BYOD - A viable alternative

There were a lot of people at the National Academies Show today who asked me for a copy of my presentation, and whose names and emails I didn't have time to take down (really sorry! Other people waiting to speak behind me!), so here, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment and want to go through it a second time, is the thing...

http://www.slideshare.net/MikeGunn/setting-up-byodpptx

#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

The Media Teacher's iPad

As an advocate of BYOD, I've always talked to colleagues about the benefits of different devices and approaches within a "mixed economy" digital learning space (or "classroom where everyone's phone is different, as it's more commonly known). Largely, what you want to do should dictate the type of device you use, and I'm quite happy to work in a multi-device environment. Until I walk into my Media classroom.

I should make it clear that I have no particular beef with any other individual device, or operating system, or anything else at which you think I may be showing signs of beefage. But the iPad has always been, and remains for the moment, the device with the most power in terms of Media and Film teaching. Think about it in terms of the skills you are trying to teach, and you'll see why:

Analysis Skills

Analysis is about note-taking, acquiring knowledge, and applying that knowledge in such a way as to develop critical faculties. This is one area of Media and Film Studies which might be considered "device-neutral" (bear with me here, we're in a new digital environment, and there will plenty more neologisms before the blog is out!). For note-taking, I use Evernote, with its easy-to-use UI, easy sharing, tagging and cataloging, and the ease with which I can record verbal feedback as audio attachments to notes. For formal written work, there's GoogleDocs, with comments, editing, sharing, peer feedback and revision checker facilities (I've written about these here, so forgive me for skimming). We do a lot of mind-mapping through Popplet, we use Notability to distribute, annotate and save PDF resources, and we use Explain Everything amongst others to offer different ways of showing learning. So far, so uncontroversial in BYOD terms. I don't think there is an app there which isn't multi-platform, and that's part of the reason I use them, because the students can get used to them in my lesson, and transfer those skills to their other lessons where a variety of different devices are in use.

Resources and curation

Similarly, in terms of resource curation, there are a host of ways of bringing information together for your students into one place which again should be accessible on whichever platform you want. Except Blackberry. There's always a kid with a Blackberry. And they're always the ones who can't access ANYTHING! I digress, somewhat bitterly...
Youtube is where all my video tutorials go (might just have blogged about that before as well), Pinterest is the magpie nest where I collate all of the useful and/or shiny things I find on the web, and if you don't already have a VLE to centralise all of this stuff at your school and distribute it to your students, you could do worse than Edmodo, an excellent all-rounder which has been made to mimic Facebook in an "acceptable to all teenagers" sort of a way.

Revision

Finally, for revision, there are a couple of nice apps called Revise Media Studies and Revise Film Studies which are, somewhat predictably if you've gathered the gist of this blog so far, also available on iTunes and Google. They're both pretty good for vocabulary learning, though if you want your students to learn specific definitions of yours, why not get them to make their own flashcard sets with Quizlet? It matches definitions to key terms, and has lots of useful games for testing, and it's available... You guessed it. Here's one I made earlier, à la Blue Peter. Or was it Jamie Oliver? Always get those two mixed up.

Practical Media

Practical Media and film production are the areas where Google struggles to keep up with the vast breadth of the Apple app ecosystem, and where Windows are, well, the less said the better frankly. Here, iTunes seems to have a plethora of simple tutorial apps available for Film which show you the basics of filming and editing, such as Making Movies Make Sense and for the more advanced students, the more in-depth CLOSE-UP, an app of advanced film vocabulary which is really useful, with a variety of checklists for commenting on different elements of film making. For example, the checklist for Lighting includes sliders between low and high-key, high and low contrast, soft and hard light, as well as options for shadows, composition and light sources. Developers just seem to think that their most lucrative education market will be Apple users, and thus they write first for iTunes. Some stop at that, others get a Google app up and going soon afterwards, but that, I think, is why Apple are currently still ahead of the game.

CeltX in action

Film Scripting

One of my favourite simple apps for creating scripts of any kind (theatre, radio, TV, film) is CeltX, and the iPad app is excellent for this. The app formats scripts exactly as they would be presented professionally, and prompts you for slug-lines, actions, character names, dialogue, parentheses, camera angles et al. When you write in what you want, the app automatically formats the information as it would be in a script. Character information is in capitals and centred, for example, whereas dialogue is indented appropriately. A free account means you can access any of your scripts in the cloud, via the desktop app, the iPad app, or the online editor. Simple, brilliant. Available on Google, but not as crisp or easy to use for some reason. No idea why.





Storyboarding

Cinemek: Why can't the kids ever pronounce it?!

Storyboarding is one of the film-maker's key tools. There are a shedload of storyboarding apps out there, but the one I love most is Cinemek, because it uses photos taken on the device you are working on, and incorporates them into the storyboard frames. That seems like a faff to some students, because they want to draw something quickly and get on with filming. But the beauty of needing to take photos is that students need to think beyond showing the story events: They need to work out where they are shooting it from, what angle is best, the distance of the camera from the subject etc. And all of this gets them into the swing of thinking of the film product not simply as a story-showing device, but as a means of artistic expression in itself. And while the camera shooting gets them thinking about framing, the storyboard itself gets them to think about timing (they can change the duration of each frame), about camera movement (they can insert track and zoom symbols), about how the script and the visuals go together, and finally they can even play back a quick video to show them how the storyboard looks in motion. Awesomeness.

