Haighy's blog

An example of the emails I'm getting

2012-01-25T12:45:00.001-08:00

From: Sarah
Sent: 25 January 2012 19:57
To: Haigh, Mr P
Subject: Help

Dear Paul, can you give me some advice

Our head has taken Gove at his word and is axing ICT as quickly as he can. On the back of that I suspect that having a head of what will be a very very small department is not going to be seen as sustainable. With that in mind I want to get to him to give him alternatives for my role!

I hear you are masterminding the concept of "digital literacy". Could you let me into your plans for the future of ICT in schools and any ideas of what i could morph my role into. Our school is backward with technology with a head with who thinks only traditional subjects should be valued so i will probably need to move on but want to do it from a strong position!

Help!!

Sarah

Hi Sarah

If your head is taking all that Gove is saying at his word then the future is bright- new technology is central to delivery of all subjects and key to running a 21st century school. If he's picking and choosing and sees the opportunity to ditch a subject he doesn't get then not all is rosy. Make sure he's reading http://www.education.gov.uk/a00201823/digital-technology-in-schools to understand the breadth of the DfE ideas.

Around taught ICT then yes I think now you should think about digital literacy for all- think KS3 and the skills students need to be 21st century students, independent learners, safe online, able to manage online identities and don't forget those office applications as professional and personal life skills, but don't be a slave to traditional locally installed applications, reflect the shifting landscape with web apps like Google apps and also get up to date with things that have happened since the old programme of study was written- web2.0, social media, mobile devices, smart phones, tablets, e-book readers internet access from range of devices- digital TV, games consoles, iPod, Kindles etc

This could be delivered as discreet lessons/ and or by embedding into other subjects (I'd argue both)- if he goes for the latter then the challenge is the CPD for the subject teachers and the mapping and tracking that it is done- a job to be done by someone and it needs to stay up to date in a fast moving field. If he sticks with discreet lessons then you are liberated from long projects flogging the ar5e our of excel or access and you can bring in some fun like designing mobile device apps or design a web2.0 social media campaign-you can argue that by delivering digital literacy well the students will be better equipped to learn independently in the 'traditional subjects'. If the head is stuck on traditional subjects tell him how cuts at universities mean increasingly more of courses are delivered through independent and online learning, as is professional CPD in the workplace not to mention the jobs the kids will have require digital literacy- remind him of the world your school is preparing the kids for.

As for computing aim to give all students the chance to experience coding in KS3- look at extra curricula clubs to engage the geeks as well as giving everyone a taster in lessons and then use this as a way in to a KS4 computer science option and market it based on UK heritage in computing/ our future economy means we should be taking computing as seriously as maths and science as the foundations of a UK knowledge based economy. Work with the maths and science departments to give computing the gravitas- even get history on board- see reference to WW2 below.

Then have a good GCSE in computing option in KS4 and use the student/ parent voice to tell you if traditional ICT isn't required, perhaps business options can cover that market?

Get your Head to wake up and smell the coffee by showing him the passage in Gove's speech that if the exam boards come up with the right specs he'd like computing to be part of the Ebacc- computing is a new traditional subject (and not that new, since modern computing started in the 1940s with the war time code breakers and Alan Turing et al)

Finally your ace card is Silicon Fen- Cambridgeshire is a world hot spot for new tech companies so you should be preparing school leavers for jobs in them, use your freedom to strike up partnership with local IT companies to design an engaging curriculum that trades on your regional pride and their needs for future employees, get some business partnerships and sponsorships to give the kids some real career aspirations.

Finally tell your head to buy http://bit.ly/haighybook and you get networking with the people shaping the future via twitter and their blogs e.g. this http://jimanning.com/2012/01/putting-my-money-where-my-mouth-is/ has just flashed by on the #tag #futureteched (also follow #codingforkids and #ukedchat) so you know what people are up to and can copy them.

And yes, if you can't change your head's mind and he's not 58 years old take your talent elsewhere- all other right minded schools are looking to a renaissance in the role of new technology and the place of computing, those who are seeing it as a chance to ditch ICT are missing the point and will end up running schools that aren't fit for 21st century purpose.

Paul

Hallam Teaching School Alliance - Teaching & Learning Programmes

2011-12-01T09:55:00.001-08:00

Hallam Teaching School Alliance is offering Teaching & Learning Programmes throughout 2012/2013. If you are interested in either of the programmes detailed below or would like to learn more about Hallam TSA please do not hesitate to contact us. In the meantime there are still a few places left on the January 2012 programme.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Improving Teacher Programme
A 6 week programme of visits to Notre Dame High School, Sheffield including lesson observations at this outstanding school. Programme has 80% success rate in turning satisfactory teachers with a capacity to improve into good teachers through buidling confidence in classroom teaching.

Outstanding Teacher Programme
A 9 week programme takes outstanding teachers or teachers with capacity to become outstanding and equips them with the tools to support improvements in teaching and learning beyond their own classrooms.

contact:

Mrs S Billingham
Teaching School Office Manager
Notre Dame High School
Fulwood Road
Sheffield
S10 3BT
email: sbillingham@notredame-high.co.uk
hallamtsa@notredame-high.co.uk
tel: 0114 2302536 Ext 264
web: http://htsa.notredame-high.org.uk/

Every teacher a blogger? every teacher a tweeter?

2011-11-08T12:02:00.001-08:00

It's something I've written about and spoken about for a while but it might be starting to happen.
If you are reading this you already know about the benefit blogging teachers can have to share ideas between schools. If you linked to this blog via Twitter you know how powerful Twitter is for pointing you to the web spaces where the inspiration is to be found. You might find this from my LinkedIn page, in which can you are just more into grown up Social Networking!

My dream is all teachers have ideas worth sharing, but they can't all be published authors or conference speakers- they can all tweet and facebook their ideas and it's not much of a step to run a simple blog- like this one where my posts come up with no technical skill, I post by email.

Teaching School work is now bringing this dream to reality. Certainly my Teaching School Alliance (http://htsa.notredame-high.org.uk/) is already promoting professional networking through social media but the agencies like the National College, TDA, and several large universities are also talking about it. It's not that one person had an idea others have listened to, some of the best ideas pop up simultaneous from all sorts of places independently because they suddenly look really obvious- although I hope I've seeded it a bit myself.
Teaching Schools are aiming to turn themselves, and hopefully the schools their work with, into laboratories of teaching with everyone in them being at least a reflective practitioner who thinks about what they do and how it could be improved, but many actually more formally studying their own practice and doing research- increasingly with masters level credits from a university partner and the teaching schools being tasked to take on more formal Research and Development roles with the National College.

By getting teachers tweeting, facebooking and blogging with each other ideas can flow, debates can happen and expertise can be found and quizzed in person. You all know this, otherwise you wouldn't have found this, but now the educational establishment is looking at how we bring all members of the profession into this, so far, secret paradise we all benefit from.

It wouldn't take much; if every teacher who sees the benefit of social networks and web2.0 tools for professional networking convinced 2 colleagues to join in it wouldn't take long to infect the whole workforce, but I can see how a short workshop with all ITT participants as part of their course would formally train the workforce and set of a new generation of teachers who study their own work and publish their own findings.
So, while it's good news that someone is planning to promote this in a big way, in the mean time tell two friends at work about the blogs and tweets that have been inspiring your work recently.

An email conversation about mobile technology

2011-11-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

From: Paul
Sent: 01 November 2011 09:51
To: Haigh, Mr P
Subject: mobile technology
Dear Paul
My colleague, Chris, contacted you a while back regarding your work with mobile phone technology at your school. I have been asked to follow this work up and was wondering if you could tell me of what impact the use of mobile phones have had during lessons at your school?

I appreciate that you are a very busy person and I have read your blogs, thoughts and ideas online, but I would really like to know the impact that it has had and if it has had any measurable impact on exam results or Higher Order Thinking opportunities.
Many thanks
Paul

From: Haigh, Mr P
Sent: 01 November 2011 21:29
To: Paul
Subject: RE: mobile technology
Hi Paul
Yes, what a shame we are so far apart- good news is my parents-in-law are about to move to your neck of the woods so calling in to see you one day when I'm visiting them isn't impossible.
I've just been chatting to people on twitter about this tonight- here are a couple of blog posts people are chatting about

http://www.ictsteps.com/2011/10/byod-it-makes-a-lot-of-commonsense/
http://www.cunniman.net/?p=1079

I was asked for my advice and it was this. Firstly don't expect a BYOD (bring your own device) policy to replace your ICT- kids will have all sorts of difference devices, some none, but by opening the door to 'run what they brung' you allow, in a very natural way like 'real life' ICT in to add an extra dimension to what is happening in the classrooms already.

So think evolution not revolution, you get the acceptable use policy right so you feel confident to 'un-ban' mobiles then you incentivise innovation with the keen staff and give those not keen the power to say to their class I don't want to see them in my lesson. The message gets out that they aren't a problem and they are quite helpful and they get used more.

Can I claim impact on exam results? We'll we've gone up another 10% this year (5A*-C inc E&M 82%) but I can't claim it's down to mobiles- most kids in most lessons are not using them most of the time, there's no need, but sometimes they are too great a resource to ignore:

1. photograph a flip chat/ whiteboard/ card sort the kids/ results in an experiment teacher have made but can't take away in any form or in these hard pressed times the page of the text book they have to share but can't take home to use for homework
2. Produce e-portfolio content in D&T including sound/ video and photos of projects being completed and products being tested
3. produce work in new media- e.g. rather than write an answer make a video in a group or record voice and email the file to the teacher to hand in, then the teacher plays these to the class to share the learning
4. allow students to use Google/ wikipedia as an on the desk reference tool just like they'd use a dictionary or periodic table (or even as a dictionary- far faster to look up and spell check words)
5. allow students to check timetables/ emails/ notices
6. allow students access paperless resources on the VLE and resources on the VLE that could never be on paper- e.g. video teacher tutorials 'how to clips'
7. allow students to improve personal organisation- putting deadlines into phone as calendar reminders, school journals don't shout that there is work to do from inside the kids pockets on a Saturday! (look at the InClass app on itunes) This could be the biggest single thing in terms of impact for kids who struggle with personal organisation and forget books/ equipment/ PE kit/ food tech/ homework.
If you haven't already do a survey like this, I'm not excited about mobile phones- too limited, too many distractions and too varied in what kids have, but look at this- 50% of our kids have iPod touch so in the average class I've got 1 between 2 http://twitpic.com/3w44qg and not got any worries about kids texting/ phones ringing/ kids browsing unfiltered 3G web (not that this ever had been a problem, people will predict it will be)

And then table the graph at SMT and say what is our position on this?? Pretty quickly people realise we can't ignore what's in their bags.

I hope that's helpful. Have you got a copy of http://www.optimus-education.com/new-technologies-handbook-schools-maximising-impact-ict-transform-learning-511 it's all in there and, as they say, much much more!
Paul
________________________________

Twitter for Teachers CPD

2011-09-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

Twitter is the source of the most exciting, powerful and engaging Teacher CPD around at the moment. It costs nothing and achieves a great deal. Teachers who use it build a personal learning network of fellow educational professional who they follow and share ideas with. The whole community comes together under the #ukedchat hash tag which is a great way to find the tweeters you need. #ukedchat comes to life every Thursday night with a lively debate from 8pm until 9pm but the tag can be used at any time. Find out more about #ukedchat here http://www.creativeeducation.co.uk/blog/index.php/2010/11/uk-ed-chat-a-guide/

All teachers should use Twitter and I’m pleased to say educational agencies are taking an interest in how tools like twitter and linking in personal blogs and tools like Linked In will help drive up standards in the next few years. It’s certainly a strategy I’ll be promoting in my new role as Director of the Notre Dame High School Teaching School Alliance.

Sing up now! www.twitter.com

Our first 10 visualisers arrived...

2011-09-06T05:26:00.000-07:00

...and at break time one has already been returned to the staff room by a colleague saying ‘this was left in my room, it’s not mine, I don’t know what it is!’ so I hastily put this together before any more get put in cupboards:

What are they?
From http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jan/08/link.link16
Visualisers are digital presentation and teaching tools that enable teachers to share a much wider range of information and artefacts with their pupils via their digital projectors. They allow the examination of text, images, artefacts and even living things in visual learning opportunities that users of the old overhead projectors could only dream about.
Essentially, a visualiser is a digital camera on the end of an arm, but it is the controls available via the base unit and/or software that offer so much more. Typically, even on the most basic of small visualisers you are able to zoom in and out, freeze and capture an image then review the image captured.
There are three main modes of operation when using a visualiser:
1. At the simplest level it can be connected to a monitor or digital projector and all the class can see the target object.
2. When connected to a PC that runs visualiser software, more opportunities present themselves, for example slow motion, time-lapse capture, storage and review of any 2D/3D object, split-screen operation and mirrored images, B&W and negative imaging and video casting.
3. If the PC is connected to an interactive whiteboard then annotation over 3D objects becomes possible.

How do teachers use them?

This teachers TV film http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/videos/visualisers about primary school teachers using visualisers will give you some ideas- you’ll see there’s a lot more to do than just putting a putting a book or newspaper under the camera- although anything small you have only one of that you want the whole class to see is a good start.

Saving the learning experiences as stills or videos to be accessed by students online on Moodle for homework or revision is a great idea- so they can watch demonstrations again for example.

Get some tips from others teachers and share yours here http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/visualisertips and find other ideas here http://www.visualiserforum.co.uk/tag/training/page/2/

More ICT ideas from the same series are here http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/series/better-learning-with-ict

Help! How do we sustain 900 PCs with all the cuts?

2011-07-05T08:22:00.001-07:00

Hi Paul,

Hope you are well. You may remember I came out to see you last year to seek some guidance on directing my schools strategy on the development of the ICT infrastructure.

Congratulations on the ebook http://bit.ly/haighysbooks by the way, I have bought it but just need a chance to read it now!!

I have a question and was just wondering if you could help me in my line of enquiry: I am currently looking at ‘virtualising’ the site here as currently we cannot sustain the costs of supporting 900 + desktops in school, however I am slightly worried about the impact this may have on developments within technology and L&T in the future as all contacts I speak to think that mobile devices and the ’cloud’ is the future?? I am not overly technical so trying to get my head around all this. However I see no way around this at the moment as our curriculum and the fact that we still teach ICT as a discreet subject directs the technology at the moment.

I have been told that you removed ICT from the curriculum discreetly and integrated it into other areas. Is this correct and did this work??

Anne Assistant Head.

Hi there Anne,

I think you’ve got two questions here- how to sustain 900 PCs in school and what’s the best way to deliver ICT.

You certainly don’t need 900 PCs to deliver discrete ICT but you do need access to a lot of computer devices to deliver good teaching across the school and ICT lessons need a ‘proper computer’ per child.

We do have discrete ICT, many years ago we did go for a fully cross-curricular model but not anymore- the ICT curriculum got bigger and more advanced and we needed expert teachers in discreet lessons.

Student owned mobile devices are something all schools should consider, but they won’t replace proper computers well, they might plug gaps and make lessons that otherwise wouldn’t have use ICT better but it can only be part of the strategy.

You might want to look at replacing full blown PCs with thin client terminals- for anything other than heavy developer work like video editing they do a great job, essentially you have a monitor and keyboard working off the processor, files and software on a central server. You will save not only a lot of money in buying hardware and software but they will last much longer and use a fraction of the energy (remember to consider TCO: Total Cost of Ownership).

The discrete ICT teacher might be less keen on them at the higher end of the curriculum but in most school ICT suites they are great- although we prefer to put ICT into classrooms rather than suites but with a bit of fixed benching they can find their way into ‘normal’ classrooms.

The other option you have is equipping the students with a mobile computer each- netbooks for example and setting up an e-learning foundation with charitable status that parents make contributions in to for a device their child owns and then you have a sustainable model that you stop equipping the school with devices that are not accessible to anyone most of the time. Add in business sponsors and gift aid and you can put a great package together.

The other angle is reduce your costs by moving to open source software- Linux operating systems, open office applications, moodle VLE etc.

A lot of this is in the book but if you want to hear me and other explain it all face to face then come down to Save me a Million next week and I promise we’ll save you at least that over 3 years if you like all the ideas we present. Sutton Coldfield next Tuesday http://bit.ly/kussw5

ICT as a subject is potentially under attack in the national curriculum review and almost certainly not going to be a core expectation so a cross curricular approach could become more appealing but only if you have the expertise across all staff and the ICT access. This move that might mean some schools lose some or all of their ICT teachers is very worrying as we need all students to have great digital literacy and many to have ICT careers for the future of the economy so I’d ignore the national curriculum review and offer what your parents, children and local employers want and keep a large KS4/5 ICT option department going with all students getting a good foundation in KS3, perhaps through a creative model such as putting ICT on a carousel with other subjects that have a small share of time or embedding projects into other subjects that are team taught for part of the year with an ICT specialist (which would also help improve the ICT skills of the other teachers).

Happy to chat more and support your developments over a longer period of time- another member of your team was here on a learning walk a few months back and wanted to work more with us.

Keep in touch and hope to see you soon. If you don’t mind I’ll depersonalise this and put it on my blog- your question is a biggy for many schools.

Paul

More advice for teachers on Facebook

2011-06-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

According to the NASUWT the number of teachers getting into trouble because of communication with students via IT/ mobile phones is on the increase. Unwise use of social networking are at the heart of much of this. This is despite many schools making their position to staff clear about Facebook and social networks. It might be that some (younger?) staff feel they know better than their (older?) school leaders who 'probably aren't on Facebook' anyway and the social networks are just like chatting to students in the yard but it isn't.

These (younger?) staff need to be careful in these assumptions- some of these (older?) school leaders are not so past it; many of them are on Facebook and understand it perfectly- some of them see the mistakes staff are making on their screens in front of them!

Friends and acquaintances are different

Remember in real life we manage our friends and acquaintances sophisticatedly; sharing a lot with very few and very little with a lot- on Facebook there isn't this differentiation. On Facebook a chat or photo shared between adults that gets seen by a student or a parent can end up very messy for your and your school's reputations.

Many a student added as a friend so the teacher can have a quick chat when they are stuck on homework will go through a teacher's profile with a fine tooth comb looking for the exciting pictures from the beach and night club- and then sharing them with many others.

