More importantly, the students are also the best people to tell me what the problems are: Brutal honesty can be instructive, as long as I've forgotten my ego hat at home.

We are also hoping to put together a "Dangerous Teaching" Group, a cross-curricular forum for teachers who are interested in using mobile technolog to enhance learning and student independence in their areas. I get some great ideas from Twitter which I can share with them, but they will all have ideas of their own, and the power of group collaboration will bring swift advances in our use of the technology to enhance our core activities.

Once we've tested these things in a few lessons, with a few regular classes, and evaluated the impact on learning, the next stage will be a wider trial. It will probably involve opening the wifi network to Sixth Formers, a safer option perhaps than lower down the school at first, and again they will give us plenty of evaluative data.


Student Training:
What training do students need in using mobile devices? They use them every minute of every day they're allowed to, and many more when they probably shouldn't in all likelihood. Well, that doesn't make them good users in an educational sense. Students need to be taught how to use the devices responsibly as educational tools, but also as social tools. If the wifi network is always available, then break time use is likely to be a very different beast compared to classroom use, with cyber-bullying more than a possibility, and we need to teach students about the safe use of these devices, social networking etc. Internet Safety Day next week provides us with our first opportunity to talk to students about these issues, about social networking, about what they think are their rights and their responsibilities. We would hope to expand this so that students can use PHSE sessions to devise a whole-school Acceptable Use Policy, which could then be reviewed annually as the technologies change. Education in digital citizenship is one of the most pressing needs our students have in this decade, and as my good friend @Gripweed1 is fond of telling me, you can't leave these things to the ICT department alone (this may largely be about avoiding doing any more work though!).

(This last phrase is an excellent example of something which, though written online, is nevertheless clearly libellous, and I expect he'll use it to exemplify cyber-bullying to the students on Tuesday, after he's had me arrested!)

And finally, there's the issue of digital leadership. This idea has been written about a great deal on Twitter by folk much more practised at developing it than we are, and we'll be nicking their ideas in due course! You know who you are. Suffice it to say that the students are probably your best advocates for any mobile technology roll-out, and if they can be convinced of the merits of using them for learning, they will probably be more than willing to engage in training in how to use the devices, how to trouble-shoot them, and how to help staff to get the most out of them. Our intention is certainly to get students trained up so that they are as much learning ambassadors as they are technical support, and attaching them to departments will enable departments to get to grips with the potential of mobile learning with digital natives by their sides. We hope the students can trouble-shoot for staff, can find them appropriate websites and apps to teach certain tasks and concepts, and whenever anything tech goes awry in the room, they will be the ones who should come to the rescue. Teachers may take a while to get used to this role-reversal (I know I did!), but for the students, their new role is nothing short of empowering, helping them to become much more equal partners within the school's learning community. Not a bad place to start when you're trying to foster independence, engagement and inquiry...


This is just the first phase of our plan, and any feedback would be really useful. We appreciate there will be issues, but this blog is a bit of thinking out loud, in the hop that many of you may have walked down the same path, and be able to share your experiences with us, and help us avoid too many mistakes.

Next issue: Staff training, parental involvement and buy-in.

Will keep you posted.

Oops, your cartoon.

2012 - What a year!

2012 was the Chinese Year of the Dragon. By reputation it is a stormy year, literally and metaphorically, with change as its only constant characteristic. Think of 1916, 1940, 1976 and 2000 and you get the idea. For those who can ride the storm, it's an exciting ride full of opportunities. and such has been the case for me this year.

Specifically it has been one of the most inspiring years I can remember for a long time. It's been the year of Twitter discovery, the year of turning the iPad pedagogy dream into reality, my first year of Outstanding teaching (apparently), and the first year I've begun to accept I may have something to offer at a level higher than middle management. The encouragement and inspiration I've received this year have been overwhelming (a lot of it from Twitter), and have pushed me along at a rate somewhere between uncomfortably hard sprint and mach 2 with lips gibbering comically. So I thought I'd finish my first month of blogging with a reflective one, looking at the things which have inspired me most this year, and hoping they inspire you too...