Filming

If you're a "real" film or media teacher, the iPad filming solution isn't a satisfactory one, but filming on an iPad certainly gives you an idea of pre-viz, and at lower ability levels or for younger age groups, it offers a lot of practical skills if you combine iPad filming with iMovie editing (especially good for its trailer templates) and / or Pinnacle Studio: The two have different functions, but are becoming much of a muchness (speed up, slow down, titles, images, sound effects etc). It's now also possible to get a bit better quality of sound and stability with Mic attachments (such as the iRig system, for use with proper microphones) and tripods designed deliberately for use with iPads. You can even control a multicamera shoot with the Collabracam app and if you want to go really nuts, there are basic Green Screen apps, as well as some more fun things like ACTION MOVIE, an app which allows you to ham up your real-life footage with exploding monsters, tumbling cars, you name it. All of these are plenty to exercise the creative minds of young students, and the process and skills are the basics you want them to learn for later on in their Media and film careers, from pre- to post-production, just a bit simpler.

Print

There are oodles of photo editing apps out there too, many of which do some neat things (Snapseed, Filterstorm, PS Express to name but a few), but few of them seem to do everything you want. For some reason, the apps which alter photos don't do good layout design, and the apps which do good layout aren't great for image editing. Personally I go with PS Touch for combining posters and images, and working with layers especially. There are standard Photoshop tools such as selection, magic wand, painting, cloning and blurring tools, as well as adjustment tools, a load of preset styles and effects, text, fill, gradient, lens flare... You get the idea. There's a lot of stuff. PS Touch makes them savable and they can then be used in other apps from the camera roll. However, having praised it to the heavens for its functionality, I should warn you that the functionality is inversely proportional to its usability! Get your degree first, then try to work out how to use it...

Quark Design Pad

For bringing the whole thing together, QuarkDesign Pad allows you to create full design products which are exportable as PDF and PNG. We use Adobe InDesign with A-level students, but this is pretty good as a cut-down version. The app allows you to place boxes, designated them as text or image or background, give them shape and outlines and colour / opacity properties. And unlike PS Touch, the interface is a lot more intuitive. Between the two of them, you can get some pretty fancy print work going.

Web

There are tonnes of app design and webpage design tools out there to choose from, and I'd be loathe to name one over another, because their suitability will depend largely on your proficiency level and the quality and key functions of what you want to achieve. You can easily knock up something from templates with apps such as Simpl easy website builder. On the other hand, if you want to build from scratch and have something which is CSS editable, you could go for something like i-Dzign Web Page Builder, with its easy WYSIWYG interface, ability to save in a variety of formats, and also the ability to publish via an in app FTP client.

And there you have it. An almost complete tool-kit for Media and Film teachers, all on one portable (beautifully designed and premium-priced) device. Get a class set. Get an AppleTV to show everyone's work, and Robert's your father's brother and other such old-fashioned witticisms.
Enjoy.

BYOD in schools - Part 6: Engaging parents

One of the most important factors in moving forward towards a roll-out of any form of mobile learning school, whether it be iPad 1:1, or BYOD in our case, is getting teachers, students and parents on board with the process simultaneously. Try shooting five basketballs towards a basket at the same time: It's more or less the same exercise. Or planning, teaching, marking, answering a thousand e-mail requests for paperwork and having any sort of life outside of school, for that matter.

I've dealt elsewhere with our general strategy and rationale for the roll-out , and looked specifically at the issues of staff training, student engagement in the process and the part played by Digital Leaders in this process, so forgive me if I don't revisit old ground here. We developed our strategy, worked out how we could train teachers gradually, and interviewed and trained our Digital Leaders to help us with our class trials. But now the big step to a whole-school roll-out looms, and we really need to get ALL of our parents on-board, or they won't allow their students to bring their devices in in the first place.

These are the key points we need to communicate to them, in my opinion:

• They need to understand that this is not a gimmick to engage students: There is a clear educational rationale behind the move, which we consider will help improve the performance of our students on a long-term basis. In other words, they have to understand that our move is fundamentally about teaching and learning, and that the use of mobile devices in lesson will occur when there is a clear way in which it can augment, modify or redefine the learning in that lesson, and not otherwise.
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• They need to understand why we have decided not to specify a particular device (often iPads in these types of schemes), or indeed pay for the roll-out ourselves from school funds. Essentially there are two key reasons for this move, which are economic and pedagogical. Economically, we as a school cannot afford to pay for them ourselves (£70000 every three years?), and if we passed the cost on to the parents, many of them may not be able to afford it either, especially in times of recession, economic insecurity etc. So not only are we saving ourselves money (three more teachers potentially to help their students?), we are also saving them money, as 99.6% of our students already own devices which they probably bring in to school on a daily basis. Pedagogically, much as I am a fan of the iPad itself, I can't pretend that other devices are not catching them up quickly. Each new iPad seems less of an education game-changer than the last, and yet the premium is still charged. More importantly, I think there is real benefit to be had from giving students and parents the choice of what to bring in, and getting them to discuss issues of what each phone/tablet can and cannot do in the context of teaching and learning, rather than mere functionality (my graphics card is faster and bigger than yours, sort of thing).
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• We as a school need to address insurance worries head on: Many parents could quite reasonably object to their children being asked to bring mobile devices into school on the grounds that they could get damaged or stolen. But what if they currently allow their child to bring their phone into school at the moment? Then there is no change in the situation. The phones can still be insured as part of household contents insurance or, as many people already do, can be insured as discrete devices. Having said that, we as a school do also need to make it as secure an environment as possible for our students to bring their phones and devices to school safely. That means addressing potential areas where students might have to leave their devices unattended (changing rooms for instance), and ensuring that we are vigilant at all times, and have water-tight security systems in place to protect student property. To my mind, we should be doing that already. Similarly, in this new digital learning environment, we as a school ought to be pressing the insurance industry for easy, cheap and viable schemes which will allow us to protect our students' devices without costing the earth. Already, some financial institutions are beginning to respond to these requirements.
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• Finally, I think it is imperative that parents can SEE the enhanced learning which occurs as a result of using mobile devices. They need to see it in action: We should be inviting them to watch model lessons with students, with a debrief showing how it has enhanced the learning, the students' organisation, their motivation and the differentiation which devices can enable. They need to see these enhancements to lessons in order to understand just how much difference mobile learning can make to their child's education. If we can accompany these sessions with Q&A at the end, with both the teacher and the students involved, (as happened here when I taught a lesson in front of colleagues from across the city using the same techniques as part of a rolling programme of CPD observations "for real"), then I think parents will be a lot more positive about the use of mobile technology as an integral part of their child's learning experience.