In almost all schools some staff are putting themselves at serious risk professionally.

If you need to communicate electronically with students it must be through your school's systems where they can protect you from false allegations that might arise even from what you see as harmless or even academically helpful social chat. If you want to know if what you are saying is OK then follow this rule of thumb: don't write anything you don't want their parents to read.

Teaching isn't like any job so teachers must also lock down their profiles to manage and protect their online identities and maintain a professional dignity. It is obviously fine to have a home and social life separate to school but by publishing it online and sharing it, perhaps inadvertently with students you teach and their parents, you are risking a lot, not least your reputation as a professional of some standing in your community. Some things are best not put online as a member of a school's staff- however well you try to manage it.

Here's my teacher's guide to using Facebook and similar:

1. Have tight privacy controls on sites like Facebook so students and parents can't see your information

2. Never add current students (that includes the Y11 in the summer term, who are still under the school's care will largely be next year's Y12 if you have a sixth form)

3. Be very wary of adding recently ex-students who, through wall to wall posts and tagging, will effectively link you into many of your current students through their siblings and younger friends

4. Avoid joining open regional networks that anyone else can join to then gain access to your profile and be wary of being tagged in photos- have a chat with non-teacher friends who do this to you.

I'm all for students and teachers meeting in virtual space to help with learning and using the best that web2.0 technology has to offer but the technology is available to do this through a school's web based virtual school, if your school is struggling to achieve this there's a nice book your Headteacher should be buying http://bit.ly/haighysbooks

To check your privacy settings log in to Facebook, click on account in the top right hand corner of the page then privacy settings and then customise to edit them to 'friends only' and then if you need to unfriend a few youngsters who found their way on to your friend list so be it, they probably have so many friends they won't notice you've gone! Better a moment's offence to them now then a potential career damaging mess later on.

Advice to school staff about Facebook photo recognition

2011-06-09T01:27:00.001-07:00

You may have heard in the news about Facebook changing everyone’s privacy settings again without telling you.

This new tool will encourage your friends to tag you in photos, which is a bit of a problem for school staff who will want to keep their photos private as tagging means far more people outside of your network can see pictures of you. If you use Facebook you probably don’t mind people seeing your photos, that just depends how you are pictured, generally though you wouldn’t want the children in school being able to find pictures of you in your private life online and you can stop this through your privacy settings.

If you want to disable this feature so you can keep better control of your image on online then:

Log into Facebook.

In the top-right corner click on Account and go to Privacy Settings.

Click "customise settings" (toward the bottom-middle of your screen).

Look for the section titled "Things others share." The permission you accidentally gave Facebook to use facial recognition suggestions is located in the "Suggest photos of me to friends" option. Click on "Edit Settings" to change that.

Choose "Disabled" and then click "OK."

The risks are not as dramatic as some are making out- for example Facebook will tell you that you’ve been tagged and you can say no and the tool only looks at photos you’ve already been tagged in but as a tool that aims to encourage people to tag you more it is a bit of a problem for school staff who to try to manage their online identities carefully but perhaps have friends not in a job like ours who aren’t so careful with your content.

Paul

Review of my book on Agent4change

2011-05-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

Need to know about ICT and learning? Enquire within

'The New Technologies Handbook for Schools' ties future to past for Gerald Haigh

As a child, I was fascinated by a very thick book of my grandfather’s called Enquire Within Upon Everything, with answers to just about every question you could think of. So comprehensive was it that my Grandma was dubious about my interest – I guess she was suspicious that “Everything” might include, well, “that”. She never interfered though, and nothing remotely approaching “that” was in there.

Why did I think of Grandfather’s book? Because Paul Haigh’s new e-book is, in the nicest possible way, its own sort of Enquire Within Upon Everything, covering as it does just about the entirety of school ICT, from vision to practical reality, and always with a careful eye on the key business of learning.

'The book is visionary but it’s a vision that’s well leavened with reality'

Read the full review here http://agent4change.net/resources/publications/942

Buy your copy http://bit.ly/haighysbooks

an example of a new techs consultancy day at Notre Dame

2011-05-10T02:23:00.001-07:00

ICT consultancy day for school X

How ICT might work in new buildings

Are ICT suites appropriate?

Tour our various ICT suites, look at various designs and layouts and classrooms equipped with lap tops

Talk to teachers who teach with lap tops- benefits and drawbacks

The Virtual School

What a fully fledged Learning Platform looks like, what is does, how it is used
Incentives to get it staff using it
Staff training/ support- Virtual School Coordinator post

Things a virtual school does beyond a learning platform:
Online reporting/ Parental Engagement
Behaviour management
Interactive school website
Paperless office e.g. trip logging system and electronic help desks for ICT and premises
Staff and student email and other communication
Student E-portfolios
Data systems

Network
Hardwires/ wifi everywhere
Guest wifi access/ student authenticated access via their own mobile devices

Other classroom techniques
Student response systems
Visualisers

Oh no not a Google search and make a PowerPoint lesson!

Examples of great ICT in lessons:
GIS in Geography
Prezi not PowerPoint in Science
Maths resources that don’t need preparing or marking
Speaking and listening and oral assessment with a learning platform
Using live chat and discussion forums in learning
Blending new technology into History lessons

Alternative approaches to new technologies
Students’ own mobile devices
Not equipping rooms but equipping students with mobile computers they take home
Netbooks and slates- a chance to look at various devices

Why pay £89 for a book?

2011-05-06T02:59:00.001-07:00

Some potential customers are worried about the price of the ICT Handbook for Schools http://bit.ly/haighysbooks at £89 so I'd like to explain what you get for your money.

If you've ever read an article I've written or contributed to in TES, Guardian, ASCL Leader Magazine, PCPro Magazine, Sec Ed Paper there's certainly more detail to what I was saying there in the book. If you've ever heard me speak at a conference there's certainly a full explanation of the topics I speak on- perhaps even version of the presentation on the CD. If you've ever heard about Notre Dame Sheffield or come for a visit to see what we do you'll get the full detail from policies upwards. Compared to the cost of my consultancy (£500 per day) or the expense of going to an INSET event (£250 plus travel?) it is great value for money.

Plus you get not just the text but a range of tools including INSET activities with sheets, PowerPoints and delivery notes, self assessment tools and policies, structures and systems you can put in place in your school. Running your own INSET is the way ahead with shrinking budgets- and better too as you tailor to your need. You also get, with the e-book, a site licence to put the book on your network and let all your school staff have access, they can print off sheets that are meant to be used alone and click on the links to the tools and sites mentioned in the text.

At a time of shrinking budgets people don't want to pay £89 for a 'book' but with shrinking INSET budgets this would take about 10 INSET days to deliver so £89 for a school improvement tool should be seen as a great deal.

Here’s what’s in the book, plus you get a CD of files.

Contents

About the author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section 1

ICT strategy and new technologies

1.1 Developing the ICT vision for your school

1.2 Turning the vision into reality: people

1.3 The virtual school and virtual learning environments

1.4 Moving forward with open-source software – a case study

1.5 ICT in school improvement and development

1.6 ICT and environmental sustainability

1.7 Developing ICT during a funding crisis

1.8 Technical support structures in a successful school – a case study

section 2

Using new technologies in the school

2.1 Changing the way teachers work

2.2 Interview with a teacher using new technologies in the classroom

2.3 Email and staff protocol

2.4 Using email with students

2.5 Using web forums with a class

2.6 Using different media

2.7 Student-owned mobile devices

2.8 Teaching environmental issues with new technologies

2.9 Interactive whiteboards

2.10 E-assessment and student response systems

section 3

Parents and the wider community

3.1 Good school websites: the essential guide

3.2 Engaging parents through new technology

3.3 Dealing with the media – a personal experience

3.4 New technology and its role in the Extended Schools agenda

section 4

Social network websites: their benefits and risks (pull-out section)

section 5

Appendices

Glossary

Weblinks and further reading

Have a read of page one:

Chapter 1.1

Developing the ICT vision

for your school

Introduction

As any aspirant or new school leader knows, securing a clear vision for a school is the

first and most essential way of clearing the mists and charting a course for progress. It is

impossible to implement aims, strategies and staffing structures to take a school forward if

the initial vision is not clear and shared with everyone. For many reasons, developing a vision

for new technologies is potentially much harder to achieve.

Many headteachers have a vision based on their own values about education, which predates

the ICT revolution and is set firmly in the pedagogy of a bygone age. At most, they may

have adjusted their vision to accommodate ICT as an enriching addition. A great teacher can

teach a class with a stick of chalk, but teachers who can truly captivate all students all day in

that way are rare and the times in which we teach have changed. To prepare students for life

in the 21st century, schools have to not only open the door to 21st-century technologies but

also grasp them with both hands, harness their potential and enjoy the turbo-charged ride

they offer.

The need for a vision

A good starting point when considering this challenge is the following quote by Bill Gates of

Microsoft.

‘… high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean… broken, flawed, and underfunded

– though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean

that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our

kids what they need to know today.’

(Address to the National Governors Association/Achieve Summit, 26 February 2005

www.nga.org/cda/files/es05gates.pdf )

This quote will make many readers immediately defend their own school and its wonderful

qualities, but Gates was trying to court controversy to spark a debate about education

reform being less about fixing the faults in the current system and more about looking at

the point of education in the context of a world that is undergoing, with the advent of

the microprocessor, its third major revolution. As a leader of this revolution Gates should

be listened to, not least because he has a track record of spotting where the future lies and

(some would say) personally shaping it.

2011-05-06T02:40:00.001-07:00

New Technologies Handbook for Schools

2011-03-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

http://bit.ly/haighysbooks

Introduction:
Welcome to The New Technologies Handbook for School. This book is meant to be a tool. By all means set aside some time to read it cover to cover but more usefully use it periodically as a tool to help you lead your school into the 21st century. I have written it with school leaders in mind as the initial readers but I'm expecting them to use the 'site licence' to copy pages and send them to colleagues in school, don't underestimate the impact passing someone a page or two with the personal note 'I read this and thought of you' can have in inspiring someone in your team to run with some of the ideas I've collected together for this book. Some of the sections are real think pieces- they could be used to stimulate debate in your meetings. I aim to get people to understand what some schools are doing today with technology not what might be possible in the future- I'll be honest and say despite having some expertise in the field I've no idea what my own school will be doing with technology in 5 years time, all I know is it will be amazing. I passionately believe new technology has the power to revolutionise learning and even the best schools are struggling to scratch the surface of what is possible today. It's a sad fact that many family homes make better use of technology than our classrooms do, I hope this book helps school leaders redress that situation. This book also contains some practical tools for people to use. There's even an INSET activity so book a slot for your team to really address where you are as a school with technology and where you are going to, and tell me how you get on please. I hope I can convince the reader that everything in this book is possible in your school- it's rooted in real school practice and as a teacher I practice what I preach. That's not to say there aren't many challenges to leading the new technologies aspect of a school today, but I hope this book helps you tackle those challenges head on.

About the author:
Paul Haigh is Senior Assistant Headteacher for Innovation at Notre Dame High School, Sheffield which is an outstanding Catholic comprehensive school with award winning use of new technologies. After studying for a degree in Geography Sciences at The University of Birmingham in the mid 1990s Paul joined 'the family trade' and took a Science PGCE at Sheffield University. Paul started a teaching career in Chemistry and Geography but he quickly latched on to new technologies as the key issue of school development of this age and carved out a career path in this area. Paul considers himself to be part of the first generation of school leaders who have grown up with computers in the home and ICT lessons in their own education, his degree made heavy use of technology and he brought this momentum into his career. Having followed fast track career he now holds NPQH and works beyond his school as an educational consultant, speaker, writer and blogger. Paul has worked closely with many educational agencies and companies and knows the new technology side to education, both research and practice, inside out but crucially he is still rooted in classroom practice teaching 3 full days at a busy city comprehensive per week and using many of the ideas in the book on a daily basis to deliver education impact on learners.

Acknowledgements:
Firstly I'd like to thank my employer; Notre Dame High School for giving such an interesting job that I've been free to develop many of the ideas you will read about in this book, it is wonderful to feel supported and encouraged in the field of innovation- where the path is not always smooth. I want to thank them for encouraging me to write about our work and being generous about me building the book around much of what happens in that wonderful school. I'd also like to thank colleagues at Notre Dame and beyond who have contributed and been featured in the book, your work has been my inspiration to write the book. Most importantly I want to thank my family- my father for setting me the example with his own writing as a teacher in his school holidays in the 1970s, I remember the thrill of seeing his name on a book spine and that must have stayed with me. Thank you to my wife and children for putting up with me typing away most nights- I remember what it was like myself! Finally thanks to Optimus Education, Jenny Lee and Giles Flitney have been a pleasure to work with and have given me great advice all the way through and I have to thank Jenny in particular for spotting my fledgling writing career via Twitter and my blog and asking me to write professionally for Optimus Education and helping me draft the proposal for this book- if that in itself doesn't show you the power of the internet I hope you are convinced by the end of the book.

Notre Dame High School, Sheffield, SSAT Learning Walk, March 22nd, New Technology at the Heart of School Improvement

2011-03-04T02:57:00.001-08:00

Notre Dame High School, Sheffield, SSAT Learning Walk, March 22nd

New Technology at the Heart of School Improvement

Booking https://www.ssatrust.org.uk/ssat/Pages/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=PPN1013017

Notre Dame High School is a large 11-18 catholic comprehensive school in Sheffield. The school is rated outstanding by Ofsted and has a national reputation for innovation.

The Specialist Schools and academies trust of are offering a ‘Learning Walk’ in Notre Dame to find out more about the school and in particular its innovations which often have new technology at their core.

Delegates will have a mixture of presentations from both school leaders and classroom practitioners, lesson visits and a school tour as well as a buffet lunch to network with other delegates and share their own ideas with colleagues about the topics for discussion

Notre Dame has an innovation consultancy business http://bit.ly/consultND and is a National Support School so very well placed to support delegate’s schools after the event should they wish to implement any of the ideas.

Programme

10.00-10.15 arrival and coffee in the ELC

10.15-10.25 Welcome from Headteacher Jane Willis, context of the school- intake, Catholic School myth busting, leadership model & ethos of school and review its success in recent years

10.25-10.50 John Coats Assistant Head (Curriculum) & Steve Davies (Deputy Head)- The innovative curriculum model and how leadership and accountability is devolved and managed in the school- the ‘Review Cycle’

10.50-11.20 Paul Haigh, Assistant Head (Innovation) Introduction to the new technologies aspect of the school- tour of the ‘Virtual School’ and highlights of several projects including students’ own mobile devices, parental engagement and the environmental learning centre

11.20 learning walk (See below)

12.20 lunch in ELC- chance for delegates to network with each other sharing experiences from the learning walk and chatting to the Notre Dame staff they saw

1.00ish finish

Group

Tour Guide

11:20 – 11:40

11:40 – 12:00

12:00 – 12:20

John Martin.

Headteacher.

VC Room (CLC)

Workshop: Innovation & Data in Maths

Peter Sides

Room LA1 (OLC)

Lesson Observation.

Year 7. Set 2. MFL

Helen Jones

Room S20

Workshop: Using VLE for A Level

Farrah Saddiq

Paul Haigh

Assistant Head

Lab 1

Workshop: Mobile Devices

Andrew Marsden

H1 (History Block)

Lesson Observation.

Year 11. Set 1. History

Shaun O’Connor

Lab 3

Workshop: ICT & Innovation in MFL

Christine Bodin

Helen Ashton

Head of Physics

Lab 3

Workshop: ICT & Innovation in MFL

Christine Bodin

Room 209 (main building)

Lesson Observation.

Year 10. RE

Ben Lacey

VC Room (CLC)

Workshop: Innovation & Data in Maths

Peter Sides

Dannii Waller

Curriculum Innovator & Science teacher

S26

Workshop: Using a VLE successfully.

Emma Dickie

Room 204 (Main Building)

Lesson Observation.

Year 9. Set 4. Mathematics

Mat Roden

Lab 10.

Workshop: Diagnostic Tools.

Dannii Walller

Steve Davies

Deputy Headteacher

Room S20

Workshop: Assessment Database

Robin Nixon

Room 102.

Lesson Observation.

Year 8. Set 3. English

Beth Smith.

Main Room (CLC)

Workshop: Using Moodle

Laura Young

Laura Jackson

Coordinator for Enrichment

Main Room (CLC)

Workshop: Using Moodle

Laura Young

Room 208 (Main Building)

Lesson Observation.

Year 9 Set 5. Mathematics.

Laura Bullars

Lab 1

Workshop: Mobile Devices

Andrew Marsden

Review of Dell Latitude 2110

2011-02-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/business/Dell-Laptops/latitude-2110/pd.aspx?refid=latitude-2110&cs=ukbsdt1&s=bsd

When Dell offered me a chance to play with the newest netbook aimed at the schools market I jumped at the opportunity- it’s like the walls have ears as we have been talking about when will the perfect device come along we can equip all students with for them to carry between home, school and all lessons and stop us equipping rooms with computers that lie dormant in evenings, weekends and holidays. With Dell being a major supplier to our Sheffield’s BSF project and us about to embark on a massive procurement of equipment through BSF we needed to see these toys.

We’ve been buying netbooks since Asus blasted into the scene with the eee PC and HP have produced our favourite. And, unlike the slates that the market is awash with now that could also claim to be that universal device for all students, the netbook market has matured.

Is this the device that should replace the books in every child’s bag?

The Dell Latitude 2110 set of machines is evidence of this maturation- these are netbooks squarely aimed at the school market: tough rubberised shells, windows for personalised labels on the ‘spines’, option of a hand bag style carry strap by linking security cable connections and a light on the lid to show the teacher when the students are online (I already know that- it’s when the lights on their faces go out!) all make one sit up and ask “is this the device that should replace the books in every child’s bag?”

I tested two models. The one I was excited about was a Windows 7 touch screen version, but that was a flop, the one I was sad to send back was a non touch screen LCD HD screen version.

The drawbacks of early netbooks were small keyboards and small screens. These Dell devices, whilst still being a small as a book cram in really good sized keys (with the option of anti bacterial coating) and the biggest screen size I’ve seen.

