Sally McKeown has a glimpse of the cutting-edge ICT for learning available for BSF schools in Leicester
Professor Stephen Heppell opened Leicester's "Engage, Evolve, Excel" ICT innovation showcase by highlighting projects from around the world where children are remodelling their learning, moving from a content-based curriculum to a more open system where they learn how to learn.
His message was clear: schools won't engage, evolve or excel if they keep on with old models of learning that don't respect young people's skills and expertise.
Professor Heppell talked of the young people in Melbourne who created a rock band in just six weeks, learning from YouTube; and of a Scandinavian model for learning where pupils could spend a whole day or more on just one subject. He also showed a letter from a 14-year-old in the UK who had created an iPhone app for maths and has now completed three units towards a degree with the Australian Open University.
While so many cities have been a victim of BSF cuts, some Leicester schools are just embarking on their rebuild or refurbishment journey. Teachers, senior managers and local authority personnel turned out in force to see what was possible, and some of them were clearly struck by the sheer range on offer. We saw iPads, iPhones and gaming devices as well as robots, Tobii eye-controlled communication technology and a radio station.
Chris Wiseman, sales director for education at Northgate Managed Services which supported the event at the Tigers Stadium, was in a mood to celebrate because Leicester looks set to become Northgate's biggest partnership authority as the company is currently supporting some 1,300 schools in the UK. It will be a muti-million pound venture - the contract with Rushey Mead School is worth £2.5 million over five years for a "bespoke and sustainable" ICT service.
'Kids love PSPs and consoles – they are a totally familiar technology'
The schools and companies in the exhibition area set out to illustrate the three themes of the day. First to engage was Mark Sutton, assistant curriculum leader for design and technology from Soar Valley College, who was a speaker earlier this year at the Learning Without Frontiers conference. He used to work as a developer in gaming and 3D modelling and is keen to bring augmented reality into schools. “Kids love PSPs and consoles," he said. "They are a totally familiar technology so we bring them out of the home and into the classroom and kids forget they are learning."
Mark Sutton is also a keen astronomer so he started with solar system. Nothing like starting big! But having discovered how effective the handhelds could be, he moved on to share expertise with other staff, helping them create curriculum-relevant materials. An evolutionary timeline can be pretty dry but in Mark’s version there's multimedia so a dinosaur appears on screen. Then there are the interactive versions of the Gun Powder Plot and the Black Death.
One of most exciting projects was built around the Sherlock Holmes story, The Speckled Band. This is a very popular GCSE text but difficult for young people who are learning English or who do not enjoy reading. So Mark Sutton created a set of virtual clues and the students took the role of Sherlock Holmes. They had to reconstruct the story from what they had learnt and then read the text to find out if they had made the right guesses. The technology can put Semacodes on a printed book too so the pupils can easily link back from the text to the multimedia version.
Wireless networks have to cope with children bringing in their own devices
There was plenty on show to illustrate the theme Evolve. Northgate and its preferred partners have learnt a lot through working with the schools and seeing what learners want to do. For example, Siracom and Meru are supporting nearly one thousand UK schools with wireless networks and have had to find solutions to the challenges posed by some of the most ambitious schools. In some cases they have had to devise strategies to deal with the sheer density of use but they have also had to be quick thinkers when it comes to finding tailored solutions to the issue of more than 1,000 children all bringing in their own devices from home with a range of apps they are keen to use.
As BSF schools are coming on stream, Promethean has developed a 'softly softly' approach to introducing its software and equipment into classrooms. When a school is entering the long and detailed rebuilding or refurbishment process, Promethean seeds some of the classrooms with its technology. This has two advantages. First, the school learns to use the software and it becomes a regular part of its teaching toolkit. More important, the company keeps up a dialogue with the school and these discussions inform future product developments.
The company is particularly pleased with the response to its ActivExpression voting kits. Promethean's Alistair Hayward said, "It is ready and responsive technology which keeps every member of the class involved. The teacher can engage in dialogue with lots of learners instead of just two or three. In turn they can also can text questions and comments. One of the key questions for educators is, 'What does good engagement look like?' Our voting kits answer that question."
So then we come to the Excel theme. Courtesy of Moat Community College, I learnt quite a lot about programming robots using PICAXE and one of the first things I discovered is that projects which used to be part of a first year degree course are now quite routinely used as part of the Edexcel Diploma.
The engineering option is a fairly new venture for the school. The first group has just finished: with seven grade As, three Bs and two Cs. Nilesh Patel, one of the teachers responsible for the course said, "It has lots of variety with a mix of practical and theory. It offers interesting mini projects and it definitely plays to their competitive edge." Next year the school will start the course with Year 7s and he also hopes to get a Girls into Engineering project off the ground.
Fronter has allowed children out of school to stay in touch with learning
Moat Community College is a Science Specialist College and its virtual learning environment, Fronter, has helped to raise standards. Many of the pupils are from Indian and Somali backgrounds and may be absent from school on extended holiday or on pilgrimage. So long as they can access a computer, they can keep up to speed with the rest of their class. Nama had tonsilitis and was ill for many weeks but thanks to Fronter and the teaching materials he got an A* in his January exams. It proved especially useful when volcanic ash grounded the planes last year just before the summer series of GCSEs.
Gulbanu Kader teaches science and has been pivotal in rolling out Fronter across the school. Unlike other schools where a VLE has been brought in across the board, Moat Community College and Northgate looked at a phased approach where staff feel more ownership of their part of the service. Science teacher Subrina Johal feels that science has benefited a lot from the Fronter approach. There are obvious advantages for pupils: they can read up on a topic before the lesson and this is especially useful for children who have English as an additional language (EAL) or those who need more time to grasp the concepts. But it can also make teaching more consistent too.
The template pages have reduced planning time and instead of watching a 20-minute video pupils might now be offered a very carefully targeted 45-second video clip. The children are also actively engaged in their learning, sharing ideas and knowledge via the discussion forums. They can pose and answer questions and a teacher checks once a day to correct individual misconceptions and identify problem areas which will need a revision class.
"Children don't all learn in the same way," said Subrina Johal, "but our science pages contain everything they need from videos to software. They don't have to wander off to find the resources they need. All the searching has been done for them so they know exactly what they have to do and that is reflected in improved results.
So what did Professor Stephen Heppell think of the day? He toured the stands talking to staff and children and was interviewed on the English Martyrs Catholic School’s radio station. He told the audience, "Leicester has the best possible prototype for world learning. It is a fabulous global centre which has welcomed people from so many parts of the world. Not many places in Europe have so many connections around the world. That is such a valuable resource and so scarce. The city could teach many others about seizing global opportunities to maximise learning."
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See also "Warrington shows way in sharing school innovations"
Sally McKeown is a freelance writer and is an expert in special needs and inclusion