My ideal way of organising this would be as follows: A festival of mobile learning. As part of this, the school would perhaps need to be open a day at a weekend (and perhaps have a day off as recompense?), and invite parents and members of the local community in to see a variety of activities in action. We would have different subjects running workshops on some of the ways in which they use mobile technology as part of teaching and learning and explaining how it works in an open session for all students and parents. We would also have several "show" lessons occurring simultaneously which parents could visit, look at the teaching, look at the types of activities students were undertaking, and talk to both students and teachers about how exactly the mobile devices are enhancing teaching and learning. You could even invite local companies connected with mobile devices and mobile learning to come in and sponsor the event, and use it to pitch the benefits of their products to parents, showing them the possibilities.

A fundamental building block of this strategy would be the involvement of students who already use mobile learning, and Digital Leaders in particular. Alongside the teacher-led workshops and model lessons, the student leaders could lead "Genius bar" style sessions including videos of other lessons throughout the year, the students' own thoughts on mobile learning, and the advantages it gives them over other learners. They would be able to show how they themselves support the process in school, answer technical queries, and could also talk to parents knowledgeably about the different sorts of devices they have used, the advantages and disadvantages of each for different subjects, and they could blog about this afterwards so that this advice is permanently there for parents to refer to, with direct links from the school website.

One of the other things this type of festival would facilitate is for other teachers who are less confident about tech use in lessons (from other schools, or from within our own) to get the same information, to interrogate the possibilities for themselves, and to make their own first steps. This would be great CPD for all involved, sharing best and next practice widely, and also enabling schools like ours to clearly demonstrate our role as a support school to those in the wider community. In fact, I think it would be great to follow this up with an hour's TeachMeet at the end of the day for teachers to share their best apps and resources, divided into different categories (AFL, BFL, differentiation and personalisation, etc), so teachers can get what they want out of it. That would act as a great summary of everything which has been shared that day, and really send people away with lots to think about.

After an event like that, I think very few parents will be in any doubt about the school's rationale for using mobile devices to enhance learning, and I would hope that teachers and students would be enthused, and that the wider community would be able to see just what a forward-thinking institution this was...

If we don't engage parents, and show them the realities of modern education, and the potential mobile technology brings within that environment, we risk them not understanding what we are trying to do, and we all know where that leads...

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An outstanding lesson using mobile learning?

Recently I was asked / was volunteered to lead something called a "lesson observation for real" in Coventry. This is essentially a lesson taught in the round in front of anything up to 100 colleagues and, crucially, an OFSTED registered Inspector. The rationale behind it lies not in the inspection of the lesson for a grade, but the sharing of the inspector's thought processes when observing the lesson, and illuminates the (at times unfathomable) thinking behind it all. As a teacher, I think it's useful to be able to hear that explained with regards to a lesson I can watch live, although I'm not sure that as the person conducting the lesson I was aware of much more than the slight niff of me crapping myself throughout! Not a nice image to leave this first paragraph on.

Hopefully you've followed me through to this second paragraph. You'll be pleased to know that, if you have, the worst of the offensive language is over at any rate. Preparing for the lesson was a bit of a nightmare, especially as the closer we got to the event, the more people I knew told me they were coming to see it. As Billy Connolly once said, it's like being forced to sing in front of your aunties! My brief was simple: The previous lesson observations for real run in Coventry (there are at least two or three a year) had tended to focus on KS3 and KS4 classes. This time they wanted to see some KS5 teaching, and it had been suggested that it would be good to see some practical use of mobile technology as part of teaching and learning. As half of my timetable is KS5 and I have been leading our school's BYOD roll-out so far, that was me pretty much dropped in the sh*t and "volunteered" (there's that niff again...)". I had to start thinking...

So, if I were creating a perfect lesson using mobile learning what would it involve? Well, of course the first thing it would have to do is focus on the learning, not the apps. I would think about learning and visible progress or at least visible problem-solving, and frame those into learning outcomes. For me, it would probably involve SOLO levels as a clear way of demarcating progress from one level of skill to the next, which means it would need a baseline. I also tend to think my best lessons would allow the students to select their tasks (according to SOLO levels), and set their own learning objectives in doing so. It's also important for me to give them freedom in their methods of presenting their learning to me and to the class, as that seems to engage them much more. I don't think that just because students get to post-16 study they are any less likely to be disengaged by poorly conceived tasks and activities.

Once I've got that idea of the elements I want to include in the lesson, that's when I'd start to think about apps and the technology.

Another couple of key considerations were how to demonstrate progress and learning. Don't get me wrong: I'm fully aware of the OFSTED dictat which stipulates that they must look for evidence of "progress over time", not progress within a twenty minute segment of a lesson. But the fact remains that students who have had a lesson in which there has been no learning or challenge are not likely to make progress over time either. As such I wanted to include a presentation of the students' work at the end of the lesson for myself and the rest of the class to see, and I wanted to punctuate the lesson with good hinge questions which interrogated what they were doing, and how well they were doing it.

So this is what I came up with...

The starter activity was a Socrative quiz: Five questions, each of which would tell me their ability to work at a certain SOLO level. I could then analyse the results very quickly, see what levels they were working at, and direct them towards tasks at that SOLO level. (By the way, if any of you have not come across SOLO Taxonomy as a pedagogy before, check this out, and then get yourself involved in the SOLO Taxonomy network).