1) Teachers were heroes, and presidents were real people (whether this a real person with courage still remains to be seen, but I imagine 90% of the world's population will be willing him on in the New Year).

Felix Baumgartner - The mightiest of leaps

2) Science equated to discovery and inspiration: 

Higgs Boson, the Mars Rover, Felix Baumgartner's colossal jump from the edge of space - A year when Science re-discovered its cutting edge and inspirational qualities, but a year in which the real science (of saving our species' place in this planet's history) was once again subsumed by the interests of those with profit as their main motive.

3) Teachers innovated: Teachmeets and Tweachers came of age, and teachers reacted to an ever-growing chorus of criticism from government and the media with professionalism, integrity, and continued strife towards improvement. But these testing times, when politics and ideology rule over education, are also beginning to sift teachers and leaders into two groups: Those who acquiesce to the demands and play the game, and those who have the moral courage to stand up for what's best for their students. The latter group is in the ascendency I think.

4) The little people stood up for their future: Pussy Riot in Russia, democracy protesters in Syria, Libya and Egypt - A year when the little people stood up to be counted, and gave their lives for a better future. And the web played a pivotal role in that process, allowing people to communicate freely with each other across social and geographical barriers: On a lesser scale, we saw the growth of crowd-funded Kickstarter projects, and in the teaching profession we saw the formation of HeadsRoundtable and its massive online petitions, consultations and deluging the DfE with over 5000 tweets in one hour to protest against the EBacc "consultation" (if such it can be called). There's your moral conviction...

5) Gay Marriage Bill: Even though the church continues to object to gay marriage, this was the year that the rest of us saw it as a complete non-issue. For Heaven's sake, if the Conservative Party are advocating a more liberal stance than the church, what is the world coming to?! I just loved the picture opposite, which showed a grown man as though ashamed of his own message, and a young lad with courage and love in his heart. Who says the next generation is going downhill?

(Do love this video response from the gay community on what might happen if we don't let them marry each other: Hilarious!)

6) The Olympic legacy

I'll admit to being a nay-sayer when it came to the Olympics, and then it changed my mind, for so many reasons. The inspirational performances were just one aspect of the whole thing to be honest. I loved the fact that we saw immigrants as accepted parts of our society who wanted to help make this a great country rather than simply a racially homogenous one; I loved the way we came to see 

Paralympians and disabled people as heroes rather than as scroungers, benefits cheats, or a drain on the nation; And most of all (as a media specialist), I loved the fact that the people we idolized were for once not over-paid ponces (footballers, looking at you here!) or people with little talent who'd made it through "reality TV" and been told they were the next big thing. The Olympians were people who excelled at their sports, achieved their success through incredible hard work over a long period of time, and when they'd finally achieved it, had the humility to admit that they were only part of a team, and that their achievements were only a blip on a much larger scale. People who are often aware of their own lack of importance in the grand scheme of things are often the ones who achieve and give most in life. That's a true legacy.

Finally, I had to leave this year's review with two of my favourite videos of the year: You're going to tell me they're the same: Same tune, same theme, same Olympic footage. But there is a subtle difference. While the first is a celebration of the Olympics and its trials, tribulations and successes, the second I think is more powerful.

Because it's about more than the sportsmen and the sportswomen who did us so proud. It's about us as well, and our role as ordinary people. It's about everybody who made it happen, made a difference, and made it such a special time for Britain (not just London). It's about ordinary people clubbing together to show how great a nation's people are, without jingoism or feeling any need to be better than anyone else...

If we're going to do anything to leave a legacy in 2013 (and seeing as yesterday went off without a hitch, and Mayans are still investing in pension funds, we can assume we do still have a future on this planet!), it should be to realise our potential as a species within the great ecosystem which is our planet.

It should be about looking out for each other.

It should be about looking out for our resources, and sharing them equitably.

It should be about realising with humility that our survival depends on working in harmony with this beautiful planet, and not simply in our own selfish interests.

A final quote, to leave you with this year. It's from a book I read years ago that is unique in its ability to constantly remind me of how tiny my place in the world is. As my Christmas gift to you all, may I recommend "Tuesdays With Morrie", and may we all continue to strive to make this a better place to live next year... Merry Christmas!

