On another school visit today I went to the Sheffield Springs Academy where I watched an impressive display of how integrated whiteboards can be in practice. Emmanuelle Bishton is the epitome of the 21st century classroom teacher, using her whiteboard as creative stimulus, collaborative workspace, timer, ticker-tape reminder and record keeper. She showed me the thick green folders of lesson plans that are about to be jettisoned now she’s stored her bank of lesson plan powerpoints. Each one is a slick and flexible bank of targetted resources. Some came free from the BBC and Teachers TV. Others she rated were bought in from providers such as Teachit, They can all be fine-tuned each year for different types of learners. Creating a bank of resources like this feels onerous, especially in the middle of a busy term. But it’s clear once it’s done how much time it saves year on year and how simple it is to add to.

In the lunch queue it was remarked that soon no-one would ever wheel a TV into a classroom again. I wonder how many still do?

This is a great example of a game that teaches without preaching. A Sims-style experience allows teenagers to live through the experience of moving out, renting a flat and negotiating independence. Made by Creative North with the local housing association in Kirklees.

We all carry our mobile phone all of the time. And it’s a source of solace and distraction when delayed on a journey. Teens with mobile phones are a readily harvestable audience for any games. The children I know are quite happy to play repetitive games of snake endlessly so the bar doesn’t have to be too high. Well-made games like these with a strong narrative drive provide an entertaining game with a well concealed but wise foundation that can also be shared with friends.

I asked about the cancelling of BBC Jam at the Showcomotion festival. The BBC Trust member was very polite and eager to say that all materials that could be reused would be - by which they meant the Gaelic and possibly Welsh components. That’s good but it seems to be fairly minimal in relation to the the 90 projects, and (est.) £50 million licence fee spent.

The following day at a session on innovative video we saw three excellent examples of the materials that have been produced but may never see the light of day outside an industry conference. It’s clear from these that the licence payers - and their children - are being sheltered from some superb educational resources. Since the UK licence payer has invested this huge amount of money, whether willingly or not, in the BBC’s educational output, it seems odd of the BBC Trust to refuse to let them see - and benefit from - what they’ve already paid for.  

The Trust’s argument is that the release of these materials would distort the market for commercial producers. Yet it also feels like a cavalier decision to allow so much licence fee to go to waste when it could be adding value to our children’s education. Like having a food mountain and pouring it away instead of giving it away. How can there possibly be public value in suppressing excellent educational resources? It feels like burning books.

On other matters, the Trust canvasses opinion on its website. Is it possible the licence payers could be consulted over this matter in the same way, and asked whether they want their children to have these free to air resources that would help them to learn? Or whether they agree that having all these BBC resources would actually hurt the interests of UK and international businesses who need to earn a living?

It may be that we would all agree with the Trust in the end but I suspect it would seem ludicrous to most licence payers. The resources exist. Our nation’s educational needs are rising. The UK’s children and teenagers need every possible help to be as well-educated and competitive as possible in the 21st century. Here we have cutting edge resources made by some of the UK’s finest educational providers inside and outside the BBC.
Having seen the three examples, It’s clear they’re eminently usable, distinctive, cutting-edge and inspiring. Why shouldn’t UK learners have access to them?

The only parallel I can think of is that the BBC produces a soap opera called Eastenders. it is very popular but was created many years after ITV created a similarly popular soap called Coronation Street. I’m sure Granada must have been irritated by the BBC rivalry, yet the BBC still produces Eastenders. Why isn’t that damaging the interests of commercial entertainment providers? And why is the BBC shy of producing educational resources in the same way? It’s been in the business of doing so for over 80 years, far longer than it’s produced soap operas for. It seems a strange sense of priorities when Lord Reith’s heirs think stuff for our school children is less worth fighting for than Eastenders.

At today’s Showcomotion I had the good fortune to attend a session with Frank Boyd and Marc Goodchild. ‘Crossover Kids’ introduced me to their method for sparking off multi-platform developments amongst a random group of interactive and TV producers. Having brainstormed lists of platforms and genres we were randomly allocated two platforms and a genre and sent away to come up with something that worked for kids. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s excellent road map for creativity and ideas generation which led from ‘an opportunity’, via a widening miasma of ’seeking perspective’ then down into a narrowing funnel of ‘editing’, to ‘a thingy’. It was reassuringly low-tech and resulted in free and easy brainstorming.

Old people, especially the millions in the UK who don’t have access to a generous pension fund need playgrounds at least as much as they need retirement homes. More than ever at any previous time in their lives, they need opportunities to socialise widely and make new friends. One of the issues facing our society is the rise of a huge retired population. My mum was discussing the regeneration of our town centre and thinking about how we could place old people at the centre of the new market complex. We thought about how public spaces should have places where old and young can mix freely and cheaply, places that are accessible and right in the centre of the action. We talked about this while we sat in a crowded cafe and the unusual owner seated more people by the simple expedient of asking young people sitting on their own if they could shove up to make space for someone else - an old person. We then watched as the generations started to talk. It worked beautifully. We then attended a meeting where we were asked how we could improve the town centre. We raised the question of communal spaces, but the information gatherers couldn’t - or wouldn’t - get it. They wondered, would the generations want to mingle? What good could it possibly do? Maybe we could use the wonderful benefits of gaming to bring them together physically as well as in the virtual world. Eye Toy, Guitar Hero and Wii Fit could be the way forwards - I’m sure there are some old codgers who could deliver a polished rendition of Smoke On the Water to blow away the opposing 13-year olds.