I should say at this point that on the back of my task sheets was the summary (left) of how I felt the SOLO levels equated (roughly) to the sorts of grades the might get in the exam. The students are all aware of their "working at" grades, and the grades they themselves have targeted, and could then refer to this summary as a way of seeing how far they had made progress not only in relation to the difficulty of the tasks, but also in relation to what they wanted to ultimately achieve by way of grade.

If students were struggling with definitions for even the most basic analytical terms and techniques, they would do the Uni-structural activity: They would be given a list of key subject terminology relevant to the lesson which they had to be able to define and remember by the end of the first twenty minutes. Using Quizlet, a great little flashcard creation app, they were asked to look up these terms, write the definitions for themselves on the back of the electronic flashcard, and then use the 'Test" facility within the app to see how many they could get correct.


If they got over 80% of the answers correct twice in a row, I'd be pretty certain they had learnt the terms, and move them swiftly on to the tasks at the next level. (The fact that this app is self-marking is an easy AfL win as far as I'm concerned)

The following activity involved the students showing me that they could recognise a variety of the techniques they'd learnt in the first activity in practical examples, to take their knowledge beyond the abstract. Using one of two apps (they could choose whichever they felt most comfortable with, Thinglink or Explain Everything), the students were sent a still image from the film we were analysing, which was also an AURA* which could activate the scene itself on Youtube straight to their devices (I could have done this with a shared QR code too, but most of the students went for the Aura). They had to use their key terms to label the techniques used in the still, and then add others used in the scene itself which might not be evident in a still image (use of editing, soundtrack and diegetic sound etc). The task was peer marked with overview from me, making sure that the students' ideas were correct, and questioning them individually to test the solidity of their knowledge. While from the lesson plan you'd have thought there was very little teacher involvement in the lesson at all apart from setting up the activities, this is where I think the beauty of SOLO lies. It frees up the teacher to test every individual and make these individual interventions where necessary. Even in a 30 minute lesson last night, I managed to spend some good time with each student answering questions, clearing up misconceptions, questioning and guiding students individually if they were having difficulties. That level of differentiation is hard to do when you're teaching a whole class I think.

Towards the top of the class, the students were working more in pairs, bashing ideas off each other in response to a task which asked them not only to look at the techniques used in the scene and their connotations, but relate them directly to the intellectual, emotional or visceral reactions they might cause in audiences. In a nutshell, the students had to work out why the techniques were used by the director, and whether they worked on all sorts of different audiences. This then allowed me to add additional hinge questions about why they felt certain audience members would react one way and other audiences would react another way. The students embedded the scene clip from Youtube into Explain Everything, labelled the techniques and connotations, and then created an audio commentary on what was happening in the scene, and what they were personally feeling, thinking etc, and then wrote down the key audience effects, and worked out the key techniques used to generate them. They could then create a summary annotation from their thoughts, and send it to me for marking via email (or export it as a movie). I think if the lesson had gone on longer, this would have been a longer task to give time for a deeper level of thinking, and once I'd checked the projects they'd produced, I would have them exported as movies and put on our Youtube channel so as to teach other students further down the SOLO scale. I accept that they could simply have taught this verbally as a presentation in front of the class without the need for tech, but the fact that this "lesson" would have been curated under our online resources is a powerful augmentation of the task which makes coming back to the material at a later date for revision purposes easier for students.

The final activity on the SOLO scale was given much more time to complete, as it involved thinking about things at a much more profound level. Students were asked to recreate the effect of the Schindler's List scene using different techniques of their own. They could cast it differently, use different camera shots, sounds and edits, and even change the setting and contents of the scene. The task relied on students knowing what Spielberg was trying to achieve in the scene in the first place, relating this back to their prior knowledge on how to create emotional effects in viewers, and using previous work on different filmic techniques to create a new unique piece of their own. Think about that task for a second and ask yourself how easy it would have been for you to do yourself. I think I would have found it difficult, and it's my subject area! But by the end of it, the students who had attempted it were thoroughly immersed in the creative task, and you could see they had really been thinking about it. (As the questions started coming from the audience after the session, she pulled me aside and asked if she could carry on with the task!!)

Here was an activity where the tech did more than simply assist the task, it transformed it. The students could approach the task one of two ways, either by taking stills from Schindler's List itself, and narrating their ideas over it using an app called Tellagami (they hate presenting in person, so this app gives them the chance to disguise themselves. It's very quick to set up a character, and gives them plenty of time for thinking the problem through, though I have to watch that they aren't getting over-distracted by dressing their character up nicely!). This then acts as a presentation for other students, which would be given as the plenary in the lesson to show others a complex response to a higher level task, and again, is archivable on the Youtube channel.

The alternative approach to this task was to show how they would have done it rather than offering a verbal commentary, using a storyboard app called Cinemek. The app allows students to take photographs of themselves and their classmates recreating a scene, and annotating movements, dialogue (they can write as a script or record as audio if they want to perform it), camera movements and edits in such a way that it can all be strung together as one scene at the end. It's a really great app I use constantly because it gets film-makers thinking on a much more technical level about how they show a scene rather than tell a story, but it can be used for a whole number of sequencing and commentating functions in other subjects. In this case, none of the students during the observation used it because frankly, in front of a bunch of other teachers, I think they were embarrassed to be taking pictures of themselves in costumes and theatrical poses! That said, it's certainly an option I would use in other creative and "normal" lessons taking place in my own environment (rather than the gladiator arena of public scrutiny!).

The half hour lesson gave me plenty of scope for asking questions, for individual interventions, and moving students forwards, but in a full hour's lesson, I would have ended with the students showing their work to me, or at the top end, to the rest of the class, becoming the "experts in their field" by way of a plenary. I would have rounded off with a repeat of the same Socrative quiz as they came in with, slightly modified to make them think a little more. If they've made progress, I should be getting more complex answers to the questions they were initially reasonably insecure about, and an ability to answer the more complex questions at a higher SOLO level.

