The case for 21st century teachers

A great 5 minute video making the case for a revolution in schools and the way teachers need to be allowed to cast off 19th century ways of working.
Many thanks to JeanetteMcLeod for tweeting this

indispensible tools for teachers and learners

links to good things for classrooms

indispensibletools / FrontPage.

Why we learn – and don’t learn

Laughter and Forgetting by Nick Shackleton Jones

a superb description of the role of emotion in learning. 20 minutes long but gold dust for educators from start to end.

Site also contains the less gripping but very useful ‘100 really useful and free learning tools for teachers’ which is just a great reminder of the long list of digital tools you can use in the classroom.

Teaching Guantanamo Bay in Second Life

At MipTV two lecturers showed us what they’d been doing with Guantanamo Bay in Second Life http://tiny.cc/bM9UW I thought this was a visionary tool for teachers.  Pupils can swiftly come closer to the story in a way that hours of news footage are unlikely to ever achieve

The game, which requires you to sign over your avatar to another’s control, also integrates the facts and feelings researched through the footage, interviews, news reports, poetry and other official and personal sources of information around the issue. It’s an amazing piece of work and points to a whole new way of undersatnding War, Peace and Citizenship both formally and informally.

12 Technologies

Intended Consequences.

Short videos on emerging education trends in ICT including Virtual Worlds and Flat Classroom

Full 2009 Horizon report here

Good writing for e-learning

George Orwell gave us six rules government wafflers (see my previous post) should use:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

I would add

7. Pay attention to your audience.

This post offers clear thinking about writing for the web.

Why are schools slow to exploit ICT?

An article by Maureen McTaggart highlights the latest Becta survey finding schools slow to exploit technology.  I’m surprised anyone is surprised though. I think the reasons are clear:

1. We tend not to take risks when our leaders have no room for failure and we are boxed in by irreconcilable demands. 

2. Many tech writers fail to make ICT accessible for busy teachers. Only the most dedicated teachers make it through the magic forest

Organisations like Becta  work hard to make ICT accessible for schools but it’s tricky to overcome a curriculum and structure that reflects the 19th century better than the 21st century.

Is Twitter useful for education?

I still haven’t found anyone who’s using Twitter for anything educational. Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross update theirs regularly. One or two of my twitter mates say some alarmingly frank things on their posts, possibly not realising how public it can be but it hasn’t changed anything much for me yet.

But it feels democratic and  requires very little commitment so it’s not too much to ask. The obvious advantages are that it can be free and it can broadcast to many followers with one click. Still, I’m curious about what a 140-character broadcast can do that a text message can’t. 

Maybe it is that very constraint. Text messages can go on and on. Twitter is strict. It could be a great lesson in the power of less being more.

One use could be in literacy, like a haiku lesson. Can you make up a poem or a story based entirely on 140-character chunks?

Can you write explanations for a complex game or route?

Can you summarise the most important aspect of an idea within the 140-character constraints?

Can you write a story Tweet by Tweet? Like a variation on old parlour games where you contribute a sentence each to a story. One difference here is that your contributors can be far-flung.

Can you write a review of a poem or a book in that space?

One way might be to set up a Twitter Fest on a whiteboard, looking at a poem or an extract and then gathering a 140-character post from every pupils summarising its meaning or mood? Even better if the Twitters could create a cloud of meaning making an immediate visual impact on the board.

DVDs of schools video clips for whiteboards

Most schools TV is now in clip form. If you miss a schools TV broadcast on BBC2’s Learning Zone, it’s still possible to get it on DVD to play on your whiteboard.

1.Your school can buy DVDs of many key programmes. The service is cheap, at about £10. for a DVD wth two hours of high quality Schools TV on it. (I made a chunk of it so I would say that)
Tel 08701 272 272 or email bbcsbr@twoten.press.net
This is what’s called the BBC’s Cost Recovery service or Overnight Broadcast Service. It’s poorly advertised but an excellent source of missed video material for your whiteboards.
The DVDs can only be sold to educational establishments. It’s useful to the teachers who forget to hit record or who end up with the last five minutes of their recording missing.
iPlayer and other online delivery streams remove this issue for the general viewer but teachers need longer than 7 days, or even 30 days, to integrate a new video into their lessons. It’s often a ‘holiday’ time activity and can take a year or more to get round to.
The Overnight service can’t be anything other than just the basic video material of the programme. No video that hasn’t been transmitted can be added to the DVD, No notes or other support material can be offered with it, so teachers have to come up with ways of integratng it into their lesson from scratch.
This cost recovery Overnight Broadcast Service is sometimes confused with the commercial DVD service offered by other providers such as:

2. BBC Worldwide/Pearson DVD service.
Commercial DVDs are not tied to broadcasts and often offer extras. They aren’t restricted to providing just the video but can produce well-researched supporting materials, extra video clips not transmitted, extra audio, e-books and all of the other stuff that can make a stimulating whiteboard experience that teachers don’t have time to build from scratch.
What used to be BBC Worldwide Children’s Learning is now part-owned by Pearson and called BBC Active
There is a more specific primary schools site for primary whiteboards also. This is where you can get the wraparound of notes, clips from various sources and teachers’ and pupils’ books, posters and ebooks.

3. Channel 4 also has specific schools resources for sale at the 4Learning shop.

4. Teacher’s TV has shedloads of great resources permanently available on their website. All can be streamed and many are available for download.

5. The BBC also puts clips which can be streamed from the Class Clips section of the learning zone website

Literacy at Norfolk Community Primary School

Yesterday I visited Norfolk Community Primary School in Sheffield, where whiteboards are fully integrated into the school’s daily practice. This is an inspiring school in many ways, both for its use of technology to foster creativity and for its general ethos. It’s an eco-school with a grass roof for insulation, recycling of rainwater and integration of activities like gardening, composting and growing food into the children’s curriculum.

Most inspiring are the teachers and pupils who have really got into writing stories and retelling stories with group presentations, using a wide range of techniques to scaffold, model and collaborate. Year 4 interrupted their PE lesson to give me an impromptu performance of a story they’d created, which fizzed along with great brio.

It’s a wonderful example of a very new school, only four years old, that seems to have been designed for learning, with wide corridors, great spaces, small and large, and a sense of warmth and welcome. And it feels like every inch of space is used, with words and maps and vivid art at every turn, creating a sense of an exciting learning community.