The LCD screen version is amazing- a really vivid HD image that a group of students can sit round and view well from a wide range of angles. The stereo speakers blast out some serious sound- loud and great quality. The web cam is excellent, although the small amount of pan, tilt and zoom control seem over kill when a machine that small with a folding lip can be panned, tilted and zoomed by moving it around.

The big let down when using Skype etc was the microphone- any ideas of lounging back in your seat whilst Skyping had to be forgotten- if I wasn’t looming right over the screen I couldn’t be heard- and that’s not a great image to have on the other person’s screen, but enough about me and my face for radio. I don’t know if I didn’t find the right setting to boost the microphone or the problem was with Skype but I want things that just work when you switch them on and so do school students.

The touch screen version carries a double battery pack- which could be an option on non touch screen versions to give them impressive battery life but it made the machine heavy and bulky- with them both living on my desk for a couple of weeks I found myself always grabbing the slimmer lighter model without touch screen when heading off to a meeting, that one fitted neatly inside my document folder.

Touch screen flop

The first draw back with the touch screen is the image quality, now, I’m comparing it to an LCD HD screen so it’s not going to be as good but it was like viewing the images through fog when compared side by side- but this also goes to show how good the HD screen is, users without this comparison wouldn’t notice anything other than it’s not that bright. Can you guess which is which from the photo above?

My real gripe with touch screen on this device is why does it have it?

Firstly this isn’t an Apple, the Windows operating system is menu based and on the small screen that’s really fiddly, and yes it’s nice to get pop-up on screen key boards but only centimetres away is a really good keyboard and mouse touch pad so why would I use it?

I had to force myself to use the touch screen, which isn’t very sensitive so the machine, being small, is constantly rocking back and the base bangs down on the desk, so you end up supporting the screen with your other hand. When you get hold of an iPad you make excuses to use it, it’s so nice to work with- I can’t say that about this touch screen device, I avoided using it as it was frustrating and unrewarding and far from intuitive like an Apple device- features like the way an Apple device instantly resize a form you are filling in to make it big and easy to complete just aren’t there.

To be more precise when touch tiny menu options you look around your desk for something pointy to tap the screen with. If you need a stylus it’s just like the tablet lap tops of years ago. The idea of some students being tempted to push their pens into the screen brings back memories of pre-glass lap top screen getting vandalised.

OK with certain software touch screen will work well- I’m thinking younger students playing games with dragging and dropping. I did a passable finger painting picture in Paint but if I were 5 I’d prefer to get my fingers in some real paint and splat around on a bigger piece of paper.

If the touch screen was on a device like others in the Dell range that flipped and folded into being a slate I could see its use but the mouse and keyboard (that my kids have found easy to use since age 3) is always there to tempt you when things like hand writing recognition let you down (my 5 attempts to write ‘Paul’ is 4 too many).

Desperate need for a fast boot to a web browser

We would be looking to buy a lot of the non touch screen netbooks if they had Dell’s feature called latitude ON like on Latitude E6410 and Latitude E4200 have which is a fast boot to a browser rather than the slow full boot to access locally installed applications. These fast boot devices are aimed at the business market. We feel it’s going to become an essential feature for the education market.

We are working towards a time when we can drop paper text and exercise books and students can boot a device in the time it takes to take their coats off. Then they can work with e-books, web based learning tools etc. 5+ minutes to boot up and download settings at the start of 5 lessons a day is a couple of hours lost a week if people have to rely on a portable computer 100%

Whilst e-book readers, ipads and the like offer this we need it in once device with access to a proper keyboard and set of applications so all students can carry one killer student owned device and their bags and they aren't too heavy as they are no books in the bag. Dell are very close to offering that killer device that could revolutionise the way school equip themselves with computers and the way students use them as natural learning tools not occasional treats the teacher has to plan in, book and set up. We can safely say Dell are at the cutting edge of Netbooks and they still tick more boxes than a slate for me.

Interested in saving money through great ICT?

2011-02-10T02:57:00.001-08:00

You may have read my article ‘Open Minds’ on the use of Open Source software in schools to save money in December’s ASCL Leader magazine http://www.leadermagazine.co.uk/articles/open_minds/ or have seen my recent presentation at BETT on the subject http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em8l1EM_f38

You might be interested to know that I and other national advocates of Open Source software in schools are speaking at a national conference in London on April 5th aimed at introducing Headteachers to the cost savings and educational benefits that Open Source brings. Booking here http://openingopportunities.eventbrite.com/

If you know a senior school leader who needs to understand the massive potential of tools like the free-to-download Moodle VLE and to hear about successful schools who have implemented this technology please show them this event.

Collaborative work on web apps for schools

2011-02-03T03:02:00.001-08:00

Copy of an email to my Geography department:

A couple of your have asked about my Y7 Haiti lesson on the G drive, it’s actually an approach that works well in lots of contexts.

It’s based on the idea of multiple users having live access to a simple web based word processor which enables groups to collaborate on co-authoring one document without having to save it and they can access the latest version at any time just by going to a web address (that you put on a worksheet/ email to them). They can be on there at the same time (some limit how many can be on at once but normally half a dozen in a group work idea are fine), and they can even use a chat window to talk about who is going to type what or people can drop in and out over a few days adding their bit and editing friends work.

In the Haiti work I set up a few pads each with a question, increasingly high level and let the kids differentiate for themselves, with a bit of prompting from me.

It works well if you explain it and tell them about being responsible, not rubbishing others ideas/ but at the same time being open to other people’s improvements to their own work and signing in with their real name- not to use nicknames or false names. If you tell them that in the work place people rarely write a document alone and people work in teams to draft and redraft there’s a really useful skill here to learn. The web means in the future we will increasingly work alone, perhaps from home, but in groups through collaborative tools to other workers. It makes group work for homework a real possibility- and cuts down how many things you have to mark, but obviously it’s hard to come out with teacher generated assessment level but great to ask students to peer and self assess their efforts.

The tool I use is called http://primarypad.com/ which you can access on a 3 month trial, it’s obviously aimed at the primary market but my Y7 weren’t offended. This is much safer as you can take control of the pad and shut it down at the end of the exercise- so you can guarantee it doesn’t get hijacked as an un-moderated chat room- which is the risk here.

With older students you could use http://titanpad.com/ but it doesn’t have the same teacher controls so as long as you are clear it’s just a web based tool that they might finds helps with a group activity but they could also just set up a group email ‘distribution list’ and collaborate like that. The other far more sophisticated approach to this is Google Docs www.docs.google.com where you can use this web based multiple access approach to a full suite of office applications including spreadsheets, drawing, presentation and interesting for fieldwork forms that can be sent to people to fill in to collect data.

The pads are quite simple and don’t have much in the way of formatting but when you close the pad down I copy and paste it into Word, tidy it up, save it as a Pdf and email it to all the kids. It can work well as a revision tool that you get the class to make revision notes together, correct each others’ errors- peer learning- and then you circulate the finished version which they can print off and learn.

The draw back with Google docs is users need to create Google accounts and students in school may have trouble with internet filtering to be able to do this- e.g. accessing a Gmail account to collect a password etc. But there is huge potential for staff using Google docs when working on a document as a team- saves multiple versions flying round on email and you not editing the ‘latest version’. A group approach to the department development plan is one idea, I’ve also done it as virtual meetings with people I work with across the UK chatting to people on Skype whilst working together on a Google Doc action plan- in other words writing the minutes and action points together as we talk.

I don’t promote this technology across the school as we don’t have a tool that the students use their own school user name and password with so it is potentially risky in that we can’t trace who said what, they could use false names when they sign in etc. But if you want to be innovative and can trust a class have a look and ideally use primary pad and be prepared to kill the pad at the first sign of misuse. It works well with Y7 because you can read them the riot act but also they are genuinely impressed and grateful!

So on safety grounds I’m not telling you to do it, but if you want to take responsibility for trying it yourself it’s a very interesting way of working and we can only justify the work of setting it up on our school system or paying for a full primary pad account if some teachers pilot it and know they need it. And, after all, these tools are out there for kids to abuse as they wish, we’d be showing them how to use them for good!

BETT presentation

2011-01-24T13:58:00.000-08:00

Bett presentation on YouTube now

2011-01-24T13:40:00.000-08:00

My presentation about saving money through use of Open Source software in schools is up on YouTube now. It covers a whole school approach, a Virtual School with website, VLE, e-portfolio, paperless communication etc that can save schools in excess of £50K as well as being state of the art.

Have a look here.

I've had some very complimentary comments on Twitter e.g. so thanks, personally I think I speak too fast and wave my arms around too much.

"Utterly brilliant presentation from @paulhaigh - Open Source Schools seminar at BETT2011"

"just finished watching @paulhaigh talking about Open Source programs; very good"

"how to use Open Source Software effectively in school - amazing presentation"

"Impressive, integrated use of ICT described by @paulhaigh Super video production by @eyebeams"

"The myth of spending a lot on a VLE - @paulhaigh's wholistic school model no wonder they do so well"

New Book Available to buy now

2011-01-24T13:23:00.000-08:00

My long-time-coming new book 'The ICT Handbook for Schools' is available soon as an e-book (order here) and soon on paper. It has got lots of 'tools' to use in a management team or in INSET activities as well as practical advice and explanations of what the technology can do for schools. Aimed at school leaders not techies and geeks- it's all about school improvement and learning, please take a look.

Open Source Schools is recruiting!

2011-01-21T06:24:00.000-08:00

www.opensourceschools.org.uk are looking to designate schools across each region to become ‘Open Source Hub Schools’. The role is not funded but would hopefully generate consultancy work that hub schools would be entitled to charge for. The schools would be good schools (in terms of their successful with teaching and learning, no point having great ICT systems if they don’t lead to great learning) and would be actively using some Open Source tools in a significant and successful way. This doesn’t mean they’d be 100% Open Source or want to be, in fact schools who blend traditional commercial tools like a Windows server with Open Source applications are the best examples for other schools to easily copy.

The schools would need to provide a case study of their work and be willing to answer simple queries from interested schools via email for free, although if this generated more involved support (such as training, consultancy, developer time or web hosting of applications) that was charged for that would be a matter between the hub school and client school. We would also expect hub schools to contribute actively to the online community of Open Source schools and participate in face to face national and regional events we run where possible.

All types of school are invited- state, private, primary, secondary, special, academy or LA. Email Paul Haigh phaigh@notredame-high.co.uk if you’d like to register an interest. Include your school’s name and your contact details.

My response to a Headteacher asking for advice about trouble on Facebook

2011-01-19T07:53:00.000-08:00

Hello Paul,

As a reader of your book on benefits and risks of social networks (http://bit.ly/snetworks) and following your offer to be contacted for further advice or help if necessary I’m asking for your ideas. I have currently have an issue with a member of staff (a lunchtime supervisor).
It has come to my attention today that she is using Facebook to discuss the way we are dealing with issues around her son who is in Y4. (It is not appropriate to detail the background here, as you can imagine).

I have made available to staff a policy for using Facebook, but this mainly addresses issues such as contact with young people, keeping themselves safe, and not using Facebook to share images or text about the school based on the helpful advice in your book.

The problem is lady is sharing concerns as a parent, rather than as a member of staff, but there should be no distinction. Do you have any AUPs that are specifically written for staff or for parents which would help me address and resolve the issue? It is very important that we keep on good terms with the lady because of the serious nature of our concerns about her son.
Thanks, in anticipation, for your help.

A Primary Headteacher

Hi there A,

This is interesting as I’ve had a few enquiries about writing policies to try to influence how parents behave, and it’s tricky.

Obviously it’s hard to have jurisdiction over what a parent wants to publish online as long as legally it’s not inflammatory, defamation, libellous etc. If a parent or group of parents want to take up a full blown online campaign against a school if they feel genuinely aggrieved there’s little a school can do other than negotiate that you would happily have the parent in to discuss the issue so would they be so kind as to remove the material online as it has achieved its aim in getting your attention. Alas they’d be likely to ignore you though as they’d then know they’ve got you wound up! Many parents can be won round by advising them that by these actions they risk damaging the school’s reputation and by the knock on effects this can have they are effectively harming the education of their own and friends’ children- e.g. bad reputation leads to falling roll, trouble appointing staff etc.

It might be you can influence the way parents behave by drawing up a ‘parental engagement through new technology charter’ setting out how you will use new technology to keep parents informed (web site, emails, text, online reporting) and how they can contact the school electronically (forms on web sites, emails, texts etc) but also setting out what you’d prefer them not to do-

e.g.
• Don’t contact teachers through personal emails or personal social networks; use school addresses or web site forms.
• Please don’t air complaints publically without first discussing the full details with the school, allowing them to address your concerns and ensuring you have full understanding of the position of the school.
• Please don’t mention other children or use their images on your own social networks without the agreement of their parents.

Agreeing to this charter could be used as a bribe to give them access to online reporting, texts and emails from the school but it’s a sledge hammer to crack a nut and could open wounds you don’t currently need to fix but if you fancied going further down the of ‘parental engagement through new technology’ I’d be happy to help. Also these challenging parents are exactly the ones you wouldn’t want to be out of the loop by only receiving the essential traditional paper letters and reports so it’s a hollow bribe, more appealing to their sense of fair play.

I guess your angle in this one case is fortunately you do have some power over her as a member of staff but simply tweaking your policy to take her on might go down badly being seen as picking on her, it may be that an interpretation of your current policy is enough though- if you kind of technically remove the fact she is the child’s mother and treat it as a member of staff writing about a named or identifiable child in a public forum without the Headteachers’ approval- the argument being consistency of using the policy regardless of her relationship with the child, then you can hope it’s a one off and you don’t need to think up ways to control all parents online behaviour.

I’d suggest ideally your staff policy should say:

• All information about the policies and procedures of the school should be shared only through official publications from the school, diocese and local authority and not through any self published materials from individuals.
• All staff must refrain from publishing any information about their work or the work of other colleagues on individual cases with named individual people in school through self published outlets such as online social networks and blogs without the knowledge of the head teacher and the people involved in the case.
• Any such publication, in agreement with the head teacher, should still not name any students but purely be used as an outlet to publicised the good work of the school and raise its positive profile in the community. Staff should only be named in official publications with their knowledge and agreement.
• Any members of staff with complaints and concerns about the school should raise these with directly with the Headteacher or if this is not appropriate with the chair of Governors or go to their Union rep as an intermediary but not through a third party medium such as a public social network or other publication

Thoughts on BETT 2011

2011-01-14T08:00:00.001-08:00

I won’t even talk about the exhibition, I hate it and I wish I’d been at the London bike show- thronging masses, pushy sales people and stall after stall of the same stuff (Like Interactive Whiteboards) that makes little impact on learning or we already have. Some real gems are out there but I prefer to find them via Google and read reviews from users than running the sweaty gauntlet of the show floor and squeezing through crowds. It’s like going to Meadowhall (which is something I avoid) but the shop keepers chase you down the malls- ‘are you a teacher?’ they enquire.

But as the annual get together of the ed-tech community is was another classic. So great to meet so many tweeters face to face for the first time (like @iusher @grumbledook @terryfreedman who has blogged his BETT thoughts here http://bit.ly/esRjWt ), but that all happens on the fringes- the talks, the seminars, the conferences and nowadays the TeachMeets. That’s what makes it good, the stall holders just pay the bill that gets us all there to meet. The press/speakers lounge is where the best conversations were had, but it’s not an easy place to get in to!

I was speaking to a packed room about Open Source (which is novel at a trade show, we had nothing to see and gave every attendee a free operating system on a disc!) with my friends @mberry @dwilmot20 and @alanbelltolc from Open Source Schools. My talk can be seen here http://bit.ly/eJT6tD and there will be a national school leaders' conference on this topic on April 5th in London- see Open Source Schools website for details. I also managed to unofficially launch my new book The ICT Handbook For Schools with a flyer arriving from the printers just in time (pre order from www.twitter.com/educationebooks or http://www.optimus-education.com/ )

First observation was there was a great deal of interest on Open Source school tools like Moodle & Mahara, and more general tools like Joomla! Inkscape Gimp etc. Second observation was the vast majority of our audience were overseas visitors. It’s great that the world comes to BETT to learn about Educational Technology, we have a global reputation obviously. It’s a shame that so few UK schools were there in our seminar, is this a lack of understanding of the potential of Open Source? Are they staying away because there’s no point going to a trade show when there are cuts on the way? I think not, the trade show had plenty of English voices and terry blog (see link above) had the attendance figures to prove it. Perhaps overseas visitors are more likely to come for a few days and get stuck into the seminar programme and UK day visitors spend a flying day visit on the show floor, shame- they miss the bit you can’t get surfing the web: the people.

It was an unusual BETT not to have Becta there, but many familiar faces from Becta were there getting new spin off organisations off the ground like Mike Briscoe’s new venture.

There was some sign of ‘an encouraging tone’ from Tim Loughton MP, Childrens’ minister in his speech to the BETT Education Leaders’ Conference:

"The future of education in this country depends on how well we equip young
people to go on and succeed in their lives. And all of us know that if we
are serious about achieving that ambition, it has to include giving them
access to the very best that technology has to offer.

The time has come to take advantage of that opportunity by encouraging
school leaders to come along to exhibitions like this, and decide for
themselves what pupils need.

The time has come to ensure that children and young people are able to take
advantage of the wonders that technology brings – without the dangers.

The time has come to place technology at the absolute centre of our
aspirations for a world class education sector."

Good sounding words but they don’t really join up with the cut in Harnessing Technology, closure of Becta and general lack of acknowledgement of E-learning’s importance. Michael Gove wasn’t there to speak, he was too busy this week justifying his drive towards a 1950s curriculum with the English Baccalaureate results published this week. If the Tories think ICT doesn't need support and guidance because it's already embedded that's like a government saying after Flemming invented Penicillin we don't need any more medicine we've cracked it.

DfE League Tables

2011-01-12T04:52:00.001-08:00

The DfE League tables published today make interesting reading.

Not only have they published exam results (and controversially brought in a new column for English Baccalaureate scores without telling schools at the time of the exams or options to start the courses that it was to be coming in) but they have also published financial data.