After the session the students and I took part in an interesting Q&A discussion about what the teachers and the HMI had seen. It was clear that several of the onlookers had concerns that the learning they had seen had not been "traditional", and many were anxious that there had not been a clear end goal for the whole class. I think my students were brilliant in answering many of these questions, as they made it clear that this model of learning allows them to learn at their level and their (albeit challenging) pace. There were perhaps concerns about how "visible" the learning was, but it was all there on the students' iPads. There was a definite sense of engagement from every student, but where, I was asked, was the progress after 20 minutes? A question which comes from having it ingrained in us that we must demonstrate progress in 20 minute chunks, I suspect. Fortunately, the HMI was fully supportive, and pointed to the fact that we are looking at lessons as an indicator of challenge and progress for all, but only as one factor in judging the key criteria, which is whether or not students made progress "over time". My students could show how these types of lessons have clearly made them think much more deeply, and could show people examples of their GoogleDocs essays, with my comments, which demonstrated this progress. The key to showing progress in SOLO is to show students improving their skills to a point where they can attempt more difficult and profound thinking tasks, and as far as the HMI was concerned, the movement of students from one task to the next, after careful checking by the teacher, was clear evidence of progress. Huzzah!

Copyright 2005 by Randy Galsbergen

Now I shall wait for the nervous tension to subside, and get back to my normal life... Maybe.

By the way, I should also at this point like to publicly thank my colleagues who encouraged me to do this, and supported me with their kind words. Most importantly, I want to thank the members of my Year 12 and Year 13 Film Studies classes for their help in being guinea pigs for this session: They were truly brilliant, magnificent ambassadors for the school and for our style of learning. My sincerest gratitude. Cakes on the way...





* If you want to see how Aurasma works for yourself, simply download the free app (Android link here), find fpsmediateacher in the search section and follow, and then hover the aura target over this picture: If you've done it right, it should turn into a purple swirl, play a weird video quickly, and if you tap on that weird video, it will take you to the link for the scene on Youtube. Simples.

Addendum: I understand that the video of the lesson may be made publicly available in a few days time. I'm not sure this is a great idea from my point of view (I don't think I got my hair right for a start, and the suit/tie combo I'm told was not up to scratch!), but if anyone is interested, please let me know and I will see if I can get a link to put on the blog.

10 Ways to use a Youtube channel in education

Youtube: The ultimate distraction (apart from Twitter, but that's for grown-ups, right?).

A marmite resource which teachers either love or hate. Personally, I love it. Marmite me up all day long, if you will. It provides a never-ending source of educational videos, inspiration, challenge, provocation and kittens launching themselves at erratic torch-beams wielded by sadistic owners waiting for their cat to splat into a wall and bag them £500 from "You've Been Framed". What's not to like?

Apart from the cats bit, that's why I started our own Finham Park Media Youtube channel. It's been building up gradually over the last few months, the longer I've been on my journey to explore how iPads and BYOD technologies can be used to enhance my own teaching and learning practice (previously blogged about here and here, so forgive me if I don't go over old ground). I've found it an invaluable companion to this journey, so I thought I would share the countless opportunities Youtube offers educationalists in this blog*. In the form of a list. So you can count them. Ahem...

1. The simplest way to use Youtube is as a place of stimulus and discussion for class topics. A video URL can easily be set as research, to provoke debate, to extend thinking for more able students or to help explain something more simply for those having trouble getting to grips with a new concept. Once the students watch the video you've shared, the comments section below allows for the debate to occur. If you "Favourite" the video, it will appear in your channel, and you can then direct students to your channel, and supervise and moderate what they're saying, especially if you have set this as a homework task.

2. I love using Youtube as a place for flipped learning videos too: I create a very simple video, say a tutorial on a concept I'm teaching, an app or piece of software I need students to be able to use, or instructions for hardware such as cameras, particularly useful for subjects like ICT, Media, Photography, DT, Music etc (example here). A Youtube channel allows you to curate all of your videos in one easily-accessed place for your students.

1. 

   Video tutorial

   I then set it as homework for students to watch and take notes on, so that they come to the lesson knowing how to do what I've been describing, or as a minimum, having questions they want clarifying. The ability to review the videos as often as they like allows the students not to feel they have to move at the same middle-ground pace as the rest of the class, and personalises the learning a little more. Allowing questions right from the start of the lesson also allows me to differentiate from the start, allowing those who know what they're doing to get right on, while I can spend time helping those who had questions. I should say at this point that I am aware there has been much criticism of the Khan Academy approach to flipped learning, about the boring videos and inaccuracies, 
   
   but these criticisms mostly miss the point, which is the principle that if you create a video of information you've already taught in class, it can not only be accessed any time to refresh the students' memories, but it can also be done slightly differently to differentiate, be that to stretch the most able, or to assist the less. The great thing about having these videos on your own channel is that you can arrange them into playlists on the same subjects, and have the playlist order follow the same logical order that students should tackle them in, gradually getting harder. the students are improving their skills with every video, but tackling each new topic at their own pace, once they fell they have mastered the preceding step.

3. I tend to use flipped video lessons in conjunction with Ted-Ed, a brilliant resource in itself which I've described elsewhere. It allows you to take any TED or Youtube video and create quizzes based on the videos which students can undertake as the test of how well they have done their homework, and be used as the basis for differentiation from the start of the class. The test immediately shows who has not done the homework, who has done it but needs more input, and who should be moved on straight away. The quizzes can be done different ways, in class, using different software, or even paper if you're into that sort of thing, but the TED-Ed quiz facility has a few nice features (such as hints about where in the video the answer lies if students struggle, and a self-marking facility) which add to the variety of your teaching.

4.  The same principle applies to teachers. I use my Youtube channel to help other teachers with app tutorials to help them work out how to make best use of certain apps to improve their teaching and learning. Again, all of these are arranged into playlists, by topic, to make them hopefully easier to find. I learnt a lot from other teachers who have put tutorials on Youtube (@eyebeams was one particular early inspiration), and a Youtube channel for me just felt like an easy way to share things I was showing teachers in my own school. 