You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.

“I heard a nice little story the other day,” Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait.

“Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air–until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore.

“My God, this is terrible,” the wave says. ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’

“Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’

“The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’

“The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’”

I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again.

“Part of the ocean,” he says, “part of the ocean.” I watch him breathe, in and out, in and out.

Extract from the book Tuesdays with Morrie 
By Mitch Albom
All rights reserved.
New York : Doubleday, c1997.

My iPad journey - Updated

Cards on the table: I've been teaching 17 years and have always been a huge fan of computers and their potential for learning. I'm not an ICT teacher, nor am I any more than a gifted amateur in the ICT world. I am not a geek, except insofar as I watch The Big Bang Theory. And love it. OK, I'm a bit of a geek. But I have some semblance of social skills, so I'm not sure it counts really.

My journey with ICT began with computers, always Windows, big Apple hater to be honest. Then the iPad came out, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. But it bugged the hell out of me the number of work-arounds I had to find for functions which would have been simple for a PC. As a media teacher, it irritated me that I had to wait until iPad 2 for a camera, but once I had the camera, it didn't take long before the iPad gradually rendered my computer almost obsolete. The iPad started as a replacement for computers, in the classroom as well as at home.

And so the iPad began to replace many PC functions in my classroom, as a simple swap. There were limitations, but more advantages than I'd thought. the "switch it on and it's on" facility (revolutionary, I know: Who thought that one up?) was a huge time-saver, meaning I didn't have to plan whole lessons around computers just to make switching them on and the 10-minute boot-up worthwhile, or introduce lessons with 20 minutes of board-work just to kill time so the damn things were ready to go. (Honestly, all the tasks were really useful, promise)

At the same time I started on twitter, where all my best ideas came from. More or less all my ideas, if I'm honest. I am not one of life's creative thinkers, it's fair to say. But I do have a much under-estimated skill of being able to look at things which are beyond my creative capacity and give them a slight tweak to improve them. This was more or less how I treated most of my PLN's contributions: "Like that, how do I make it work for me?".

Our school has been on a three-year drive to improve AfL, and this was brilliantly served by Socrative quick tutorial here if you've never seen it before), which had the advantage of being usable on computers and phones as well, useful for classes where we didn't have enough iPads to go round. In fact, it's the ideal tool for any BYOD environment too. I started realising that the iPads had loads of advantages, but these were often negated if you didn't have a device per person, so using web-based apps helped as I could supplement the ipads with conventional PCs. This was enriching the learning in my class, with a greater variety in my students' educational diet which was keeping them on their toes.
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By now I was starting to see the creative potential of the iPads for making movies, podcasts, comic strips, posters etc. It started out as a solution to my attempts to "flip the classroom", buy allowing me to create simple tutorial videos I could set as homework preparation for lessons (Our Youtube channel gives you a few examples which you are welcome to share). I could even put them into Playlists so that the videos became more advanced, and students were able to go as fast in their learning as they wanted to, which was really useful at KS4 and KS5. Using the camera on the iPad and iMovie enabled me to make these short videos within half an hour sometimes, and as they are all online now, they are permanently there for students to refer to. Which means I've stopped repeating myself in class, a lot. Apart from the phrase "Do you know where to look for your answer?" which is getting trotted out more...

My own forays into creativity also showed me the iPad's potential for increasing the number of ways my students could respond creatively to tasks rather than just using them to find out information, browse the internet and write notes. Creation is perhaps the one area the iPad really has it over other tablets, as it has a huge amount of potential. So my students would be using creative apps to illustrate their learning, and this, I realised, was enhancing learning dramatically, by deepening the way the students were thinking, and really getting them to synthesise and apply the information in new and creative ways. Twitter and @Gripweed1 added more apps from a fabulous website of the week feature he does, eg Explain Everything, and the ways in which my students were able to demonstrate their learning continued to grow.