My school does very well academically; 2^nd highest state school in our authority on 5A*-C including E&M in city (by just 1%) and joint 1^st highest E-bacc which feels like winning a race we didn't know we were in, no one was competing against us and no one wanted the prize. Contextual Value Added scores are more impressive, if they were still published (what’s that all about, showed the 'wrong' schools were making progress by delivering a curriculum appropriate to the learners needs rather than ministerial whim??).

Our success with ICT is well documented (Becta Excellence Award 2009 for example) and this is an important part: the excellent Teaching and Learning through ICT as well as IT systems in school management and parental enagagement through new technology drives up the results (but IT is by no means the only reason for the success).

The interesting bit is our spend on ICT resources is £44 per pupil compared to £63 as a national median average. Heavy use of Open Source software like Moodle VLE is one reason, another is effective and efficient use of what we do buy to ensure impact on learner outcomes.

Please do contact us if you want to make use of our ICT Consultancy business

Exciting News

2011-01-05T08:15:00.001-08:00

My new book is nearly ready.

The e-book will be published soon- flyers will be going out at BETT 2011 and the paper copy later in the year- pre-order now!

Details are:

The New Technologies Handbook for Schools

Maximising the impact of ICT to transform learning

By Paul Haigh

ISBN 978-1-907567-41-4

Published by http://www.optimus-education.com/ sign up for e-bulletins there or pre-order with Jenny.Lee@optimus-education.com

Open minds

2010-12-10T10:53:00.001-08:00

Re-post from ASCL Leader Magazine http://www.leadermagazine.co.uk/articles/open_minds/

With the demise of Becta and cancellation of Building Schools for the Future, question marks hang over the future of ICT development. But, argues Paul Haigh, there is an easier, more cost effective option with open source software and tools.

The demise of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – which addressed ICT infrastructure as well as building stock – left many schools wondering how they are meant to make buildings and ICT fit for the 21st century. But, to me, the loss of the BSF ICT strategy is great news.

It wasn't a sustainable way to work: a massive injection of new kit in one go without the ongoing funds to replace it all again later was wasteful. A school could find itself committing perhaps a million pounds to the project and be stuck with the same technology for the next five years.

Good riddance, I say, because you can revolutionise your ICT strategy yourself. Evidence from Becta Excellence Award winning schools like my own shows that normal school funding deployed in a creative way can produce outstanding schools with ICT systems which are superbly fit for their purpose.

If a school was prepared to pay around £140 per pupil per year for the BSF managed ICT service – a typical cost from school funds for the ongoing managed service – why not dedicate a similar amount to your own solution? In fact you can do it for far less.

No contracts

Some aspects of good ICT are not as expensive as you may think and retaining control of your spending is far better these days than committing to five years of heavy payments.

Open source software is a solution that was waiting for this problem. Some of the best schools make use of the open source software which can be downloaded from the internet for free with no contracts.

Technical staff can access the coding to adapt any open source tool to your specifific needs, which is a creative role many find very rewarding.

A popular example is the virtual learning environment (VLE) Moodle. It is the most commonly used VLE in the world and has been taken up by large colleges and universities as well as schools.

My own, Notre Dame High School in Sheffield, has set up a 'virtual school' where each stakeholder, including staff, students and parents, can log into a personalised online account.

Our system blends traditional, paid for, proprietary software like Microsoft Windows, its Office Suite, the management information system (MIS) Facility from Serco, the parental communication tool Keep Kids Safe and a range of open source tools. They include Moodle, the Joomla tool for authoring websites and the Mahara e-portfolio which we are increasingly using for tracking personal, learning and thinking skills (PLTS) and UCAS statements.

We give web access to folders on the network such as 'My Documents' and shared folders with open source code from Gleam Tech. It presents the user with a single web portal where they can work online just as they do in school from anywhere in the world using a range of devices such as mobile phones and iPods.

Parents have access to full real-time reporting on the system as well as a direct link to communicate with the school electronically.

Turbo-charged website

Is open source genuinely free? Well, you need a server to run Moodle, for example, plus technical staff to support it and internet connectivity to publish it, but don't you already have all of this? Are you making the best use of the technical infrastructure and staff expertise you have?

If you are currently hosting a rather dry and under-exploited school website why not turbo-charge it into a dynamic manifestation of the live school community with Joomla? With such tools you can save yourself thousands of pounds on software licences and open the door to the best of 21st century learning.

Some schools have gone further and set up their networks with open source operating systems and office applications. Open Office is a suite of word-processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation tools that many users will find very familiar but for which you do not have to pay Microsoft. Similarly, Ubuntu is an alternative to Windows as a computer's operating system.

The students you teach may be ahead of the game here. The Audacity tool turns a computer into a recording studio and is loved by many amateur musicians but it's also great for making revision podcasts your students will appreciate.

Firefox is a very popular free, open source alternative to Internet Explorer which is not, as some think, the only way of getting online. Many users find Firefox a far more rewarding experience when browsing the web.

Sources of support

The beauty of open source is that the support is everywhere. It's a community and for schools the hub of this support is the Open Source Schools website at http://opensourceschools.org.uk/<http://opensourceschools.org.uk/> I invite you to join our community today.

Anyone can download open source tools but anyone can also make alterations and additions. People then freely share this new knowledge back to the rest of the community.

It means there is a global army of developers who only have the quality of the tool at heart. The tools develop rapidly with improvements available all the time and are tested by more people.

An example of this was the way we needed to link Serco's Facility (our MIS), to our VLE Moodle. Ossett School in Wakefield had cracked this problem and devised a tool that means courses on the Moodle VLE can be assigned to classes on the MIS.

This link between VLE and MIS is essential if e-learning is to take off. We were able to download the tool from the Moodle website, alter it to suit us and then reap the benefits.

School leaders may not want to get involved in the community aspect of sharing the programming code but they will want to join the community of other school leaders who are benefitting from cost savings and teaching and learning benefits. You can register on the Open Source Schools site to get access to forums and invites to events, and to read case studies.

And for access to any of the open source tools mentioned in this article, just Google them.

* Paul Haigh is assistant headteacher at Notre Dame High School, Sheffield and is also a part-time consultant. See http://bit.ly/consultND

web based virtual schools and the snow- adversity driving innovation

2010-12-02T01:53:00.001-08:00

Regardless of extreme weather- and in Sheffield in recent years extreme is the word- floods in 2007, record breaking snow in 2010 both January and now that has forced schools to shut- we are ever more reliant on our web based systems, everything we do at Notre Dame High School, Sheffield happens via our 'virtual school'.

This week we have been closed due to 2 feet of snow but we are working with our students using our shared online resources, email, Moodle and web resources like Youtube and MyMaths. Our council leader wants us to report to schools that are open (there are hardly any) but that would stop us being an effective e-teachers to our own students. Other staff at my school today will be collecting students work submitted by Moodle and giving grades and feedback, others will use discussion forums and live chat rooms to teach in real time and give the students a collective and collaborative experience.

Schools without this technology can use public systems like Google docs and social networks but there are risks as well as benefits and school leaders should read http://bit.ly/snetworks

So what have we done to build in the needed resilience in our systems? Firstly we've taken responsibility, not accepting the managed service we were offered, secondly we've built in fail safes- multiple connections to the web, not just one we were provided with, systems of multiple servers so if one part goes down there is a) a back up and b) it doesn't take the rest of the system down and we've spotted weaknesses in the system like importance of the web server for the main 'hub front page' which everyone uses to link to the tools in our Virtual School and have a clever bit of code that detects if this is down and then automatically redirects users to a functional list of links to all the key parts of the system that will be running- e.g. our Moodle server which (touch wood) has never failed.

We learnt some of these lessons from an web site outage on boxing day last year when no one could access school due to bank holiday to restart the main school site web server- resilience and built in redundancy at the watch words for a reliable Virtual School, web systems are no longer a nice add on to the brick built school, they are the school- 24-7-365 (yes there were working on boxing day!) the brick built school we visit 200 days a year for 7 hours a day is fundamentals but its just a part of the school, just as the web site is part of the school.

In 2011 the word 'school' doesn't mean building but a collection of staff and learners who work together- sometimes but not always in a building together. But don't look for just one 'trick' to make your system robust like shipping your Sharepoint to the cloud- that might be one idea but part of a while strategy that is regularly reviewed (our strategy group visit this issue every 2 weeks as a standing agenda item).

Managing the Integrated Use of the Home and School Technology

2010-09-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a rough outline of a piece of writing I'm working on

'Us to them' How schools can reach out to learners at home/ when out of school

How to use technology to merge the work students do in and out of school

Using a common web based Learning Platform to access work both in and out of school

Giving web access to files and software applications out of school

Making online work a better substitute for face to face teaching and learning through use of multimedia- not just in learning content but in students submission such as uploading multimedia files or better recording sound and video directly into the learning platform

Moving beyond e-learning where students essentially work remotely without a teacher to e-teaching with real time collaboration with teachers over web technology

Enabling peer collaboration through web technology- going beyond home study being essentially a solitary experience to working live with peers through chat, VOIP, video chat and multiple access to files on web apps.

'Them to us' How schools can be more open to the way young people use technology in their own lives

Essentially making the most of the enthusiasm and access to technology that students have out of school that to date most schools have not tapped into and actively discouraged from bringing into school

Letting students use web based software technologies for learning in school they use in home private lives- gaming, social networks, social communication tool- instant messengers, VOIP/ Skype

Letting students use mobile devices for learning in school they own- mobile phones, lap tops, media players, games consoles, cameras etc including Acceptable Use Policies, Wifi set up in school, pedagocial ideas for classroom activities, coping with inequality/ digital divide.

Re-post Article for Merlin John Online on dyslexic teachers and the help ICT can offer

2010-08-25T04:33:00.000-07:00

I've recently had an article about teachers with dyslexia published at Merlin John Online which can be seen here and is re-posted below. It might explain the quality of the literacy on this blog which obviously doesn't have the benefit of professional editor and unlike much of my writing as its a very personal article.

Word imperfect – how dyslexia affects teachers too

As reports question teachers' literacy and SEN expertise, Paul Haigh calls for honesty and ICT solutions

As teachers our own education experience and academic success is probably key to us joining the profession. Our good – and bad – teachers have inspired us.

I didn’t realise how poor some of my education was until I became a teacher. I didn’t realise that I had problems with literacy that were never going to go away. Fortunately, new technology adds to the canon of coping strategies for literacy that prevent obstacles to learning and career progression. And now even severe dyslexics like Edward Vickerman can become award winning teachers (SSAT new teacher of the year 2009) today.

My own education during Thatcher’s 1980s wasn’t too bad considering. Books were one between two and tatty. Science equipment was old and broken. My sleepy, middle-class primary school had lots of old-fashioned learning packed with pre national curriculum content. Literacy was drilled into me daily in a traditional way some commentators say we should have more of: weekly spelling tests; endless, dull comprehension; lots of copying from the board and reading work.

However, there was very little assessment so it was not that apparent that literacy was somewhat weak for me compared with all other subject areas where I was strong; my end of school report gave me B in everything, plucked pretty much out of thin air judging by how much work was marked. I couldn’t recite the alphabet in full until the age of 12 despite a rote learning approach: activities to put things in alphabetical order or to look things up in phone books and dictionaries were no fun. I only coped with spelling tests by getting intense help from my parents.

The culture at my primary school was ‘shouty’. Despite the children being as nice as they come, class teachers and the head would shout at us every day. Spelling mistakes were “carelessness”, our fault. Messy handwriting was “naughty” and punishments included losing playtimes which were used for copying out and doing lines.

Mixed-ability teaching in English from the age of 4 to 14 meant I could look good compared to many in the class. So there was no need for any help, especially at the big city comprehensive where I was mixed with many weak learners. However, compared with those of my own cognitive ability I was poor on literacy.

The lack of assessment data was wonderful for me; I got away unnoticed. I discovered, and excelled in, science and geography, which lasted through to today – I teach both subjects.

‘This right-on approach meant I had no idea how I was doing’

The much anticipated new GCSE in English started. My course was 100 per cent coursework-assessed and my teacher went entirely down the new route of us learning by being assessed and evaluating our own work. We weren’t ‘taught’ anything, just spent the entire course handwriting assignments from week one. Feedback never included any marks or levels, just a one-on-one discussion of our pieces. Assessment for Learning it certainly was not. This right-on approach meant I had no idea how I was doing.

Learning difficulties were never mentioned, I couldn’t be "special needs" as I was bright and doing well, although no one in the school had an overview of my assessment profile to spot the dichotomy. In fact most teachers knew little of dyslexia: some believed it did not exist, and some Local Education Authorities even had policies stating it did not exist.

The dominant view was that some children might struggle with literacy because they were weak, while other, brighter children with poor writing and spelling were lazy, careless or badly taught. The outcome was that I did very well in all subjects except English which was my weakest and the only one I under-performed in.

I don’t blame the very traditional approach of the primary school or the too liberal approach of the secondary school. I would never be as good at literacy as my other subjects; there is a block there that could not be totally overcome. It’s the way I am, but I keep working at it and today I’m making far more progress than I ever did when I was at school. Now I enjoy reading and writing.

'I trust the computer'

It wasn’t until becoming a teacher in an excellent school in what was now a very different education system that I realised I was probably a mild dyslexic. As I learned about SEN I realised the mismatch between my non-verbal reasoning skills, that made the abstract concepts of physics and chemistry plain sailing to me, and my classic weaknesses in literacy, with blockages on the alphabet, memorising orders of letters and a word blindness over certain types of word, were typical of the dyslexia spectrum. To this day even, after studying a word like "definitely" for ages I still can’t write it down correctly. I look at the spell-checked, correct version in this sentence and can’t reconcile it as being correct: I trust the computer.

And that, you may now be gathering, is why this article is here. New technology has liberated me from my literacy problems and turned me into the most unlikely of things; a (part time) professional writer. You can’t see it in this version, but this article was formerly peppered with little red zig-zag lines under misspelled words by the spell-checker.

'It’s socially acceptable to scoff in public at people whose spelling is poor'

All dyslexics develop coping strategies; often covering up their problems, choosing words with care, steering clear of problem areas, avoiding reading aloud and keeping writing activities to an absolute minimum. I’m intrigued about how the education community treats people who are bright in other ways but have poor literacy. I’d gone from primary school where we were told off for carelessness to a more subtle intellectual snobbery at university and to my career where it’s socially acceptable to scoff in public at people whose spelling is poor.

Once, at short notice, I was asked to demonstrate a new IT tool to colleagues in the staffroom. This particular tool had no spell-checker so there were two spelling mistakes in my presentation. I was shouted down by an angry (English) teacher. It was “ridiculous” to have me presenting this as I “couldn’t even spell”. Do they speak to their learners like that?

This was more a backlash to the technology and the young upstart presenting it, but it’s no wonder dyslexics often avoid professional careers even though they may be exceptionally bright and creative; intellectual snobbery shuns them.

The coping strategies dyslexics use have become more sophisticated with new technology. Now virtually no one knows that I struggle with literacy. Part of the reason that I developed systems to computerise reports to parents were to benefit myself – speeding up the task and improving the literacy.

'When I do slip up, the children never scoff or sneer – often they help me out'

I never use a phone book or dictionary; Google does both far faster. Google’s “Did you mean?” feature (below, left) that directs searchers to a properly spelled term based on common mistakes of its millions of users is inspired. That doesn’t mean I’m a slave to a computer; my iPod Touch and mobile phone are at hand when I’m not working at a computer. The way I have been treated by my own teachers, lecturers and senior colleagues when I was a young teacher inspired me to go on to be a school leader who is honest about his literacy problems to children and parents, to show them it need not hold them back. Some would say teachers with poor literacy aren’t fit to be teachers, but that’s not giving learners realistic role models.

It’s only the children I teach who see my raw, unedited writing on the board who know about my poor literacy. I don’t make many errors: pedagogy and modern schemes of work don’t have much "chalk and talk" these days, and where they do it’s all content I know inside out. But when I do slip up, the children never scoff or sneer – often they help me out. I take pride in being honest with them and showing you that you can get on in a career without being perfect in all areas.

Exams – 'the only place and time in people’s lives without access to technology'

I believe new technology has much to offer people with far more profound literacy problems than mine but its potential is often overlooked. And not always through ignorance – often it is deliberate. The reasoning being this: that using technology is a ‘get out’, is only postponing the problem. The notion that learners won’t always have a computer device and should "stand on their own two feet" is becoming increasingly ridiculous – the formal examination is perhaps the only place and time in people’s lives when they can’t get access to technology.

Just as some people could never read a map but now have their satnavs to save them the anguish, we need to get over intellectual snobbery and embrace technology that can allow a dyslexic to become a teacher, and even a writer.
Literacy for everyone needs to be functional, and beyond that I say bring on the new technology to help. How many learners realise their computer has built in "reader" software? Highlight the text, click a menu and it can read it aloud to you. The teacher’s work sheets as digitally published PDFs can be listened to as well as read, but most teachers don’t know that.

When writing and editing in tools like Microsoft Word few teachers and students understand the full capability of the application for literacy, and not many use the "look up" tools to replace the slow and cumbersome dictionary and thesaurus.

Many teachers believe in the primacy of physical books like dictionaries. These are valid, but some think using an electronic version will somehow de-skill learners, even though they won’t use 'real' dictionaries when they leave school, just like professional research scientists who will probably never use the mercury thermometers and Bunsen burners we still give them at school.

'Schools must think about letting students use the wonderful mobile devices they own'

Some teachers think that moving with the times means adopting fads and discarding the tried and tested, but too often they forget to take a closer look at the work and society we are preparing learners for. Thankfully that’s not the case with the English department at my current school which has turned the entire GCSE poetry anthology into video podcasts that students can listen to on a range of devices, including their own mobile phones. They can listen to their teacher read the poem while seeing the text and and even annotations appear over the text.

Schools must think hard about letting their students use the wonderful mobile devices they own, and showing them how they can help them learn. The best learning platforms are now not only giving learners sound files of the spoken word as a resource; they also allow the learners to speak back, recording their voices or musical performances and submitting the sound files back to their teachers.