5. However, new media technologies take us way beyond simply finding things other clever people have done, and this is where your own Youtube channel comes into its own. For a start, if your students create their own video work (on phones, iPads, at home, on PCs etc), it is the place to store it for later referral, for assessment (remember, you can comment on their work from there). The process of uploading is incredibly easy once you have the video file, or even more automatic from certain apps which are already linked to Youtube.

6. This also acts as a public showcase for your students' work, which is a huge incentive for them. You need their permission to share this work publicly (you can upload things to Youtube but keep them private, or stipulate that only people in your classes can see them), but if they and the people they filmed are happy with it, you can then open the channel up to more public eyes and exposure. This knowledge that anyone could come across their work can really sharpen their focus and inspire students to produce over and above their usual class efforts.

7. Not only that, but if your students are serious about their work, the channel acts as a networking opportunity for your students, to allow others to see what they have done, and allow them to talk about and discuss their work with industry professionals. It might even get them noticed by someone really important, but even if they're don't get signed for their first multi-million dollar film deal, the channel opens up the way for discussions with people who can help them to improve their practice. In one recent example, a friend of mine who works on video effects saw the work of a student and started a conversation with them about how they could get better, and different techniques they could use. hey presto, the student's next piece was even better. Feedback from an expert certainly carries more weight than mine does (apparently!).

8. The discussion and comments sections for videos also allow an opportunity for extended peer feedback: By sharing the links with other schools, you allow your students to put their work before a broader audience of their peers, and a broader range of criticism. This acts the same way as the way other colleagues share their class blogs between schools, and with the same positive effect in my experience.

9. Additionally, I think having your own channels allows you to share your students' work with other teaching professionals, providing an opportunity for moderation. Anyone who finds themselves in my position of working in a small department without a budget to send you to those costly moderation meetings will appreciate the ability to share your links with other professionals and get their opinion on the marks you're giving, or how the work could be improved, especially if you're feeling a bit too close to the work to be objective.

10. Finally, there is a great deal to be said for how far a Youtube channel gets you noticed as a school. Ours has attracted attention from all over the place, and when people from around the country discuss the work of Finham Park students, many of them have seen it on our Youtube channels, so our school's reputation is enhanced.

One final word on Youtube. Many schools block it, despite the fact that it is the most extensive resources of video material the world has ever seen. For me, that's all horribly wrong. The fact that students could access inappropriate material via Youtube is not a reason to ban it. After all, no school banned the Internet, despite the rumour that at one stage it consisted of 90% pornography (This may be apocryphal and impossible to prove, but you have to admit it's persuasive and emotive: Everything we need from a "Gove-fact"!) Essentially, it should not be for technicians or bureaucrats to decide what your students can and can't access. It should be for the teacher. If the teacher doesn't feel confident that students will stay on task and use learning-related sites they have stipulated, then they shouldn't take a risk in using it. On the other hand, if you feel you trust your students, or that you have the ability to manage behaviour (it is the behaviour which you are criticising after all, not the technology), then use it. As far as I am concerned, what students can access should be a matter of teaching and learning, not decided by technicians. They are there to serve the teaching and learning community after all, and that's a powerful argument to take to leadership teams to get them to unblock these sites.

*If you are about to skip the rest of this blog o the basis that Youtube is blocked in your school, I suggest starting at the LAST paragraph

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

BYOD Implementation In Schools - Part 3: Staff training

I've been teaching for many years now, and I've seen many an initiative come and go. My present school is one of the few I've ever taught in where initiatives are very much superseded by foci. This may sound like no difference at all, but for me the difference has been in the time taken to research, test, trial and embed practice over the long term. Three years our school spent on an AFL "initiative": I'd argue that after three years, that's not an initiative any more: That's a focus. And a pretty serious one at that. And it has brought the vast majority of our staff on in leaps and bounds.

One of the reasons a focus works better than an initiative is that a focus necessitates full staff commitment, and therefore training. Staff training has been one of the key strands to our BYOD trials at Finham Park, and we are now into our second term. We began by converting one of our school's dozen or so TALK Groups (Teaching and Learning Communities, groups which all staff are part of, including learning supervisors and student teachers) into a group solely devoted to looking at the use of mobile technology to enhance teaching and learning. We co-opted a number of staff covering all faculties, and importantly, covered different levels of technological skill. We didn't want the trial group to be a geek-fest, because any good ideas we came up with could immediately be rejected by other staff on roll-out as just being for the technologically competent or gifted. We had to make sure that this was transparently seen as a focus which could benefit all teachers no matter what level of technological competence they were at.

During our first meeting we shared our strategy for the BYOD programme (published here if anyone's desperately interested), and shared our rationale behind it. We also made our expectations clear to the staff involved in the trial:

• To develop their interest and skills in SMART learning in their classroom
• To experiment with different web-based apps to enhance learning experience, variety, assessment and effectiveness
• To bring back tips, techniques, ideas, apps, problems and obstacles to each TALK group meeting for discussion
• To develop skills further based on each TALK group session
• To help roll out their experiences and expertise to other teachers, with the help of Digital Leaders when we are confident the major infrastructure obstacles have been tackled

In return, we asked staff what they felt their biggest training needs might be (on the understanding that as the trial progressed, some of these might well change, at which point we would change our provision in line with those new needs). The key areas we identified between us were:

• Learning to use devices to enhance AFL in class
• Managing behaviour in the digital classroom
• Establishing expectations with students within this new learning environment
• How to get the students' devices onto the wifi network