I often agree that technology is leading to massive positive change in the way we learn and teach. The interview with Julian Baggini  reminded me that it isn’t necessarily so. However much the technology allows us to personalise our learning, and disseminate our teaching, fundamental things about learning remain the same and have done since Socrates. We don’t really learn anything until we are motivated to learn. Our motivation can still be destroyed and depressed by bad teaching - of which there have been many examples in elearning, just as there have in traditional learning. I have seen Gradgrind at work with a white board and a set of tablet PCs at least as often as I have seen him with a stick of chalk. And this, as Baggini’s interview reminds us, is because we still bring ourselves along with our technology, so the instinct to rubberneck unashamedly at an accident and then talk about it to our friends can be transformed into taking a picture of an accident on a mobile phone and sending it on to our friends. Our basic instincts remain. Online, just as offline, we see both altruism and mendacity, excellence and mediocrity. The quality of the educator, their ability to scaffold learning and to inspire and motivate is still the key to good elearning. The difference for learners is the possibility of much greater choice of providers, to find the right one for them instead of being tied to a sole provider. The need to be a great teacher is still essential.

Mscapes (mobile games, stories and tours triggered by your location) are great ways to develop Dorothy Heathcote’s ‘Drama in role; and ‘Mantle of the Expert’ techniques. 

She taught me that you could teach many areas of the curriculum through drama  - history, science, maths, geography. It is in many ways the antithesis of early online teaching methods with its fragmented bits of factual knowledge and its need to focus on the easily measurable. But role playing games have always had a touch of her wisdom in them, whether I’m beating up an enemy in GTA or remembering I have to play with the kids in Sims, I am choosing to step into the shoes of another character, to inhabit their world and to make the kinds of decisions they would make given the amount of available evidence. She was very keen on ‘available evidence’ as a way of focussing and then developing holistic learning. I think she would have liked the new moves to create Mscapes, where your mobile phone or other handheld device can feed timely information to you as you move through a physical landscape either within a school’s boundaries or on the site of a great historical or geographical event. Based on this incoming information and the developing scenario you can make choices about how to act or you can take that exciting step into interaction with another character in role, committing yourself to go with your instincts until the next piece of information arises, and learning something about why decisions might get made.  Two of the finalists in the BTween Exploding Narrative competition show this possibility. 

Both The Detective and Night Bridge demonstrate how drama in role could be developed using handhelds.

The drama of p-ause for thought

An Arts Council initiative at B-Tween is encouraging people to pitch interactive ideas. I like this deceptively simple one by ‘Catra’ for KS2 teachers

The idea seems to be that kids aged 7-11 receive footage and are encouraged to use it as the basis for a KS2 creative writing exercise. So it’s a bit like story starters from Teacher’s TV, a bit of film that can inspire investigation and creativity.

The TTV videos are much more structured as dramatic starters while Catra’s is much looser and purely location based, serving more  to provoke the imagination.

There is no particular reasons why it has to be an age-specific experience. Although it is a good way of generating creative writing or exploring genre or ‘other worlds’ in the primary curriculum it can also have application for all ages and for cross-curricular purposes. 

It could stimulate work in geography, or art. In one sense it’s a postcard propped up on the desk, but the delivery mechanism and its capacity to be moving, developing footage makes it so much more laden with possibility - receiving a random bit of footage, possibly away from your desk turns you into a detective immediately - why this piece of film? what could it mean’

The effect could be generated by teachers sending pictures to mobiles or PDAs, or, in the classroom, by using video on whiteboards or sent to individual workstations. If pupils have access to individual devices, handheld or not, it would be possible to let the pupils send a choice of video to their colleagues. You could have a chain reaction and have each participant sending a picture or video on for exploration. It’s a very simple but powerful idea for generating stories, poetry, or what the proposer calls ‘what-if’ writing.

I would like to use this method for teaching Drama. The late great Dorothy Heathcote’s teaching method was one in which pupils and teacher assumed the ‘mantle of the expert’ and created the story as they went along, with very loose prompts to react to. That teaching method would be enhanced by the ability to play off short video clips that would inspire new possibilities for participants to weave into their dramas.

Nice idea for History - or Geography?

http://just-b.com/btween/hp-labs/place-holder

This is a great idea for the teaching of history - it’s only possible if you have access to an existing asset, postcard, footage or graphuc, showing a scene from the past, which pupils can view on their hand held as they walk around a site. Excellent for historical monuments or locality studies but I would like to see this developed for Geography - if you could stand in a spot and see what it looked like last year, twenty years ago, a hundred years ago, five hundred, a thousand you could see both the change over time wrought by events e.g. The Industrial Revolution, and the consequences for the landscape.  

This looks like a nice bit of software to create an Eye Toy style experience

http://cam.playdo.com/

If you have a webcam set up you can try out these games which will give you an idea of how it might help.

The predecessor of the Wii Fit was the Eye Toy Kinetic, a ‘gym’ game for improving fitness. It was an important step but it didn’t get it quite right. Too complicated  to log in was one issue, repellently fit avatar trainers was another, but more importantly, it was designed for people who were already  fairly fit. This is a misunderstanding of its audience. Many creators continue to overlook the middle-aged audience they could harvest. The Eye Toy Kinetic’s routines require a level of agility seen in wiry teenagers, not fat middle-aged women who’ve forgotten, if they ever knew, how to exercise. But the Wii Fit has got it right. In the last four weeks I’ve watched some government morbidly obese statistics switch on to exercise because the Wii Fit helps you leap over the barriers to exercise without humiliation, finger-wagging or boredom. It manages to be motivational without ever being patronising. It gives frequent and timely feedback and it repays effort. I’ve seen a middle-aged man become competitive enough to beat a skinny teenager at hula hooping, and a woman who’s never run in her life jog for 60 minutes. This is when the technology becomes exciting, when it can incite this level of personal empowerment and change.