I’m not saying we should let learners who have difficulty with literacy side-step their issues, but we should recognise that we absorb information through a full range of media now, text being only one of them, so our learning should be multimedia. We need to prepare learners for the world they occupy. The teacher’s rant “How will you ever look up anything in a phone book if you don’t learn this?” will soon be met by the question “What’s a phone book?”

ICT literacy is increasingly more important than knowing whether K comes before M. Alphabetical order may underpin everything from filing, book indexes, class registers as a way of helping us manually navigate the static paper databases of the old days, but we meet them increasingly rarely – files are in virtual folders on computers, search boxes let us look up things and lists are on screens with icons to sort them how ever you want.

We need to train learners who have literacy problems that will never go away that new technology provides some of the coping strategies they will need throughout their life. It serves me well. Right, now I’ve a few hundred little red zig-zag lines to deal with...

Paul Haigh is senior assistant headteacher at Notre Dame High School, Sheffield, and also a writer, speaker and consultant on ICT issues in schools. Paul is the author of Social Network Websites: their Benefits and Risks. A guide for school leaders and he writes a blog. You can also find him on Twitter.

More information

My personal use of ICT

Keep a word processor open all the time when typing into forums, chat and blogs and even when writing with a pen and paper to quickly check spellings.
Makes heavy use of "look up" tool in Microsoft Word (highlight word, right hand click, ‘look up’) to check that the word exists and means what you think.
I use Google search’s "Did you mean?" function as a spell-checker as well as a way to accurately search the internet despite poor spelling.
I use Dictionary Apps on my iPod touch and my Nokia phone.
I never look anything up in indexed paper pages if I can avoid it – eg I use the internet as a telephone directory.

My professional use of ICT

I convert worksheets to PDFs and encourage weak readers to listen to the document as well as read it with the reader tool, plugging their own headphones from their MP3 players into the school computers.
I make increasing use of multimedia, from video clips of the teacher teaching to online tools like video podcasts and also interactive tools where children can submit work as spoken-word sound files, using Nanongong on our Moodle VLE or often using their mobile phones and emailing me the sound file. This has turned one Year 7 child in particular from one unlikely to attempt homework (so little can he enjoy a writing task) into someone who wants his homework played to the whole class over the AV system – and it's excellent! The confidence he now has as a child succeeding in the subject is now being transfered to better behaviour, concentration and better... writing!

Twitter Feedback

I've had some great feedback on Twitter which I'm reproducing here as some of the Tweeters are interesting contacts if the article is of interest to you.

www.twitter.com/merlinjohn Why do dyslexic teachers get worse time from colleagues than kids? www.twitter.com/paulhaigh on the ICT solution http://tinyurl.com/2vj5kru

www.twitter.com/fsalvage "Great article and I never knew PDFs can read themselves out loud. Great tip. (via www.twitter.com/merlinjohn )"

www.twitter.com/tonyparkin "I also enjoyed your article at http://tinyurl.com/2vj5kru Teachers & dyslexia definitely impossible combination in my day"

www.twitter.com/SSAT "Just noticed Paul Haigh's very insightful article on teachers and dyslexia http://tinyurl.com/2vj5kru "

www.twitter.com/drseide "Thanks for your wonderful article on dyslexia and teaching - very thought-provoking!"

www.twitter.com/neilmilliken "Your fantastic article on your experience at school on having dyslexia reflects my own experience. Did you know the Open University & some others allow disabled and dyslexic student to use assistive technology in exams?"

www.twitter.com/ITNMark "Well worth reading and thought provoking article: Teachers and Dyslexia"

www.twitter.com/K_5remediation "From Paul Haigh fantastic article on his experience at school on having dyslexia http://is.gd/eCiSZ in UK"

Basic classroom management strategies

2010-06-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

This blog post may seem a bit off-piste coming from me and my normal issues about ICT but the increasing use of ICT based behaviour management systems must not deskill classroom teachers from basic classroom management techniques and school behaviour policies need adapting to include the ICT system alongside these skills not replace good teaching techniques with a computer database. That way behaviour deteriorates further and the pastoral team in a school crack under the weight of incidents flashing up on their screens. The following post is the basic reminders, good for those new to the profession, about how to manage behaviour and when to log an event on the computer system

Basic classroom management strategies and when to log a behaviour event or send for Student Support Room (SSR) ‘on call’

Prevention is better than cure
Well paced, purposeful lessons delivered in a direct and businesslike manner prevent most disruptions, ‘own’ your room, decide who sits where and make your expectations very clear

Win the psychological battle
Children not settling down? The power of a pause and stare is impressive, if you soldier on delivering the lesson they take it as acceptance that they can chat and not listen, stop, pause, wait until the whole class is waiting for this individual to concentrate, it’s a battle of psychology mostly.

Challenge the students who don’t meet your expectations
If then you need to challenge students verbally use a clear, non-aggressive, assertion that what they are doing is not meeting your expectations (refer back to when you made the expectations to the class, point out that everyone else is doing it).

Look after your voice, your main teaching tool
Raising your voice has its purpose, such as settling a whole class but overuse dulls the effect and wears out the voice and the teacher, a headache doesn’t make you a better teacher- quiet can be very powerful, drawing in the students and using tone to communicate as much as words.

Sometime good to appear to be angry
Raising your voice at an individual should be rare, but on occasions the impression that a student has made you angry is a useful tool but that’s all it should be; a tool. The teacher should actually be deploying a controlled technique in an act, not actually losing their temper. But remember direct aggression to an individual with behaviour problems will trigger aggression back and escalate an incident that could have been dissipated with the right approach and it’s undignified and demeaning to a child. Sometimes we get it wrong, getting the wrong end of the stick- a lot of damage and upset to child and parents can be caused if we fly of the handle without full knowledge of the facts; its best avoided.

If tempers are genuinely being lost the situation needs urgent intervention with the child removed from the lesson, but more on that later.

Make a clear formal warning when you need to draw a line in the sand
If you sense students are ‘off track’ you can normally prevent it getting to confrontation. Remind individuals why they are in the lesson, what needs to be achieved, where they aren’t meeting your expectations and make a clear warning if it continues you will put a behaviour event on the computer system that Form Tutor, Head of Year, behaviour managers and parents will all be able to see, live on the web.

When to log a behaviour event online
If then the situation doesn’t improve do log the behaviour incident online, be sensitive about your projector being on if you do this during the lesson, but do not be afraid of getting the student up to talk to you quietly and see you put the event on the system so it is clear to them why they have got it on their record. Make it clear that the matter is closed they are to go back to their place and get on with work. Check they understand the work and what they need to do. Make it clear that if there is another incident you will have to send them to withdrawal room and that will get them in a lot more trouble.

Make sure you don’t name any other students in the log and don’t use it as an opportunity to vent your spleen; parents can see it and it may well be used in evidence when reviewing a child’s records for exclusions- keep it brief, factual and professional. You can always communicate more later.

Have the student taken out of the lesson if needed
For the rest of the lesson if there are minor problems or signs of problems with the same child just bring them back into line by quietly reminding them of the withdrawal room option. Don’t though fall into the trap of getting a reputation as a teacher who never carries out threats, if the child commits another event worthy of logging do so and have them removed by getting someone ‘on call’.

Of course if there is a major behaviour issue- fighting, swearing, aggressive and dangerous behaviour you go directly to sending for 'on call' support. These issues are very rare but need immediate decisive action and to get the rest of the class back to learning as soon as possible.

Outline of a current Keynote speech

2010-06-22T03:50:00.001-07:00

This was a proposal for a Keynote I was asked to give at an event soon, but as is the common issue these days their budget bit and they couldn’t go ahead.

I was asked to give an overview of e-learning and the learning platform vision, too good not to share as it was looking like a nice neat little presentation, book me if you’d like it at your event.

1) Forget the VLE, or at least stop obsessing about just the VLE; think Virtual School- not just web based learning for learners but web based work for teachers, non-teachers and web access for parents- make the virtual school strategy integral to planning for the whole school strategy. VLEs aren't the only way of delivering this and aren't good at some of it, think a single portal with a range of tools accessed, perhaps including your VLE.

2) Teachers don't only teach- think paperless office, communication and collaboration tools for their internal and external work

3) Parental Engagement, don't let the loss of Becta and a change in government divert you from Parental Engagement through new technology, it's the easiest way to raise attainment without making the school change- empower the parents by engaging in what their children do at school and see your results rise and the parents support you more.

4) Go beyond 'anywhere anytime' learning but think also 'any device'- the rise and rise of student owned mobile devices and wifi is a tide not be held back but harnessed. The ridiculous mobile phone press storm from Oct 09 shows how out of step society is with its own understanding of the potential of the technology we all have access to, also the internet is increasingly accessed through games consoles and TVs and web access is growing all the time.

5) Move beyond e-learning; e-teaching is the future; live on-line collaboration between teachers and learners and learners with each other through web2.0 technology is how new technology can really boost learning, putting paper worksheets and text book pages on a screen doesn't change much other than accessibility, web2.0 changes everything.

Case Study of Secondary Contact from 'Keep Kids Safe Project'

2010-06-15T07:53:00.001-07:00

There are a plethora of text/email/voice broadcast tools on the market these days- that's one of the things that hit me at BETT this year, and there are big variations in cost and functionaility. Notre Dame chose the Keep Kids Safe 'Secondary Contact Tool' who helpfully give schools a 2 month free trial, here is a case study I prepared to evaluate the initial impact after this free trial, we went on to take out a contract.

Case Study of Secondary Contact from ‘Keep Kids Safe Project’

A Parental text, email and voice broadcast tool at Notre Dame High School, Sheffield

Paul Haigh, Senior Assistant Headteacher phaigh@notredame-high.co.uk

Notre Dame High School, Sheffield, is a high performing Catholic city comprehensive school. The school has a national reputation for innovation with ICT, most notably shown by the school winning the Becta Excellence Award for Best Whole School 2009 in the Yorkshire and Humber Region.

The school is at the forefront of Parental Engagement through New Technology having hosted Online Reporting to parents since 2007 and is a leading light in the Online Reporting Advocate Schools Group and delivers support the guidance to other schools on the Parental Engagement agenda as all secondary schools aim to have online reporting set up for September 2010 and primary schools by 2012.

Notre Dame did not take on the Keep Kids Safe tool to tackle attendance as many early adopters of the technology did, fortunately attendance is so good automated communication systems were not needed. The main reason was to further engage parents.

Notre Dame was very aware that whilst online reporting gives parents access to a huge amount of relevant and personal information about their children there were two main issues:

1. Online reporting relies on parents remembering to log in to check the system, if reminders and back up reports have to go home on paper the online system is pointless

2. Online reporting presents so much information to parents there needs to be easy ways for the parent, at the computer screen viewing the information, to then contact the school to respond to what they have seen- electronic communication must be 2-way if it really is to develop parental partnership.

It was this two way dialogue that attracted Notre Dame to the Keep Kids Safe tool. Whilst other tools could send out text messages and emails to parents, which in our case could alert parents to new information on the online reporting system and trigger large numbers of parents to log in the Keep Kids Safe tool allowed parents to reply.

Common replies include

· “Thank you for the reminder of the new online reports, I have lost my password can you send me a new one?”

· “I see my child’s attendance record has some authorised absence, can I authorise that my child was sick on the following dates...”

· “I see my child’s level in science has dropped, what can I do at home to support my child with his learning in science?”

It is through handling these replies that school enhances it relationship with parents and empowers them to support their children which has an impact on achievement.

Notre Dame also sees the Keep Kids Safe tool as a way to cut costs and tackle the green agenda. As a Green Flag Eco-School the school has set up paper recycling but the school realises the need to reduce the use of paper in the first place. Mass and personal communications are being moved across to the Keep Kids Safe system where families are happy to opt out of paper. The system also allows the school to increase the amount of communication. In the past the school could not commit the resources to write home over every little issue, naturally priorities that mean ‘squeaking wheels get oiled first’ meant there was perhaps an lack of balance between the positive qualities of most students and the amount of negative feedback the school was sending out. Electronic communication can make it easy to for example send home messages like these on exactly the day when they are most relevant:

· Congratulations on your child’s 100% attendance this term

· Congratulations on your child hitting your attainment targets this year in....

· Congratulations on your child achieving top grade 1 for effort in 5 or more subjects this term.

· The school was very proud to have you child represent the school last night in the football match/ school production/ netball tournament etc

This positive feedback not only reward students and families who may in the past have received very little communication from the school despite supporting the school in every possible way but it creates a culture of positive reward that students who have in the past not met the school’s expectations but improve not only stop getting negative feedback they get more regular positive feedback instead.

Web

Notre Dame High School http://www.notredame-high.co.uk/

Keep Kids Safe http://www.keepkidssafe.co.uk/

The great mobiles debate at JISC YH

2010-06-11T02:25:00.001-07:00

I was honoured to present at JISC Regional Support Centre YH #Active10 conference http://tinyurl.com/active10 yesterday and then speak at the debate on use of students’ mobiles in learning, not so much a debate on ‘yes we should or no we shouldn’t’ than ‘yes we should or I’m not so sure’, the debate served well to polarise opinion clearing up the don’t knows with clever use of voting pads before and after and a text wall throughout. Massive win for the ‘yes’ camp I’m proud to say, looks like the 21^st century is getting off the group, a decade late. The understanding the students can access a school or college's filtered and monitored wifi safely (for the network) via the firewall with their own devcies certainly won a lot of people over.

You can watch the stream of the debate here http://bit.ly/cGG1OY

An email too good not to share

2010-06-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

I had a phone call from a school in Hull yesterday asking me, as an Excellence Award winning school for some ideas about developing ICT so the school can prepare for the ICT Mark. Our conversation was unfortunately brief as snatched chats on the phone often are and my advice centred on making better use of systems already in place, such as how to bring all the students onto the staff Exchange email system and how you can monitor and manage a 1000 extra users and then get some great but simple e-learning going.

We also chatted about Learning Platforms and how getting a full blown VLE off the ground take time and effort but some simple Open Source tools can develop in school intranets into the basis of a great Learning Platform.

Also I talked about incentivising innovation and risk taking in pedagogy by talking about our annual Curriculum Innovator bursaries. I followed it up with an email containing links to extra information about our work and other places to get ideas from and I then decided the linked were too good not to share here:

I assume you found us via http://awards.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=41304 so have seen the clips and case study there. Here are some other links to look at;

Teachers TV Using moodle for a virtual field trip http://www.teachers.tv/videos/hard-to-teach-secondary-geography-using-ict

Using moodle to record voice in MFL (FFWRD to 4:09) http://www.ict-register.net/lp-video.php?v=101

Environmental Learning with Learning Platform and handhelds http://www.ict-register.net/lp-video.php?v=107 (FFWRD to 4:40)

(if you google 'Paul Haigh Mobile Phone' http://bit.ly/agUVEX you'll see I've rather a reputation in this area- but I'm more excited about students' ipod touches than their phones, despite how I'm represented in the press for a balanced and researched article read this in the TES)

Next generation Learning presentation for the ICT-Register Showcase Event http://www.ict-register.net/presentations2010.php is an overview of our 'virtual school' with a Joomla portal leading to the Moodle VLE, the Serco Facility MIS for online reporting and lots of other open source stuff.

To see more about our Open Source work watch this interview I did after presenting for Open Source Schools at BETT 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiNVQFficvE and read my case study on their site http://opensourceschools.org.uk/award-winning-open-source-notre-dame-high-school.html

Technical issues in Primary Schools

2010-05-20T03:01:00.000-07:00

The vision for new technologies in primary schools both from the school and from the policy makers isn't really any different to that in secondary schools; get e-learning going, have students accessing work from home, get teachers changing their pedagogy to capitalise on new technologies and organise the school better with new technologies such as engaging parents through ideas like online reporting.

The difference is the capability of primary schools to achieve this and copy what most secondary schools are now tackling.

I was presenting at an event yesterday with both primary and secondary school leaders and teacher. The above picture was clear, we shared the same conversation but the feed back I got from secondaries was one of 'thanks for the ideas, we'll take them back and implement a few' where as from the primaries it was more like 'this all sounds great, but our server is about to fail and we have no one who can sort out web enabled software systems, what should we do?'

Well, when presented with that I gulp and try to hold back comments like 'how can you run your entire school with all your eggs in the one basket with a single ageing server that's trying to cope with everything?' But I hold back, its not their fault, they are doing their best and achieving a lot with limited means.

Some primaries have part time shared technical support and this model works well, some have this support from a partner secondary school and this works even better as it forges linked within the family of schools where everyone in the team has common aims. I can see that top-down regional strategies to support primary schools have largely not worked and they are falling being secondaries in terms of the adopted of high quality IT systems.

The primary schools I see doing well with ICT are often large, approaching the size of a small secondary and thus carry the technical teams and posts for teachers to lead ICT strategy that secondary schools have, albeit often driven by one or two key staff who, should they leave, would take the school's expertise with them.

what's the solution?
For me its go to be bottom up development with 2 types of collaboration. There is either collaboration with the partner secondary school or there is federation with local primary schools or a bit of both.

what can be achieved?

1. Perhaps like schools share technical support share a post 'virtual school coordinator' to look after web based systems, develop content with teachers and train teachers in its use.

2 Perhaps share the servers and have a common learning platform with the secondary paying a share but getting the technical support and hosting from the big brother. There's huge mutual benefit, the secondary get Y7 students who already know how to the use the Learning Platform and bring work with them. There can be KS2-3 transition projects, KS2 G+T kids can access KS3 courses, SEN KS3 kids can access KS2 work and we can move from Age to Stage education that isn't hampered by the transfer from primary to secondary.

3 We get the teachers across the phases collaborating, discussion forums, shared email, content folders all encourage the expertise to cross fertilise.

Alas top down solutions don't encourage this, a secondary school in a BSF ICT contract will struggle to set up a shared learning platform or share the technical expertise to run it. In times where funds are short, does bottom up save money, share expertise efficiently, foster development and aid innovation generating better educational outcomes sooner? I think so.

Reply to a letter requesting to see IWBs in action

2010-04-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

I had an email today from a lady in Australia planning a study visit to the UK in the Autumn to see Interactive Whiteboards in good use, I'm happy to host her but I feel she needs to broaden her study, if you go looking to see something being used well, that's probably what you'll find, but that misses all the bad use and arguably better use of alternative technologies.