I have already written about a variety of ways to use online apps for AFL elsewhere, so forgive me for not repeating myself here. Go and read it if you want: It's got tutorials, witticisms and cartoons and everything. But finish this first. Patience, young Jedi... The more thorny problem, which vexes teachers and SLT alike, is the potential for classroom disruption and disengagement offered by mobile devices. We've been straight down the line about this all the way through the process, and said that if students disengage using a mobile phone, you have a behaviour problem, not a technology problem. I'm sure everyone wanted to ban pencils when they were first introduced too: As anyone who has seen the outstanding French film Nikita will know, you have serious potential for GBH with a pencil, and that trick The Joker did with a pencil, a table and a gangster in The Dark Knight doesn't bear thinking about either. But we don't ban them. So we talked to staff about how to handle students who misuse devices. In large part, it's about the establishment of clear expectations with students from the start: Students must understand that the mobile device is a learning tool, which can be brought out when the teacher deems it appropriate, and not otherwise. With these expectations firmly in place, students understand that doing anything other than learning with the devices is not acceptable. The other key thing is that disengagement is much easier to spot if students are using mobiles. If students are spending an inordinate amount of time staring down at their crotches during lessons, you can bet they're either texting, or doing something even less savoury. Either way, deal with it quickly and firmly.

Finally, we needed to liaise with our Tech Support to work out a way to logistically get every student in the trial put on the wifi. In our case, we weren't prepared to simply open the access to everyone, so the technicians agreed to put each individual device on for us. This liaison with our technicians has been extended by inviting one of them to join our TaLK Group each session, so they have a far better overview about what we're trying to achieve, and can give us good advice on the optimal way to achieve these goals. So far, it has been a fruitful relationship which has allowed us as teachers to appreciate the concerns of the Tech Support department, while also allowing them to see what we are trying to achieve as teachers. I will let you know as things develop, but so far I have to say that this mutual collaboration has proven very useful.

The format of our meetings has followed the format we established for the TaLK Groups when we were trialling AFL techniques: We spend the first ten minutes or so sharing individual experiences, we assist with solutions where problems have arisen, and we generally pat each other on the back encouragingly for how far we've come since last time (think Alcoholics Anonymous meets Star Trek convention). We then go on to look at specific areas where we want to improve our practice: It could be the use of specific AFL techniques, or getting students to organise their work on mobile devices, or investigating a new app: Whatever. We get everyone to pick a partner who is interested in exploring the same area for mutual support, and another partner to go to for advice, and we arrange informal mutual observations, research sharing or discussions to explore whatever it was we wanted to focus on. The meetings are every half-term or so, to give teachers time not only to explore, but also to embed ideas into their practice. And this same cycle of plan-do-review happens during each session, and we help each other move forward with our practice. Simples.

Between the group, our main areas of focus so far have included assessment for learning, obviously, but also how we can use mobile technology to improve student organisation and student independence too, with personalised learning strategies being developed through mobile technology.

By next meeting, we will start assessing the impact of the group’s discussions on our practice so far. I'm looking forward to hearing about the individual ideas, the progress, but also seeing what areas we need to iron out before we can go any further with this scheme: Technical issues, infrastructure, teaching and learning problems, all of these are bound to focus our attentions, because unless we can get rid of as many obstacles as possible in our initial group work, we will leave ourselves open to staff who don't want to engage with these ideas simply rejecting them because "the systems aren't in place". And we can't afford that.

We will also be looking during our next session more closely at the SAMR model (with thanks to @ICTevangelist from whom we blatantly nicked this one!). The SAMR framework will allow us to assess how effective mobile technology is in enhancing learning. It is easy to get carried away with the novelty of a new focus in the classroom, especially one as shiny and pretty as mobile technology, but unless we can be sure that these technologies are being used in a way which moves learning and teaching forward, then there isn't really much point in making such a song and dance about them. We're hoping that this model will serve as a benchmark, allowing us to reflect on how far along the path we are actually moving, and how far we are genuinely transforming learning. More on this as we go forward. Now I need to work on our Digital Leaders strategy...

Apposite cartoon...

And choon and video to really cheer you up. Seriously, watch it...

Bring Your Own Device in schools - an implementation strategy Part 2

I blogged a little while ago about the journey we are taking in our school to implement a SMART Learning strategy, facilitated by a scheme allowing students to bring their own devices to the learning environment. We've been through the exploration phases, the feasibility stage, and the infrastructure set-up stage in that post, so forgive me if I don't go into it again. Read it for yourselves, I can't be bothered to type it all out again, I'm on holiday, and I've given you enough repetition of the same hyperlink in the last sentence that you can't miss it!

Developing an Acceptable Use Policy:

At the time of writing it we were on the verge of conducting a school-wide Safer Internet Day project, most ably led by my co-conspirator @Gripweed1 (definitely worth following). The lesson was conducted by all mentors across all students, and Associate Staff and SLT were attached to classes too, so it was genuinely a school-wide discussion. The theme was the rights and responsibilities of using digital devices and the internet, both inside and out of school, and the ultimate aim was to engage the students in defining what would become our Acceptable Use Policy. The responses we got from students were very high quality, with a great deal more emphasis on the responsibilities they had than the rights, and a lot of intelligent discussion about where one person's rights conflicted with those of others. The results were presented in assemblies to each college by the ICT students leaders, so the students could see what we had done with their input, and we are now hoping to run a more focused Baraza*-style consultation of the students to focus their ideas down into a simple, user-friendly policy which achieves their buy-in.

* Baraza: noun, of African origin: To sit round in a village circle and have a chat about making the village a better place in order to hit FFTD targets, or something like that. I don't know. Head's idea, but works really well

Now, however, we reach the squash stage: There are a number of simultaneous processes we have to carefully carry out at the same time, but without any of them getting too far ahead of the others, lest the whole thing falls apart. The key stake-holders are all involved in these stages, because to put it simply:

• We can't switch on unrestricted access to wifi until we have students agreeing to how it will be used
• We can't allow students to use their devices willy-nilly (stop me if I get technical) without showing them how to use them responsibly in an educational context, to assist their learning
• We can't teach them how powerful these tools are for learning unless we have teachers trained in the use of SMART devices and pedagogy
• We can't expect the teachers to also be trained up in the potential technical problems associated with different devices, so we have to train up digital leaders to assist in technical matters
• And we can't do any of this without the rationale for it being clear to the parents themselves, who are otherwise quite within their rights to wonder how their children can learn in a class where they are allowed mobile devices out when these very same devices are exactly what prevents them getting any form of decent conversation out of their offspring once they get home at night!!

