Thursday 1 April 2010

Consult@ND

Going live soon at http://www.notredame-high.co.uk/ here's preview of our new consultancy marketing site
Notre Dame High School ICT in Education Consultancy Service

Notre Dame has long held ICT at the core of school improvement. We became a Technology College in 1995 and have since then been innovators with New Technology. The school is highly successful as a result, graded outstanding by Ofsted across the board in 2005 and 2008. In 2009 we won the Becta Excellence Award (Best Whole School in Yorkshire and the Humber).

We also have long held a big responsibility to share good practice with others. As a specialist school there are our community partners but also as a Leading Edge School, host of a City Learning Centre and National Support School there has been additional support to a large number of particular partner schools.

Our consultancy service in terms of ICT has been accessible to all interested parties beyond the official partner schools through initiatives like our presence on the www.ict-register.net and us having a leading role with Becta such as film making and our Online Reporting Advocate School role.
An example of the films we have made with Becta


We now want to market this support even more widely.

Services

We offer bespoke consultancy with the dedicated support of an experienced school leader or senior middle manager in the following areas. These are fixed price of £500 per day (£250 for part day) for up to 4 delegates from one school or seminars based on 5 or more colleagues from one school or separate schools are £100 per person with up to 30 delegates at a time.

You can book in a group of colleagues from a family of schools for a seminar and spread the cost between you and choose a date to suit you or you can book on to courses when advertised dates are shown here.

To make an enquiry contact Sarah Billingham sbillingham@notredame-high.co.uk

Subjects we are currently busy offering consultancy on include:

• Whole school strategic leadership in ICT

This service aims to support whole school development through effective deployment of ICT in all aspects of the school. Based on the Becta Self Review Framework and through sharing the experience of a school at the top of the Self Review Framework schools will be able to embark on a journey that should they wish would lead to being in a position to apply for the Becta ICT Mark and then go on to challenge for an Excellence Award.

• BSF ICT Strategy

What should you be looking for out of BSF ICT? What will you do with the funding? Get advice on strategy around BSF and help shape your vision for how new technology will transform learning by working with a school who have achieved much of what BSF aims to achieve in all schools. If BSF is years off for your school, or you are worried it may never arrive why not start setting aside the costs of your managed service now to spend on ICT to jump-start your tranformation through ICT, our advice can help you with vision, strategic development planning and getting innovative pilot projects and leadership in place ahead of BSF so you are well placed to make the most of the investment and should it not materialise you'll be well on course to realise the potential of great ICT anyway.

• Learning Platforms and Virtual Schools

Getting a VLE doesn’t automatically mean e-learning will take off. We can support you in specifying what you want from your VLE, how you lead the implementation and how you go beyond VLEs to a more comprehensive Virtual School and find out where e-learning is going in a post VLE environment where personalisation is key.

• Parental Engagement/ Online Reporting (secondary)

With the deadline for secondary schools to make behaviour, attendance, attainment and progress as well as SEN paper available online in secondary schools for September 2010 approaching now is a great time to seek support from one of the Advocate Schools with an award winning system that has been case studied by Becta and running since 2007. Clarify your vision by seeing a system in action; find out about the strategic leadership issues to take you towards your own vision and seek reassurance from a school who have the system in place and have already reaped rewards not least with record breaking exam results.

But also see beyond the basic targets for 2010 and find out how New Technology can engage parents well beyond the basics of online reporting, find out how vibrant web sites, SMS text and email, Social Networking and other web2.0 technologies can engage parents in the partnership of educating children and improve 2 way communications between home and school.

• Parental Engagement/ Online Reporting (Primary)

With online reporting due to take effect from 2012 Primary Schools should now be taking a strategic look at how they can use New Technology to engage parents. Primary schools have time to get simple, effective and low cost ideas working in advance of full-blown reporting to engage parents. In an environment where budgets and technical expertise are in shorter supply than in secondary schools primary schools who seek guidance can exploit low cost and free technologies such as email, SMS text and Social Networks to engage with parents and improve home school communication.

The challenges for primary schools where young children are not able to be a reliable conduit for communication between school and home are big, but the opportunities are massive and with training non-technical staff in primary school can revolutionise how they communicate with families.

• E-safety

Most schools are well equipped to help keep children safe online, if you aren’t we can help, confident schools may want to come and spend some time rethinking policies. Advice today is moving towards training young people to recognise risks and take responsibility and control when online, traditional policies of blocking and filtering web access may have their place, particularly in removing distractions from learning, but don’t education children well for the majority of their time online which is often unfiltered and unsupervised.

Lots of schools have not considered the safety of their staff though, are staff trained of the professional risks of how they conduct their online lives? Are school leaders aware of the challenges Social Networks can bring them where teachers get into trouble online with young people or who act irresponsibly or unprofessionally in their online life compromising their own professional reputation and that of their school? If you would like to get up to speed on these issues and rather than fear the technology take control of it and use it for school improvement we can offer you consultancy with the author of popular e-book: Social Networks, the benefits and risks to schools.

• Making use of students' own mobile devices

Students own mobile devices are massive untapped resource. Notre Dame hit the headlines in 2009 for proposing to allow students to use such devices at school and many other schools are now looking at this issue.

Carefully written Acceptable Use Policies and reconfiguration of the schools wifi network mean students can now safely access the internet via their own devices, this allow schools to evolve their pedagogy allowing students to use devices they naturally use out of school and allows schools to make big leaps with the exploitation of New Technology at the same time as allowing their own computer resources in school to stretch further.

As internet accessing devices become ever more ubiquitous and cheaper schools need to adapt their role to be the provider of safe connectivity, well designed Virtual Schools and developers of engaging e-learning content which can be accessed by students anytime, anywhere and on any device. Come and have your ideas ignited and join us on this journey towards future learning.



We will also prepare courses and consultancy on other ICT topics at your request pulling in expertise from a large pool of contacts within and beyond Notre Dame, please contact us to discuss your needs.