Here is my reply, I hope to broaden her view and paint a picture where IWBs have their place in learning but there are certainly not the be all and end all.

Hi Jenny,
Great to hear from you. I'd be very happy to host you for a visit if our schedules fit, but I thought I better tell you a bit about my feelings on IWBs.

I would be able to show you teachers who make great use of IWBs and to meet a trainer who runs our City Learning Centre, which is a good practice hub and was heavily involved in IWB training delivery when they took off here a few years ago and I'll be able to show you lots more use of New Technologies.

What I need to say is personally and it's a view that's becoming common IWBs aren't much to get excited about and I wouldn't recommend a large scale investment in putting them in to classrooms. If individual teachers and departments want them because they suit their pedagogy fine but they are not as good as their marketing strategy might suggest.

The use of a computer, projector and screen is fundamental and every classroom should have them, but most Interactive Whiteboards are at best just electronic black boards, they tie the teacher to the front delivering learning in a modernised version of traditional didactic 'chalk and talk', not a bad thing often but an expensive way of achieving this and it can encourage the teacher to teach like this too much.

They can be used interactively with children but there are issues, children might not be able to reach, don't have the skills with the pen or more often are too scared to come out to the front- remember how scary it was for us as teaching students.

Personally I feel it's a much better investment to have a Bluetooth slate & pen or tablet style computer or just a humble wireless mouse to allow the teacher to control the screen from anywhere in the room, perhaps standing with the child they are talking to at the time or with the child who doesn't listen well and then there is risk free interaction as the students can be given the device to control the screen from where they are sitting. Spend the money you save on a Visualiser and USB Microscope if relevant and you have a far more powerful and flexible teacher set up that will have more impact on learners.

IWBs took off here, I think, because policy makers and politicians could see what they did, understanding it in the context of a computerisation of how they were taught, so because they could grasp it and see it they backed it. It's harder to explain the concept of a Personalised Online Learning Environment to someone who probably barely uses the internet but a blackboard that talks to a computer, bingo- massive investment.

Now don't get me wrong, I like using my IWB but you need to know that context when if you come here and see lots of teachers aren't teaching at all with them or just using them as screens a lot of the time. Some of the research really does confuse this, for example I've read research saying IWBs are good because, for example, short video clips can be used- that's the projector and the screen, not the IWB.

You'd be very welcome non-the-less! Keep in touch.
Paul

Consult@ND

2010-04-01T04:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Would you like your work or your school to be featured in my new book?

2010-03-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

After the successful publication of the short e-book Social Networks, Benefits and Risks to Schools at www.optimus-education.com I am now working on a much longer paper book for them which is going to be marketed as a school leader's resource pack really. It's called 'The ICT Handbook for Schools'.

To make it a bit more interesting and pull in different perspectives I'm looking to add a couple of sections with voluntary contributions from folk reading this.

Firstly I want to put in some interviews with people from the ICT Education Community, whether you are a policy maker or shaper from an Educational Agency, a school leader where ICT is a big part of your vision, a techy who makes it all happen and wants their expertise heard alongside the teachers' ideas or most importantly a classroom practitioner who is making innovative use of ICT that is having an impact on learners in any context I'd love to hear from you. I'll send you an email with questions and you just type your answers and bingo, if it fits what I need I'll publish it and happy to add links to your blogs and sites etc. No promises, editors decision is final etc.

Secondly I want some more case studies of excellent practice other than my own school, if you want to work with me on a case study so your work gets recognised and published please contact me.

Contact me on twitter @paulhaigh or on email phaigh@notredame-high.co.uk

Moving forward with open source, a school leader's view

2010-03-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

There's a certain amount of smugness around the Open Source Schools community; whilst many schools are working hard to get their Virtual Learning Environments off the ground some of the Open Source Schools are, with the flexibility of their systems, able to start planning for a post VLE landscape. Schools with less flexible ICT strategies, perhaps through Managed Services and multi-year contracts, may be locked into a traditional VLE for many years to come based on a system that was probably designed several years ago and already looking obsolete and will a few years from now represent technology of a decade before.

At Notre Dame High School, Sheffield, we have enjoyed the fantastic functionality of the Open Source Moodle VLE, it is certainly more powerful and more flexible than many commercial systems other schools are using- the massive global uptake of this VLE across all education sectors is testament to that. Lots of schools are tied into contracts with VLE providers and can only hope the tools evolve to adapt to new technologies and new pedagogies. Open Source Schools have the freedom to adapt as they see fit because the range and functionality of Open Source tools never stands still, there's no need for a supplier to balance developer costs against profit when they consider the work required to develop their tool.

We've never looked only at the VLE, we've always seen the VLE as one tool in part of a Virtual School that encompasses public, student, parent and staff web sites, MS Outlook for email, the Management Information System (including Online Reporting to parents- Serco Facility),school and personal calendars (Open Source tools taking data from Outlook), My Documents and shared directories (published to the web with Open Source tools from Gleamtech) including such as teacher resources, students' learning resources, admin files and other paperless office systems.

This expansive system is great, it's all integrated with Active Directory to allow appropriate access based on the user, there is single sign on where appropriate and possible meaning users can click between tools but it can be a rather complex system for some learners and its not always easy for the school to engage them all in all aspects of the system, we still have some students losing work on memory sticks when they could be uploading to My Documents on the network for example.

This is why we now want to redesign the student’s home page as Personal Learning Environment. At the moment this is just a test system using the Picock Personal Dashboard that comes from the same developer stable as the Mahara e-portfolio system we also use. This is similar to the iGoogle idea of built your own home page with gadgets that show live data and perhaps allow interaction with the application. The gadgets should include key tools the students need quick access to, which would include we hope:

Emails
Calendar
'My Courses' on Moodle
'My Documents' on the network
Personal timetable and other data from the MIS such as personal attainment data
Relevant online notice boards
Perhaps a gadget with latest posts in forums the use is following
School notices and emergency announcements

But beyond this we also hope to bring in useful gadgets from the web, perhaps:

A news feed, such as CBBC Newsround
A weather gadget
Links to key education revision sites

But importantly students need to be able to personalise a PLE themselves, pulling in their own gadgets as long as they are appropriate, useful links to sites relevant to the subjects they study and there's nothing wrong with them having access content that is personal to their out of school interests; a news feed from the football team they support if that means they value their page and they want to log in and then, as a captive audience, the school and learning content is there waiting for them.

Once we have this in place the next logical place is to develop this idea for staff around two key themes, First further development of the paperless office with access to more interactive forms to log requests, e.g. IT help desk or room bookings as now but also the sort of pro-formas staff have to fill in and submit, like request for cover, claim for overtime. Secondly to help more staff develop their Personal Learning Networks which are such a powerful way for teachers to access personalised CPD through the use of Social Networks and Web2.0 applications allowing teachers to communicate, share good practice and offer peer support both internally at school, but more significantly unlocking peer to peer support between schools. This, through technology can be done regardless of geographical location; it’s far more important teachers hook up with the contacts that are most relevant to their development rather than have networks imposed on them by local and regional strategies for geographical and local funding reasons that don't actually fulfil teachers' needs.

Considerations for your Learning Platform/ VLE

2010-03-21T14:07:00.001-07:00

Whether you are procuring your own learning platform, assessing the one you have or judging one provided for you the following check list will help form your judgement.

Open Source or commercial product

Most products on the market are commercial tools you buy a license for, sometimes called ‘proprietary software’ and these should bring the product quality and service reliability a service contract should bring (alas quality and reliability aren’t always there). Conversely there are a small number of Open Source Learning Platforms. Open Source software essentially means anyone can see and edit the coding behind the product, this renders them commercially impotent as the code can be shared and adapted by anyone. These tools are free to download from the internet. This might make them sound like Heath-Robinson esoteric tools for fanatics, far from it- the most commonly used VLE in the world; Moodle, is just this.

Open Source software might be free to download, it’s not free to use, you might need technical staff to run the system, you might have to pay for training you will have other technical costs (see below) but its massive uptake can be put down to a few key issues.

key issues for the popularity of Open Source learning tools:

1. The tools are great, they aren’t popular because of expensive marketing, if they are well known it's because they are good and then a global army of developers who can access the programme coding set about adding new features and making them even better so:
2. Open Source Tools are constantly evolving and getting better as users share improvements with each other. There is a global support community helping each other out, users don’t have to wait for annual releases hoping some weaknesses have been addressed, they improve month by month.
3. Being non-commercial the product can never disappear if a company goes bust or gets bought out by a competitor
4. Being non-commercial there’s no contractual tie in, if you decide it’s not the right tool for you just drop it, you aren’t stuck trying to make a poor tool work as you are stuck paying for it for years to come or as new technologies and pedagogies become available you can adapt- VLEs are we know them are a very temporary part of the educational landscape.

On the other hand there’s a lot to be said for a good commercial tool:

1. Set up of the tool should be done for you, or done with you during the:
2. Training, should come as part of the package
3. There should be a help-line to help you when you get stuck
4. There’s a contractual requirement to provide a product of certain quality and a service of certain quality

Home or Away- where is the system hosted

Whether you opt for a commercial tool or an open source tool there is another big issue; where is the system hosted? It might be on the servers in the school system or off-site such as with the local authority as part of a regional strategy or on the property of the commercial provider or a sub contracted firm who host data systems.

This issue shouldn’t matter, and in the future it won’t but for now internet band width is the issue. If your system is hosted on the school site the users in the school day will have super fast access to the system, screens will load quickly and the system should be satisfying to use, and this is an important consideration as this is when you will have the largest number of ‘concurrent users’ but when users are working out of school- which is the whole point of VLEs giving access to ‘anytime anywhere’ learning they are at the mercy of the school’s web connectivity- how quickly can the school’s internet connection send data out to the internet, but users will be spread over a longer time period between 4pm and midnight and all day at weekends and holidays with lower numbers of concurrent users are any one time.

English schools connected to National Grid for Learning should not have a problem here, and internet speeds are only going to improve in the future.

If the system is hosted off the school site the situation is reversed somewhat.

During the day potentially a 1000 or more users are all accessing the system through the school’s single internet connection and this could be slow. When students are out of school they are all using their own separate internet services and they could be having a faster user experience.

Now, this all depends on how fast the service provider is able to send data to the internet and some of them are today really quite small enterprises and they may not be investing enough in their own connectivity, and small enterprises have nasty habits of going bust in tough times; there's certainly some maturation of the VLE market needed as innovative start ups catch on or fail.

So which is best? Well obviously there are strong arguments for both hosting at home and away so here’s another issue to consider:

Control

When a VLE is hosted in school the school can exert more control over the service. The big issue is when the system needs to be closed down for ‘essential maintenance’. Some commercial suppliers will do this, killing your service, at a time that suits them which can be very inconvenient when lesson plans go to the way finding the whole system has gone. Other suppliers think they are being helpful by killing the system for maintenance on a Sunday, but this is busy day for homework so that’s no help- ‘the system was down’ is the 21st century version of the homework excuse that the dog ate it.

Schools who host their own systems can exert a bit more control, they can take down part of the system for maintenance (such as installing updates) but leave other parts running and warn people in advance or best of all do this when the students don’t need the system such as between the end of the school day and students arriving home. The 3.30-4pm slot is the technician’s favourite time of day.

Service level provision

One area where a commercial tool hosted off site could beat all other systems is in terms of the level of service provision. The idea of ‘anytime anywhere learning’ means schools should expect 24-7-365 service provision. It might not be healthy for students to work very late at night, but that can be managed by the school- at least with VLEs the teacher can see what time the student was working which isn’t possible with paper so teaching can be better- there is now the option of counselling the student who clearly is burning the midnight oil or is a last minute merchant with assignments as the VLE gives all this away. Don’t forget though students may be in different time zones when on holiday or visiting family on a Leave of Absence and might still want access to their learning during our night.

But do check carefully what the provider is offering, should the system fall over in evenings and weekends how quickly will they fix it, promises of fast fixes normally only apply to core office hours, and again some of the small players just can’t provide 24-7-365 service. Many won’t even attempt to fix a failed system until the next working day which could be bad news if a system fails on a Friday night.

Now, these companies may say, in their defence, that a school can’t provide such service but a school who looks creatively at their technical staff conditions of working could provide a better than core office hours support. Systems don’t fall over all the time and are often very simple to fix, sometimes remotely, a system of overtime payments available to claim for a technician who happens to be free is better than nothing without making their job unreasonable by effectively putting them on call at all times.

Technical teams on a rota can take turns claiming the over time job or passing it on to the next in the rota should they not be available or not interested. Families of schools in an area using the same system could federate over out of hours technical support.

After you’ve made your choices over these big issues there are lots of small issues that can make some VLEs much better than others. Try to tick as many of these boxes as you can with your VLE:

• A range of communication tools including
o E-Mail
o Chat room
o Instant message service
o Discussion forums
• Students can save their work easily- ideally straight from the application they are working in using ‘save as’ rather than save on one place them upload to the VLE to give them external access, they don’t bother and end up carrying all their files on a small USB stick which inevitable gets lost, stolen or broken with all their exam course work on it.
• Students have realistically large file storage space, in these multimedia times this should be measured in giga bites not mega bites.
• The system can access the school’s legacy content- ie all the curriculum resources the teachers had before the new system was procured. Some system will allow all this to be transferred across, other require each individual file to be uploaded one at a time, which for 1000s of files is completely unreasonable, busy teachers don’t do this and continue to use the legacy system not adopting the new system.
• The VLE has a large ‘tool box’ of learning activities the teachers can use to deliver learning including
• Simple file upload to hand in work done in another application such as a Microsoft Office document or something more diverse such as a MP3 sound file, a video or a file from a specific piece of software use in the curriculum such as a PhotoShop image or CorelDraw file.
• Simple type in directly free text and click submit answer to teacher (with full work processing editing tools)
• More advanced question modules such as multiple choice, order sorting, tables to fill in, action buttons to click such as clicking on the rights answer or terms like True/ False Yes/No etc
• Ability for students to input work not just with the mouse and keyboard- such as orally speaking answers via the computer’s microphone or by video such as via the computer’s web cam- this not only compliments various subjects such as languages and music is also supports different learning styles or Special Educational Needs.
• Ability to mark the answers automatically and give instant feedback to students and send the assessment data on to the teacher
• Ability to host full range of media as teaching resources including quite long sound and video files such as hosting digital copies of a department’s video collection or scans of old photos and old documents
Add these feature some last big but hard to test things until you’ve used the system and you’ll have the blue print for a state of the art system
• Is it easy to design pages that look good, have good accessibility and are easy to edit
• Is the tool intuitive to use, if a keen but non technical classroom teacher can’t pick up the basics with a few minutes training alarm bells should be ringing
• Do learners find the system easy, satisfying and rewarding to use and does it ultimately raise achievement, alas that’s one you won’t know until you’ve used it. Ask them, they are experts in web technologies and can spot a stinker better than you!

Why do VLEs fail?

You can see from the lists and information above that some VLEs are likely to not work as well as they could before a school even starts to use them but putting that aside the main reason why a VLE fails to take off in a school and have any impact is failure at implementation, and the blame for this falls at the foot of the school leader.

Normally VLEs don’t take off if they aren’t a school development priority driven by the Head Teacher and backed up by great strategy, this may require workforce reform, certainly at least one post to lead the work, probably another in the fullness of time to run the web tools, uploading content, working on more technical issues like editting video prgramming interactive features- a non teacher's role and definitely for the teachers there needs to be a range of incentives to help staff take a leap to a new pedagogy, such as annual curriculum innovator bursaries.

This strategic leadership is often more important that the tool itself, but combine great leadership and great technology and school improvement follows on. Don’t forget to constantly review the e-learning strategy, look for its impact and share the good practice in pockets in the school and develop the key practitioners so the bug spreads.

Things to look for in a middle manager with whole school responsibility for e-learning

2010-03-19T09:08:00.001-07:00

At a medium/ large secondary school I would expect these posts to be two separate posts. Appointing someone to be Head of the ICT taught courses department is relatively straight forward; an excellent ICT class teacher who is ready for middle leadership.

The leadership of ICT across the school is somewhat a different ball game, it's a whole school role, it's strategic and they have to influence all sorts of different people- most without an ICT background without directly line managing them, which is a challenge.

In smaller secondary schools the two posts are often rolled together and if they are going to be successful in their whole school role there are additional things to look for in candidates. Teachers in other subjects can be hard to influence from the position of Head of ICT as they will often say 'its just not like that in History...English etc' which is why I prefer the model to be a Head of the ICT department and a whole school ICT leader who probably comes from a background of making great use of ICT in a non-ICT subject.

So to get that whole school perspective that creates confidence and ambitious in the whole workforce and fosters trust in ICT look for:

•Enthusiasm about the massive potential ICT has to revolutionise learning
•Has a good understanding of the massive role ICT plays in daily lives of students, parents and teachers outside of schools and the issue that schools struggle to keep up with this and exploit the potential to catch up with the norm outside of school and move ahead to innovate
•‘Gets’ the importance of VLEs- experience of using them, perhaps understand the post VLE landscpae- PLEs and PLNs. (personal learning environments/ networks)
•Understands the importance of quality content on VLEs- both homemade and bought in
•Understand the important of staff development around encouraging, training and handholding a shift towards new pedagogy, such a training on e-learning content creation and the skills of teaching with ICT
•Can see how ICT can improve outcomes for children by freeing teachers for time consuming tasks- allowing sharing of resources, faster admin, reducing marking, reducing work load with things like reports and improved pedagogy; engaging activities, differentiation and AfL built in, make great use of communication tools to access teacher support out of lessons
•Has a good grasp of the reticence many non-ICT teachers feel towards new technology and has ideas of techniques to get ‘buy in’ gain trust and incentivise innovation and peer to peer sharing. Has to present a bold vision and have ambition but balance with sensitive support for those who don’t pick up new technology quickly.
•Understands how ICT and web tools can enhance teacher CPD and peer2peer support and school2school support, also the importance of training staff in e-CPD
• Strong on E-safety and ICT Polcies but takes a realistic and pragmatic approach to the risks.
•An expert ICT practioner in professional life and personal life- 'walks the walk' not just 'talks the talks'
•They don't need to be a techy; that's the network manager's job, but they need to be able to hold conversations with the techies and know the difference between upload/download and wifi/hard wired and be technically aware from a user's point of view

When looking for a Network Manager I would say go beyond the technical ability, elevate the post to a similar level of this one and expect significant cross over in the roles so these people can work together. In other words look to appoint a Technical Manager who doesn't just maintain systems but drives curriculum and school development forward as part of the whole school development plan- the Headteacher's key technical advisor.