You get the idea. Lots of people to get on-board, lots to work out in terms of the order in which to do this. So this is our priority list:

Digital Leadership training:

Before students start using the devices for learning, the teachers need to be ready to use them, and need to be able to overcome a range of technical obstacles in their way. You may be lucky enough to have a great team of techies in your school to be able to help out with this, but frankly, even with the best will in the world, once there are 1500 plus devices around the place, they're in it way beyond their eye-balls. Our strategy is to train a crew of digital leaders across all years whose job it will be to assist in two key ways:

1. With basic device problems, functionality, logins, printer problems etc
2. With helping the teachers source ideas for using the new technology in learning

If we can get at least one digital leader in every classroom across each year, the teacher hopefully shouldn't need to worry about stopping the entire lesson because "Sir, my phone's not working!" The teacher will have enough on their plate without having to worry about that, and moreover, the less confident a teacher is, the fewer obstacles it will take before they jack it all in as unworkable, new-fangled etc etc. The role of digital leaders is to shoulder those technical responsibilities, and that will take a lot of training.

Staff Training:

Our next stage in our school is to get a group of digital enthusiasts together to lead the initiative further. We could call these "dangerous teachers". We could equally call them "canon fodder" I guess, but let's stay positive! These need not, and ideally should not, be tech-experts. Restricting this part of the project to the tech-savvy will alienate anyone else too easily, and make it seem like a clique of "boys with toys", at the risk of stereotypical gender generalisation. Better to have a cross-curricular range of gifted enthusiastic amateurs who know the potential, and want to develop it.

Staff who are developing new pedagogies need time to experiment and explore. That would go for any new idea, whether it be co-construction, SOLO Taxonomy, Flipped learning or whatever. All the more so for SMART Learning. Not only do they need time to get to grips with a device, but they then need time to work out how it fits into their curriculum, what the potential for it is. Mark Anderson (@ICTEvangelist) has written some superb guidance on how to move mobile device use through a variety of stages from the enhancement of teaching to its transformation, and teachers who are taking on this challenge will have to work their way gradually through these stages to get the best out of them.

In a BYOD environment, teachers wil initially be looking at web-based tools which anyone can access no matter what device, and then be looking at more specific apps for certain tasks, some of which may be exclusive to certain platforms. At the moment, there are a great many apps I use on iPads which are simply not available on Android, but others may be, and teachers will go on to explore those, as well as eventually looking at subject-specific apps. All of this takes time and regular training, which is why the teachers shouldn't also have to worry about the technical side of things going wrong, hence the digital leadership programme.

Once the teachers feel comfortable with their devices, and their potential, it can easily be made part of those digital leaders' remits to ask what departments' needs are, and to find possible solutions to present to the teachers, almost reversing the teacher-student relationship.

For me, this is one of the most crucial areas of staff training: To get them to accept that in a fast-moving, hi-tech world, they are no longer the "sage on the stage". If teachers have the humility to accept that they may not know something, but that by working with students there will be a way to find out, they will establish strong collaborative relationships which could mark a fundamental shift in the way students see the relationship too. When students and teachers are brought down to the same sort of level, the focus on learning and progress becomes much sharper, with both parties constantly interrogating the path they're taking, and the tools they're using.

We also need to get away from the idea of "safe teaching". All teaching should be inherently dangerous, and perhaps uncertain, but if the final destination is something which is agreed from the start, collaboration will get us there in the end. Hopefully this will pave the way for a far more risk-taking culture, and it requires a brave leap of faith from leadership teams to allow their staff to try to fly, and watch them occasionally fall. But in the words of one of my favourite philosophers...
"Why do we fall? To pick ourselves up." Might be a prize for guessing the philosopher. Leave your guesses in the comments section...

Class Trials:

So after the digital leaders are trained, the next stage is class trials led by those "dangerous teachers". This would involve allowing teachers to experiment, try different ideas with different classes, getting digital leaders alongside them each step of the way, meeting regularly to discuss new needs until the staff are completely comfortable, at which point the digital leader roles can be extended even further to include pedagogical questions, such as "what works best if we are trying to...?". You can see we're not talking about an overnight process here. In my opinion, if you don't give SMART learning the time to bed in, and support it with a long-term development strategy, it will not become an effective tool in the learning toolbox.

Once those classes, teachers and digital leaders feel comfortable in their roles, and have ironed out a lot of the worst potential pitfalls, then you can start bringing the rest of the staff onboard, training them in exactly the same way.

Eventually you want to get to a stage when the technology is a non-issue. It's invisible. Its use is seamlessly integrated into classrooms in a way which enhances learning, but doesn't get in the way of learning. The same is true of behaviour problems which devices may seem to be causing. Students need to be trained into a routine of how to use mobile technology effectively to assist their learning, but if they do misuse it (for Facebook, games, texts etc), then what you have is a behaviour issue, which should be challenged as such. Part of our job as teachers is to show students that there is another way to use this type of technology, beyond the recreational. And as one BYOD enthusiast told me once, students disengaging with lessons on their mobile phone are often much easier to spot than those who are quietly simply staring out of the window. Either way, they need to be engaged in the learning process, and that's our job.

Next instalment: Parental engagement. How to sell your idea for SMART learning to get parental support for it. They're the ones paying for the devices, after all...

For anyone interested, this is an outline of our strategy and rationale at Finham Park:


Finham Park School SMART Learning implementation strategy