Explain Everything has been a great case in point, one which I am developing my use of consistently. At first it was me making tutorials, or explaining concepts for students. But after a while I started asking the students to use it to explain the concepts themselves. The beauty of it was that it allowed them to use pictures, labels, extended writing, but also make these into movies which they could produce verbal commentaries for. A lot of my students with special needs have benefitted from this new way of accessing and showing their learning, or boys especially who never quite get round to writing things in any more detail than the absolute minimum they can get away with. Tell them they can explain it verbally or make it into a movie and they're mad for it. Tell them how brilliant the answer is but they now have to write it in ten minutes for an exam response, and they suddenly realise that succinct writing is a skill they also have to learn. Importantly though, those who always thought they were not much good in class because their written responses got low marks now realise that the knowledge is more than adequate, and that the only obstacle to good marks is writing. Somehow, that seems to make the task of improving slightly less daunting to them.

Then the enhanced learning led logically into sharing our work. Students were so proud they wanted to be able to show their work to everyone, through the Apple TV, and to their parents. Students sharing their work with each other on Twitter has increased the collaboration in class dramatically, for a start. QR codes, tweeting, Creative Book Builder (another easy tutorial here for those of you who've never tried it), were my first steps into this curating work and bringing it together. Again, @Gripweed's app of the week showed me countless possibilities for doing this, such as Wallwisher, Edmodo, Scoop.It. And my eyes began to open to the number of different ways I could do that.

I ignored virtually all of them, because if there's a down-side to Twitter, it's that it can deluge you with too many ideas. But I had enough to fulfil the functions I was after, and it was clear that sharing work was having an additional unexpected effect: It was extending learning. What students were producing was changing, the way in which they were doing it was changing, and they were now learning outside the classroom much more. I'd been toying with flipped learning for a long time, but suddenly these tools made it not only possible, but also driven by the students.

So the next stage was to stop exploring too much, and sit down and rationalise things. I spent time thinking about the functions I wanted my students to be able to undertake using the iPads, and created a list: Mind-mapping, AfL, writing and recording, researching, demonstrating learning, sharing learning, creating posters, word clouds, videos, demonstrations, podcasts, revision, online accessible storage.
Here are the tools I used, for those of you with an unhealthy interest:

AfL - Socrative
Mind-mapping - Popplet, iThoughtHD
Note-taking and recording - Pages, Evernote, GoogleDocs, Keynote
Research - Safari, Skype/Facetime, Khan Academy, TED and TED-ED
Word clouds - TagCloud, Word Collage
Demonstrating learning - Explain Everything, Skitch, Timeli, VideoScribe, Creative Book Builder, iBooks, Apple TV
Creating - CeltX, Cinemek, Pinnacle Studio, iMovie, PS Touch, PS Express, StripDesign, Phoster, Flipbook
Revision - Quizlet
Storage and sharing - Evernote, Dropbox, Cloudon, iBooks, Twitter, QR codes

Way too much info, huh? Up until the list you were busy thinking "Wow, great, cool, I should try this!" And then this turned into those, and I can feel your enthusiasm waning with the immensity of the task! I've been there. I sympathise. I call it "My inspirational Twitter PLN hell". But here's the thing: To quote my favourite philosopher Lao Tzu, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". There is no minimum speed limit on this journey. There is only DO or DO NOT. So pick one app. Try it. When you've got it wrong a few times, try it some more, get the students to help you out, or find work-arounds, and get good at it. Embed it. And then add another, and so on.

And add in your other learning styles: Flipped learning works brilliantly with iPads, as does SOLO Taxonomy. As, I would imagine, does co-construction. It's only a tool after all, and there are a whole load of ways it can help you do your job more effectively. The final thing you'll discover on this journey is that, beyond changing how you do things, varying your educational activities, deepening the learning of your students, and extending the ways in which they learn, you will ultimately have empowered your learners to take charge of their own education. Which is technically, I reckon, Outstanding, is it not?

The process so far has taken me a year. I now have four classes using iPads most lessons, for a variety of tasks, and constantly coming up with new ways to learn. Sometimes I feel like a spare part, but it just gives me a precious second or two to sit back and smile to myself. Before I get back on their backs expecting even more!

Thank you. Once again, you've made it to the end of the post. Here's your cartoon... At least I'm getting more consistent with my rewards system, eh?