Thoughts on the ICT Register Showcase

2010-03-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

Well a busy couple of days down at Loughborough University- a superb conference venue for all sorts of reasons. Day one was the ICT Register Focus Schools meeting, always a great meeting- I don't go to another meeting where there so many movers and shakers from schools who 'walk the walk' not just 'talk the talk' like so many at 'policy makers' meetings do (who if they ever did teach in a school it was pre-internet if not pre ICT!)

The Focus Schools represent all phases, primary, secondary, special schools, CLCs and there's so much expertise in one room its quite inspiring, certainly a big part of my network for where I get my ideas and support from.

The SSAT ICT team presented bold and ambitious plans for the future, which were great to see- the influence the community of practitioners will have to inspire and support other schools is set to increase and this model of school to school support,certainly one of SSAT's original key planks, in a post-quango environment really has the potential to have the influence is should have. Watch our for developments via SSAT's new iCPD brand.

The Showcase the day after is a great little event, perhaps hampered this year a little by the clash with NAACE. I know its a good event by how much I write. I tend to lapse to my old rationale I had a university; namely I'll start writing when the speaker says something worth listening to and grumpily I look forward to walking out with an empty sheet. I feel like I'm challenging the speaker to make me write.

Even more of a challenge I went to Dominic Tester's workshop on Parental Engagement which is something we've allegedly cracked with our Real Time Reporting system and I was expecting to find he was doing the same as us but I took a full page of notes there with lots of ideas to move our system on, which is just what you need when you've got a system bedded in and are starting to think what next?

Dominic (@dtester) and Costello Technology College are certainly ones to watch and have the likes of us and Simon Thompson from Monkseaton as 'old hands' on our toes! Dominic's is a SIMS school using Frog VLE to share the data and get the web2.0 tools going, a great solution- many SIMS schools look at our Serco Facility system with home-made Joomla portal and Moodle integration and say that's all very good but SIMS isn't like that and we don't have your techies.

My presentation on Next Generation Learning went down well. I did a rather fast paced tour of our 'Virtual School' including our own Parental Engagement, some of our nice work with Moodle, Joomla and Mahara- quite a few hadn't realised how good Open Source tools are. Thanks to Becta for making the film on our Moodle work that makes my presentations look good now

I had a bit of fun about 'the mobile phone debacle' (Showing some of the 'readers' rants' on the Daily Mail website after I was dragged through the press for having the audacity to suggest students own devices have untapped potential is the easiest way to get laughs) and some serious thoughts about how we've got to get over ourselves and start exploiting the mobile devices sat in kids bags. This article in the TES is where to go for a balance view of the story and some more informed readers' opinions like that from @bobharrisonset.

I didn't have time to go into detail on one thing, but by trying to give a holistic over-view of school improvement through ICT was the aim with the offer to follow up with anyone who contacts me later- and already I've been answering emails from people on things I hadn't thought were crucial, like our on-line IT support desk, so the idea of covering as much as you can and let the audience decide what's relevant to them was a good one.

To view my presentation (showcase 3) and others from the day click here .

A nice testimonial from a total stranger

2010-03-09T04:26:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd share this very nice message that made me smile. I had an enquiry from someone 'down south' who wants to come to our Online Reporting day on March 25th and I said whilst he was welcome I could save him the travel and put him in touch with schools nearer to home. This was his reply:

Hi Paul,
Thanks for replying back to me. I would prefer to visit your school. Good practice is not everywhere. I am a devoted follower of your blog and your fascinating work. I have been tuned in since your TES article on using mobile phones last year. I loved the way you challenged the establishment :)

Its nice to be appreciated, better put on a good show on the 25th then!

Parental Engagement/ Online reporting days at Notre Dame High School

2010-02-25T01:45:00.000-08:00

Events are free of charge but places are strictly limited so email phaigh@notredame-high.co.uk to book a place or book direct with SSAT here. Delegates who have not booked a place will not be admitted on site due to limited places and safeguarding procedures.

Twilight 18th March 2010

4pm- 5.30pm

30 places

Hallam CLC, Notre Dame High School, Fulwood Road, Sheffield S10 3BT

Paul Haigh, Assistant Headteacher and Rosie Pontzen, Systems Manager will present Notre Dame’s award winning online reporting system that meets and exceeds the Government’s online reporting requirements. They will also explain the strategic management process in setting up the system and explain how it uses the school’s Information Management System (Serco Facility) and the school’s Learning Platform (Joomla & Moodle) as well as making use of parents SMS text and email (Keep Kids Safe). Notre Dame no longer send home traditional reports to parents.
The will be ample opportunity to ask questions about the system and how it works.

Parking is extremely limited on the school site, please use side streets. Directions are here

Full day 25th March 2010

9.30am-3.00pm

30 places

Hallam CLC, Notre Dame High School, Fulwood Road, Sheffield S10 3BT

Paul Haigh, Assistant Headteacher and Rosie Pontzen, Systems Manager will present Notre Dame’s award winning online reporting system that meets and exceeds the Government’s online reporting requirements. They will also explain the strategic management process in setting up the system and explain how it uses the school’s Information Management System (Serco Facility) and the school’s Learning Platform (Joomla & Moodle) as well as making use of parents SMS text and email (Keep Kids Safe). Notre Dame no longer send home traditional reports to parents.

The will be ample opportunity to ask questions about the system, share your experiences and network with colleague as well as hear from a school who have an outstanding system based on SIMS. There will be time to work on the Becta EPRA tool kit online which will guide you along the journey to online reports and have a tour of Notre Dame High School and the Hallam CLC.

• 9.30 coffee and registration
• 10.00 introductions, welcome, housekeeping. What are the requirements of online reporting and jargon busting around the technology, what needs to happen before you can launch your system- some tips having taken the journey.
• 10.30 a tour of the Notre Dame system
• 11.20 coffee & networking
• 11.40 complete tour of the Notre Dame system, Q+A around the Notre Dame system and sharing experiences between delegates
• 12.10 This is all very good but we don’t have Serco Facility MIS; Input from a SIMS school (Simon Thompson, Monkseaton/ Becta)
• 12.30 lunch
• 1.10 Finish input from a SIMS school, introduction to the EPRA toolkit and working on the EPRA tool kit to bench mark where your school is now and how to move forward using www.ict-register.net and PCs
• 2.10 Plenary- how do we move ahead and what support is available
• 2.30 Optional tour of the school including a visit to the sustainably build Hallam CLC Environmental Learning Centre
• 3.00 finish

Parking is extremely limited on the school site, please use side streets. Directions are under contact us at www.notredame-high.co.uk

The many ways to read my book

2010-02-22T04:11:00.001-08:00

My e-book on Social Networks, their benefits and risks to schools http://bit.ly/snetworks is capturing interest. It was reviewed in the TES here http://bit.ly/dD9zhj last week (Gerald Haigh is no relation!) and an extract has been published by ASCL here http://bit.ly/9Wjuuy . It can also be previewed on google books here http://bit.ly/dvZ84e now.

New book now available on Google books

2010-01-29T08:04:00.001-08:00

My new book- Social Network Websites, their benefits and risks to schools- a guide for school leaders is now available via Google books meaning you can read a fair bit before you go on to buy a copy. Click here to browse the pages http://bit.ly/ccrlgb

Here’s what the twitterati are saying about it.

timsgreenhalghGreat ebook primer from @paulhaigh for school leaders on social networks benefits and risks. http://bit.ly/7YXxw0

teachexpertiseLearn about the benefits and risks of using social network sites in learning for just £17 with our 'sharable' eBook: http://bit.ly/snetworks

ITsmartieideas for social media in the classroom @olliebray http://bit.ly/7udKEi Not ready? Get the basics right first with http://bit.ly/snetworks

karl_goddardjust ordered Paul Haigh's book on social networking http://bit.ly/8Z8H20

ebookseditora flurry of orders this morning for http://bit.ly/snetworks. Most overlooked 'credit card only' so we have to raise lots of invoices now

paulhaigh@andyjb recommends my book on social networking in schools http://bit.ly/9Zc08Q

Got some time to get out and about

2010-01-27T07:14:00.001-08:00

It’s been a busy year, first book out, second one half written, Becta Excellence Award, made 3 films for Becta, spoken at ICT Register Showcase, BETT, SSAT Rural Dimension Conference, ASCL Online reporting events, Becta Online Reporting Events, BSF events in Whitehall and Westminster, been in every paper in the country (and a few in China and India) over students’ use of mobile devices and asked to join various research groups and networks as well as keep up with a steady flow of schools wanting to visit us (normally to look at Online Reporting or Learning Platforms or get advice around BSF).

The amount of interest this is generating in the ICT work at my school, which has had a record breaking year for results, has meant more and more request for my time so the time came to renegotiate my contract with Notre Dame and I now have more freedom and time to work out of school.

This means I’m now offering more consultancy slots, speaking and training work and hopefully will have the time to get stuck into supporting a client rather than turn up, do a presentation and contribute to an event and then clear off but actually guide a client through a new development from concept to impact.

I’ll have more time to work with the usual suspects like Becta, SSAT, National College and ASCL who all run excellent events but as school support moves away from Local Authorities , national agencies and quangos people will increasingly be sourcing their support from the successful schools and getting help from the horse’s mouth and we want to be well placed to offer that.

Now this is nothing new to us, we host a City Learning Centre, have Specialist College Partner Schools, most significantly through our Leading Edge role, have Becta Consultant School status and are an ICT-Register Focus School and always contribute to SSAT events not forgetting the big daddy of them all we are a National Support School and currently provide a Headteacher to a National Challenge School but this move to set up an in-house commercial consultancy is a new string to the bow, offering a very bespoke service as well as marketing seminars and school visits.

The keys areas I’ll be promoting are

• BSF negotiating the right ICT deal for you
• BSF what do we do with all the ICT money (to get an impact on learners)
• Strategic Leadership of ICT (essentially the old SLICT days at our school)
• E-learning/ VLE stuff
• Parental Engagement/ Online Reporting
• How to foster a culture of innovation in a school
• Hand Held Learning and using students' own devices safely
• Sustainable Schools issues
• Becta Self Review Framework/ moving towards ICT Mark
• Data driven school improvement through Information Management strategy- tracking pupil progress etc.

Drop me a line if you’d like to know more, we’ll have a proper web site running soon

phaigh@notredame-high.co.uk

Some data about students use of computers for homework and their mobile devices

2010-01-18T04:43:00.001-08:00

A couple of surveys I showed at BETT last week caused some interest, they deserve a little more explanation and discussion.

How often do you use a computer for homework?

This fairly open question to 1400 students in Y7-Y13 generated this response http://twitpic.com/y64av with 75% of students using a computer several times a week for homework. The homeworks in question would be homeworks where students were sometimes asked to use a computer- for example maths putting their homework out through the learning platform or where students chose to use a computer- for example for research but there is still a lot of homework where there is no need to use a computer. That said 10% claim to never need to use a computer at home, how can this be so? I expect these are students who use computers in school, the home computer is there (we stopped doing home access surveys in 2007 when it hit 98%) but under a lot of pressure with many family members using one machine and a fair number of our students hand around at school until parents pick them up later using our Open Learning Centre and our Cyber Cafe for homework while they wait. Oh, and there’s always the odd student who seems good at avoiding homework altogether!

One question about this was why is our home access to IT so high, the answer is I don’t know, I don’t even know it is high. We are a fully comprehensive city school and I think our home access reflects the average position for families with teenagers. National data for households is not skewed by the pester power/ education need teenagers bring to a household. If we are better served it is maybe the school’s use of new technology (Becta Excellence award winner) promotes, literally, ‘buy in’ from parents and being an oversubscribed Catholic school our parents are very committed to the school.

What mobile digital devices do you own?

This survey was done to time with our new policy to allow students to use their own mobile devices in school under certain conditions. Conditions include agreeing to an Acceptable Use Policy, using the school wifi which is monitored and filtered, only using devices in lessons when the teachers has allowed it etc. The survey http://twitpic.com/y62rf shows predictably every student has at least one mobile phone, but more useful is the very high numbers of lap tops, which if I break this down by age shows a skew of older students often having their own lap top for school work, particularly sixth formers. The high numbers of students who have great hand held devices like the iPod touch is very encouraging as the curriculum applications for such devices are really taking off and, unlike mobile phones, they don’t have the risks of mobile phone network connectivity that may interrupt learning with calls and texts.

Discussions about this data have noted devices are very common but not everyone has them and this brings up the inequality issue. Actually, it can improve equality; at the moment in a lesson with lap tops students will have to share, perhaps 20 machines between 28 students, if a few bring their own lap top/ netbook or other device the school’s machines stretch further.

If budgets do get tight in years to come making use the wonderful resource the students already own by developing safe wifi and AUPs would be sensible it seems.

A visit to BETT 2010

2010-01-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

Well, was it worth the trek through snow and ice to get to BETT 2010? I was meant to come down on the Wednesday for the BETT awards dinner and then do the show, but weather chaos meant I could only manage a flying one day trip.

Overall yes, it was good, but not an amazing day. It was a pleasure to do a little 'unplugged gig' on the Open Source Schools stand (L20) and Miles Berry there is the nicest bloke you’ll ever meet- go check their little haven of common sense out among the madness, they can tell you about free downloadable tools that will knock other tools in the show costing £thousands into a cocked hat. My presentation was about our IT set up blending open source tools (Joomla, Moodle, Mahara to mention a few) with commercial tools (Windows, Serco Facility, Outlook etc), and they recorded it so it will be available online soon. Here's an interview I did on you tube after my presentation and here is the case study I was presenting.

Also, it is the ICT Education community’s annual get together so it was great to catch up with the Parental Engagement team from Becta- Simon Shaw, Lorna Thompson etc, always good to see old friends from SSAT including the legend that is Tony Parkin and see the www.ICT-register.net team of Glyn Barrett, Pam Winn and John Wordsworth and always a pleasure to see what ICT guru Paul Hynes has been up to (this time bringing augmented reality to education, it will be 'normal' 10 years from now to explain difficult concepts with augmented reality software), great to see SSAT not just reporting good practice in schools today but instigating new practice themselves. And, best of all, I finally met my editor; the wonderful Jenny Lee (www.twitter.com/ebookseditor) from www.Optimus-education.com who I have written 1 and half books with (‘Social Network Websites- their benefits and risks to schools’ out now http://bit.ly/snetworks ) and only ever having had email and twitter contact with her after she found me on Twitter and commissioned two books. Nearly all these contacts have pencilled me in for speaking at events this year so that's efficient networking for you.

But what of the show itself? It's not for me. I was very depressed to see so many Interactive Whiteboards for sale, you'd think Smart and Promethean had the market sewn up and the boards aren’t breaking down so sales have slowed and newer, more important technologies would be taking over, not so if you base it on the number of stands showing IWBs. Don't get me wrong, I like my Activ Board, but it hasn't changed the world (or, nationally, have they had a noticeable impact on level of achievement despite being in every school in the country). They tie the teacher to the front of the class, makes them teach in an old fashioned way (electronic chalk and talk)- albeit with some nice ICT presentation and tools but stop kids having to work independently when they are all listening to the teacher, there's a time and place for that but I know I spend too much time in my lessons talking to the class and doing Q+A because it’s easy to engage them with web sites like youtube but really I need to get away from the front and circulate my classroom while they work independently and in groups using mobile devices to tap into ICT resources as and when they need them. They aren’t interactive most of the time anyway, give me a wireless mouse or a blue tooth slate to control my PC and projector any time over an IWB and I’ll be dancing round my classroom and getting the students interacting with the screen at a fraction of the cost and with far better learning outcomes.

There were also a lot of student response systems from the excellent Promethean tool to some more than a decade old and are frankly rubbish (there’s one big firm who seem to think they can flog 10 year old kit with a really big stand and a hard sell, I hope none on you gave them your email and phone number; they’ve even got put through to me at work saying ‘it’s a sensitive personal call’- they will be hassling you for the rest of your life, I wonder how many of you know who I’m referring to!)

Parental text/ email tools were quite rightly doing well, the current weather a real blessing to their sales- every school should have one, Keep Kids Safe seemed the best one to me with voice/ email/ text and it collated responses, tracked dead email addresses, monitored message uptake and didn't sell SMS messages in stupid bundles that decayed if not used. And they are a Sheffield company, so even better!

One little gem, the Rap-Man 3D printer that at around £800 brings real CADCAM work to any D+T department and Technology Colleges could even buy a few to share with Primaries- a tool that turns a design a child has made on screen into an object they can hold and evaluate is something all schools should have and they were a worthy winner of a BETT award (even if they were a little jaded this morning when I went to congratulate them- a late night and I'm kind of glad I couldn't make it, I have no self control and would have been up till 4am like the mates I chatted to today who all looked far better on it than I would have!)

I think it should be on the PGCE and BEd curriculum to go to BETT and quickly find out what is available in the world of ICT, if I were a PGCE tutor I can see a great 2 day team building trip to London with a day at BETT and a day raging round London art galleries and museums finding out what resources the great London institutions have for schools with a bit of team bonding and plenary on the over night. Also, anyone newly promoted to making strategic decisions in a school will find it’s a good way of getting up to speed but I just felt like I was walking round mentally ticking off stalls; 'got that' 'that's rubbish' 'done that ourselves' but perhaps that's just because I work with the ICT stuff day in day out and we've achieved a lot already. I was glad to find and outdoor display screen to get electronic notices to students, but I think I'd have found that on Google if I'd tried.

It was fun, the weather allowed me to get there and the buses, trains and tubes all worked like clockwork so no regrets and I love a trip to the big smoke, I'll go next year if I'm booked to speak otherwise I'll give it a miss.

My new book is out

2010-01-12T12:02:00.001-08:00

My new book Social Network Website; their benefits and risks, a guide to school leaders is out now as an e-book, buy here:

http://www.optimus-education.com/social-network-websites-their-benefits-and-risks-guide-school-leaders-254

Student owned mobile devices

2009-10-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

A draft chapter from my upcoming book 'The New Technologies Handbook for School' from Optimus to coincide with my interview in the TES

Student owned mobile devices

The future for students’ use of ICT has to be based around them carrying and owning a mobile device, if not two. From a sustainability point of view schools just can’t afford to buy and continually replace enough equipment to reach the goal of one computer device for every student. In a perfect world a student needs a computer at home and one with them at school.

Why do students need computers with them at school all day?

ICT is used often in school but students don’t use it all the time, and nor should they, but they should be dipping in and out of ICT technologies as a resource for learning throughout the day just as they dip in and out of books, listening to teachers, watching videos and working in groups. ICT learning activities would range from an hour working on a spreadsheet to a couple of minutes watching a video clip to introduce a concept with activities like writing, playing educational games and using web sites making up other activities.

Many schools are accessing activities like this without the students all carrying a mobile device. Bookable ICT suites and lap top trolleys are the main ways to give students ICT access but these have drawbacks. Bookable ICT rooms will often be booked on the days a teacher needs them meaning they can’t get in, perhaps because a whole year group are working on a topic that suits ICT but these rooms could be empty and unused at other times. When a teacher does take a class into the ICT suite they lose access to their normal text books, wall displays and other resources in their normal classroom and the ICT may have to be ‘spun out’ to fill the lesson.

The best learning integrates ICT in a ‘blended learning’ approach where the ICT adds to the lesson rather than takes over from it. Best practice allows students to choose when to use ICT and how to use it, alongside traditional textbooks and other resources. This idea has resulted in the popularity of lap top trolleys but many teachers feel they end up being a technician; fetching the heavy trolley, plugging it in, handing out the machines, helping student get them connected to the network and managing the return. Their lesson may be scuppered by a previous teacher not plugging the trolley back into the power supply so the lap top batteries fail and as the lap tops age their batteries perform worse and worse and as a result some teacher stop using the lap top trolley.

If the students carried their own light weight and compact lap top they could get it from their bags as and when it is needed to enhance their learning. This not only brings convenience and allows ICT to impact on learning more appropriately the machine will be well used in evenings and weekends. School owned ICT equipment is hardly ever used in the evening, at weekends and rarely in holidays and after three years it has become virtually obsolete. Student owned machines will need replacing through heavy use, which means the investment has been well used. When the students own the machine they then also get other benefits, they can check school emails and electronic notice board announcements, they can use an electronic diary to note down homework and use the machine to enhance their participation in the wider life of the school such as for extracurricular work or to express their ‘student voice’ through things like a web based student council.

They should also be allowed and encouraged to use the machine for their personal social use as this increases their personal ICT expertise and enthusiasm for seeing applications for new technologies.

How to fund a mobile device for every child

No school can afford to buy every student such a device, let alone maintain it and if they could the benefits that come with student ownership would be lost- don’t under estimate what allowing the student to choose their own model and put stickers on it means to the impact the machine will have and how well they will look after it; just see how they cherish their personal mobile phones.

Parental contribution is the only way to realise this potential. School based and government backed home access schemes should help those with financial hardship but a contribution of £3 a week spread over 3 years would finance an excellent machine, whether this is handled in house or through a 3^rd party leasing company.

Or...is there another way that is the wood we can’t see for the trees?

There is an alternative that is not ideal but could represent an interim measure until mobile computer devices become so low priced all schools can buy them (consider the scientific calculator that cost less the £5 today that was once an investment for a maths teacher but out of the reach of the students) and could be an additional approach to also providing machines in school in a perfect world.

A survey of a secondary school will find, depending on the socio-economic mix of the children, a surprising number of students own a personal wi-fi enabled lap top. Some schools have set up their wireless network so such ‘guest machines’ can safely access the network via the network firewall and the users can access the school’s monitored and filtered internet feed. Whilst some might say a policy like this will cause all manner of problems and will emphasise the inequality between students others will recognise that with well written policies this is just a sensible way to let the children work in the same way in school as they would at home and schools should not stand in their way.

Often today students are working in class on paper and are reluctant to make progress knowing that when they get home and can use their computer they will start from scratch. John Dunford, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders said, in SecEd on September 24^th 2009 http://content.yudu.com/A1gcm7/SecEd24Sept2009/resources/7.htm

“Today’s students have grown up with technology, especially the internet in a way that makes it almost as natural as breathing. We know this affects how they learn and its means the curriculum will need to be centred on more actively engaging students. This will be a challenge to some teachers, but it is the world in which these students live and work”

Just by letting the students bring their own device into school we can let them work in a way that engages them and makes the most of their time. In addition to lap tops there are a plethora of mobile devices that can access the internet. Games console, e-book readers, tablets, mobile phones and netbooks are commonplace and with clear guidance and good classroom management all could enhance learning when used appropriately. To extend John Dunford’s analogy schools that prevent student working with new technology as a first impulse rather than an occasional added extra are suffocating their learning.

To see how to manage an initiative like this policies and guidelines from a school doing this are included in an appendix.

Managing the machines

Regardless of who owns the machine there is a tricky issue of the software on the machine. Installing the basic operating system and word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation tool and web browser wouldn’t present a problem but the myriad of subject specific curriculum software would be a major challenge as students all have a different timetable depending on their age, options taken and level of ability. Then, as a subject department start to use new software all the machines would have to come back in to school to be updated; a logistical task beyond a school’s capacity. It would not be possible to put all the possible software titles on every machine, it would slow the machines down to a snail’s pace, use up disk space and be wasteful even if the software licenses could be paid for.

Then the school need to protect its network that malware such as trojans, worms and viruses don’t get picked up from the students home internet connection and transferred to the school system- a degree of ‘lock down’ stopping the students from install any software any protect the school system but stop the students using the machine for anything like its full potential.

There is a solution to all these problems- web access. The most forward thinking school would invests its time, energy and money into its technical infrastructure and ‘virtual web based school’ so that the students access ‘my school’ through the internet needing only a web browser on the machine. They can now access office applications, curriculum software, all their teachers’ lesson resources, their email, their personal files and works stored elsewhere via the internet and then they can see exactly the same ‘work space’ when they log in from a computer in a library, a relative’s house or on a family computer. When a computer breaks down they can simply drop it off at the technician’s room and pick up a replacement machine.

A menu of machines from the most compact netbooks to wide screen lap tops and even including tablets that can use a pen-on-screen input method or Apple machines that really support creative digital media work well can be offered, meaning students can be guided to make a choice that suits their age (younger students carrying very small machines) or their curriculum choice- those studying creative digital subject might need a computer that can cope with high powered graphics and large digital video files.

Great school web sites

2009-09-29T04:45:00.001-07:00

The public school web site is an essential tool for the school. Most schools have one, few have a great one. The main reasons why some school web site are not as good as they should be can be summarised as:

-No clear vision for the purpose of the site
-Poor quality, it doesn?t look good and users have a poor experience
-Not up to date or not complete with links to areas that are marked ?under construction? but nothing ever seems to appear

Does a school need a good web site?
Yes, it is essential. In today's world it is the shop front of the school. Prospective staff and parents often get their first proper impressions of a school from its web site. A school is only as good as its staff and with the majority of advertising being online now prospective staff click straight into a school's web site and ask themselves 'do I want to work here?'. Some may think they don't want staff who are put of by something as superficial as a poor web site but that's defensive, the web site should reflect how good the school is and show it in its best light.

More than just marketing
Some schools, particularly private schools, have clearly paid good money to have a professionally made slick web site authored for them purely as a marketing tool, and as a replacement for the traditional paper prospectus that is a good idea- videos of school life and personal messages from the Headteacher are very nice but this only appeals to a transient audience, the prospective student and family; transient in that they either join the school or don't and either way the marketing work of the site is done. The site needs to be the online expression of a vibrant and busy school, here are some pointers to achieve this:

-It must change, daily ideally with new content appearing all the time, news articles are a good way of keeping a front page fresh but out of date news is an instant turn off
-It must engage the user, be more than a passive experience, tools like polls allow the reader to join in and use the site
-It must be personally useful to each individual stake holder and related;
-It must be possible to personalise the view of part of the site to each individual user

How many web sites?
Some schools end up with several sites, some public others private (perhaps referred to as an Intranet site). There may be the public web site- the marketing and public relations tool and further staff, student and parents' sites. The best system is to use one public site as a portal for all stake holders to use. This way the site gets all the traffic through one initial front page and this can be used to promote the ethos and character of the school. Users should instantly recognise the school through its web site; the school crests, the colours, the mission statement or motto and the plethora of logos schools acquire should all have impact on the first page alongside interesting and up to date news. Schools often try to do too much with their front page, then fail to do the job well so consider carefully the role of the front page and keep day to day business announcements for a specific page one click in.

By using a unique username and password there then are two main ways to personalise the site. Logging in can either increase the users access rights to enable them to access a student, staff or parent specific site hidden behind the public site, but this is not totally personalised as it puts the user in a cohort who can access certain areas together. Better that this a user name and password changes the website to be specific to that users needs, adding in tools on the screen like a dashboard of a car- perhaps a icon to show how many email messages are waiting, a calendar that is specific to the user- showing deadlines for course work they are enrolled in, notices specific to age or role and further 'tabs' to click on to take the user to 'my documents' on the network or 'my courses' on the learning platform.

Plugging in tools
Increasingly schools are using a host of web based tools such as:

-Email
-Shared document directories
-Online room booking
-Online fault and repair requests
-Online reporting to parents
-Online data entry tools as part of the Management Information System (MIS) for staff
-A web based learning platform
-Web access to telephone voice mail
-Online access to finance tools

There is no single tool that can offer all these functions but with care each of these tools can be 'plugged in' behind one web portal. Single sign on is a buzzword here, once a user is logged in to the site they should be able to access all these systems and the systems know who is using them so present a view appropriate to the user. This level of slickness does cause one worry in a busy school- data security. Busy teachers do leave computer 'logged in' and walk away from them, perhaps as they help students in class. To protect the security of the system staff need to either lock their screens (in Microsoft Windows this is achieved with ctrl/alt/delete and hit enter) or have the system set up so they automatically log the user out after a period of inactivity like online bank accounts do.

The beauty of web based systems is no data should be stored on individual machines. Stories of government staff leaving a lap top on a train with millions of people's personal data on are horrifying, but if users are only accessing tools hosted at the school via the web this can?t happen.

The best tools in the list above can be tailored in appearance (or 'themed') to fit in with the branding of the main school web site. This may seem to some to be trivial but it isn't. Users need to being able to feel instinctively when they are within the realms of the school site and when they have left it, just as the school gate lets people know when they are on or off the school site so should the virtual school make people feel 'at school'. This is important for ethos with both staff and students being encouraged to meet the expectations of the school even when away from the school site but 'at the virtual school'.

Another buzzword is interoperability, that the separate tools should work with each other, for example the learning platform needs to pick up class lists and timetables from the MIS, the email system needs to pick up user account information from the network. Complete interoperability is a bit of a holy grail, but when choosing new tools ask suppliers about the interoperability with the tools you already have and like using, if would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bath water when buying a new tool.

How do I get a great web site, we don?t have the expertise
Plenty of companies will set up a nice web site, but to keep it fresh a school either needs to keep paying them, which is not feasible or manage it themselves. Secondary schools can justify a full time member of staff to do this, primary schools can work in soft federations to share someone, but they don't need to be an amazing technical wizard; web site authoring seems to many to be a black art but it isn't. Fair enough, piping more than half a dozen other tools into one 'virtual school' may be technical but modern web site tools allow WYSISWYG editing, which stands for 'what you see is what you get' and people with the right permission level can click and icon and literally delete the text there and type a new version.

Many schools use a tools such as Sharepoint, Uniservity or other learning platforms that also provide a web site for this, other choose an open source free to download tool called Joomla. Hosting the web site can also be a headache, the computer hardware that publishes the web site should not be out of the realm of a secondary school, primary schools may again find it best to collaborate in families or with a partner secondary school or a regional strategy from the local authority may include a web site tool, under Building Schools for the Future in England it will.

BSF ICT- the issue about opting out

2009-06-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

Enquiries have been asking me for more detail about schools that don't like the BSF ICT strategy. You can try to opt out and retain the funding by submitting an Alternative Business Procurement Case, but it’s hard work and the odds are not in the school's favour, however the system is there to be used, so do use it if you have a case. Otherwise you can just say ‘no thanks, we'll just take the building’, after all turning down investment that takes some leading schools backwards is sensible for everyone- not least the tax payer, but you've got to be realistic - are you really better than what your LEP is offering? That's going to depend on you, your LEP and how much tailoring to your needs the LEP is offering. Later waves seem much better at engaging with the schools ahead of contracts and specifications being drawn up than earlier ones, so decide what you must keep 'in house' (and why) and what someone else might be able to do for you. You could get the best of both worlds, but if people won't negotiate and take your views into account then get stuck into an opt out bid.

Here is the text of a speech I was asked to give in Westminster in March 2009 at a Parliamentary event chaired by Andrew Slaughter MP from the Education Select Committee on this issue. The entire transcript of this speech, the other speeches and the Q&A session was made available after the event, but to save people tracking a copy down here is my bit. It is very specific to my school though and getting a bit dated already, Sheffield has now moved ahead and we are very satisfied with what we have retained and how well the schools are working together on issues like 14-19. And I must say everyone at the LA, PfS and DCSF did come together and sort out a solution that worked for us and the city- so keep talking!

"The experience of BSF ICT procurement we have experienced offers nothing to a leading school which already has superb ICT provision and it damages ICT for all as it stops such schools innovating, taking risks and trailing new pedagogy that all schools have the potential to learn from. Whilst the ICT Managed service is universally unpopular amongst schools and the approach to delivering it from PfS varies between bullying and cloak and dagger it will improve ICT, albeit in a non-sustainable way, in most schools but not ours.

The ICT output specification we were expected to accept under BSF represented a retrograde step for us having already achieved everything in the specification and moved beyond. For example, for some years we have run a sophisticated online Virtual School that caters for more than just the learners’ needs. All stake holders including learners, teachers, parents and community members have access to a personalised online virtual school which we have developed and host ourselves with a mixture of commercial and open source tools we have put together behind one web portal.

The specifications of this far exceed most schools aspirations for their learning platform- for example we have ‘BBC Spring watch style’ live wildlife video web cams and meteorological data streaming on a dedicated web site.

Far from just being a system the Virtual School is a way of life, used by everyone. Parents in their hundreds log in every week to check up on their children’s attendance, behaviour, attainment and progress through a Real Time reporting system that has been running for some years and exceeds the government’s own target for online reporting not due until 2010 (although most schools are set not to meet this). It is no coincidence that we were running online reporting before it was mooted as a national expectation but when Jim Knight announced this at the BETT show he did so against a back drop of images from the system we use- good ideas have to come from somewhere.

None of the BSF schools who are already open have a system anything like ours- they still come to us for help even though we haven’t been through the process of ‘BSF transformation’.

The arguments for taking a managed service run something like this; it will remove schools from the burden of managing an ICT system and deliver them with a high quality reliable ICT system- this is a powerful argument in many schools but not in schools like ours. The performance of our system meets or exceeds all the key performance indicators set out in the output specification and our control over it is not a burden, it is the engine that drives innovation in teaching and learning onwards- if we want to make radical change like ditch a major software system in favour of another we can do that, our technical manager chairs the ICT strategy group and we employ ICT graduates through all ranks of management who work side by side with teachers on curriculum development.

Our technical team are not some small back-room low paid support team to keep a system running for a teaching team to use they are an integral part of a post workforce reform team with a one-staff culture where everyone employed by the same governing body whose performance is managed in terms of our collective progress towards school improvement based on learners’ achievements. BSF should be about developing the school not contracting parts of it out. Successful school improvement means root and branch reform steered by the vision Headteacher who can quickly react to opportunities and changes in circumstances. 5 year contracts describing what the best schools were doing 2 years ago are not transformational they are ‘stagnational’.

We have a long history of supporting other schools for example we are currently providing the leadership of a local National Challenge school that is without a Head Teacher- we certainly don’t have an insular ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitude, we are fully committed to system wide reform but to continue to be a leading school with something to offer the system of the future we must have the freedom to plot our own course- it’s not a rash risk to lets schools like us do this we in a position to have earned autonomy but it is a rash risk not to have any schools doing this.

The specification that PfS are delivering is based on good practice extracted from good schools and turned into a business model that was scalable and profitable enough to entice private companies into investing (although half the contracts have gone to one company so it’s not that attractive and we know it is getting tougher to secure the investments needed). The trouble is ICT doesn’t stand still and we need pioneers to forge ahead and find out how emerging technologies can impact on learning and be free enough to pounce on new technologies as they arrive- Interactive whiteboards and Virtual Learning Environments are already technologies of the past.

We have opted out of the BSF ICT managed service and are the only school in the area to do so and keep some of the funding as the opt-out rules have now been changed. We fully intend to continue to be an outward facing school showing what ICT can achieve but there will be many more schools in the same position as ours, BSF is still young. The DCSF will say there is a fair procedure in place for schools who feel the way we do- they have 42 days to produce an Alternative Business Procurement Case that the business experts in their Local Authority will have had 18 months to work on (in our case 107 pages long). This is a trick, there is no way any school can show economy of scale (even though I actually have the figures to prove we can- it won’t be accepted, it’s sacrilege to suggest it) or show ‘transference of risk’ (we don’t talk about transferring the risks of educating our children elsewhere, we talk about professionals taking responsibility in house- isn’t this a lesson from the credit crunch?)

The ‘opt out’ system should not be about making a case for alternative procurement but about bidding for a special status to be the jewel in the crown of BSF- that each authority should be looking for a pioneering lead school to earn the autonomy to chart the way forward with the freedom to run their own ICT system, if they want to, but with the responsibility to share the knowledge gained with the local, national and international education system. The system needs reforming before it is too late and the billions of £s investment fails to have the best impact."