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You’ve probably heard about the viral campaign to stop Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The video has been watched approximately 40 million times since it’s release on Monday. If not it’s here:
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
This swept through our school today, all the pupils were talking about it, most had watched it. That’s 11-16 year olds watching a 30 minute documentary about an African war criminal in their own time. Quite unique!
I’m sure that getting celebrity tweeters such as Rihanna on board will have had a lot to do with the viral success of this with young people. It’s a fascinating insight into the power of social media, and celebrity to influence the hearts and minds of our young learners.
Something of a backlash has been taking place online today against the group behind the project, their accounts have been scrutinised and their methods criticised.
The guardian has a nice summary, and also an interesting video with London schoolchildren.
Ethan Zuckerman has a long but well reasoned think piece about the whole affair.
As I left school, I’d not seen the video and wasn’t quite sure of the whole story. But the pupils were already talking about taking action.
It’s taken me a couple of hours to digest many sides of the story, and argument. I’m still unsure as to whether we should encourage our students to show their voice for this cause, or caution them away from it.
I doubt our learners are spending so much time looking at this from all angles. This is a crucial digital literacy skill, and a golden opportunity for us all to engage with students about casting a skilled critical eye over everything they read, watch or hear.
One thing is clear, it’s a brave new connected world and we have significant challenges ahead of us to equip our students with the skills they’ll need to flourish in it. It’s also a world with the tools to do great good, our students can all have a louder voice than we ever imagined.
Yesterday I posted an article looking at the teaching and learning features and requirements that IT provision supports in schools. I concluded that if funding can be made to work (and with creative budgeting it’s not as hard as you’d think) that 1:1 is the ideal model.
So that begs the question: What device?
We’ve looked at this in detail at my school, tested devices, read more reviews and reports than you can imagine. I’ve put together a list of technical and practical requirements that are desirable in the 1:1 device and graded various options against them.
Here’s my side-by-side analysis of the options:
As you can see, in my humble opinion, the iPad wins this race at the moment. Without wanting to spark a ‘fanboy’ induced series of arguments, I’m intrigued by others opinions on this. Have I missed any important criteria? I’ve deliberately not included a higher-spec laptop such as a Macbook Air or Windows Ultrabook. I know some schools around the world use these, but they really aren’t a financial option in the UK state funded sector!
Do you run a 1:1 program or are you planning one? What device are you thinking of?
There’s been much talk and excitement of late about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as the cure to all IT provision ills in schools. Whilst it certainly has a place and should be encouraged it’s not a replacement for other models at the present time. This post owes a lot to Ryan Bretag’s recent writing, a large chunk of it comes from work that has been ongoing in our school for the past year and hopefully will result in an exciting new provision model in the near future.
Before we look at where BYOD and other models fit into the provision of IT equipment for learning in our schools, we have to consider what it is all needed for.
When we looked at what we wanted our IT provision to support we concluded we need provision that:
Models
There are three potential models of IT provision that can be considered:
Current Blended Environment
Continuing a traditional mix of dedicated ICT suites, laptop trolleys and various other devices such as video cameras. Wholly funded by the school. It makes financial and practical sense to lease laptops rather than purchase them outright as has been done in the past. They have little or no residual value at the end of their life-cycles, leasing would ensure replacement, flatten budget requirements and reduce maintenance requirements. The number of devices would inevitably be lower in this model, one laptop trolley per department can only be used by one class at a time, often leaving several others without access for that lesson. Current value for money from this model is questionable. This model has little or no impact on learning outside of the classroom.
1:1
Every learner and every member of staff have access to their ‘own’ device. Either wholly funded by the school, or part funded by parental contributions this model is most suited to fulfilling the requirements above. It gives staff and students a uniform platform to build upon, greatly reducing the barriers to creative use of technology in the classroom. Allowing these devices to be taken home fulfills a need to promote learning outside of the classroom in conjunction with parents and the extended school community. Learners only spend 15% of their time within the school walls, it is imperative that we tap into some of the other 85% of their lives. This model is hindered by some funding and safety issues.
Supplemented with some traditional dedicated ICT suites and some specialist laptops for subjects such as Media, Music, Art & Computing.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
Learner’s own devices are used in the classroom, and at home for learning. These devices could include smartphones, tablets, laptops and handheld games consoles. By it’s very nature this model means a classroom will have a wide variety of devices with an equally wide variety of software, function and access to the web and other resources. Student devices are already allowed for use within our school. The majority of devices used are mobile phones and the predominant use is communication and internet research. BYOD is not a solution at a whole school level, particularly in areas of deprivation due to the obvious inequalities involved and the limited capability at present of many devices. This would have to be supplemented with the current blended model. Obviously there are cost advantages to encouraging this model. BYOD is a fantastic support mechanism to a wider school IT provision, but at least in the next 5 years, it can’t be seen as a replacement for other solutions.
Conclusion
If it is possible to fund a 1:1 device that is powerful and flexible enough to cover the majority of the desired outcomes then it is clear that it is the best solution. A successful 1:1 program has been shown in many schools to have impressive impact on the quality of teaching and learning and hence the outcomes of the learners in that environment. If wholly embraced, then there are also many cost savings that can result from a program, that help cover the increased capital funding requirements. The progress in tablet computers in particular are making 1:1 an increasingly attractive proposition.
What does your current school IT provision look like? What are your plans for the next 5 years? Have I missed anything obvious from our list of needs?
This was originally written as a think piece for the DfE for the http://schoolstech.org.uk/ site, think pieces weren’t used in the end so here it is!
Our young learners inhabit a world where communication and access to knowledge is being transformed by mobile devices. A world in which we as adults would be lost and frustrated without our own mobile devices. There are 81 million mobile devices connected to major mobile operators in the UK. 60% of 9-16 year olds in the UK access the Web from a mobile device. More than 1 for every man, woman and child in the UK. This excludes iPod Touches, Wifi iPads, Nintendo DSs etc..
I own a smartphone, tablet and tiny laptop. I have 24/7 access to tools, knowledge and people that was unimaginable even just a few years ago. I have learnt more through applying ideas picked up in discussion with colleagues all around the World via Twitter and their thoughts and experiences recorded on individual blogs than I ever did during my PGCE or any school-based CPD
Are we allowing our learners access to this amazing pool of knowledge and opportunities? Many schools need to re-align their thinking in three key areas if we are to make the most of this revolution:
What would learning look like if your students had increased access to learning opportunities through mobile devices? A pedagogical shift is needed to make the best use of the opportunities that are provided. My personal experiments have shown promise new pedagogical models such as Minimally Invasive Education and student led 20% time. Opportunities abound to collaborate with learners worldwide, revolutionise assessment, and to tap in to the 80% of learner’s lives spent outside of school, but alongside their mobile devices.
What are your experiences of using mobile technology and connectivity for learning? Where do you see the biggest opportunities and barriers?
I’ll leave you with words from Lord Puttnam at The Schools Network National Conference 2011:
“Technology has not as yet been able to make anything like the significant impact as has proved possible in most of the other fields of human activity”
“We need to develop a far better sense of the challenges [our students] face and we need to engage far more effectively with their world… to see the digital environment as they do, as transformative… as something that’s already changed the nature of how they go about their daily lives and indeed the way that they learn and can be helped to respond to learning.”
I attended Alan O’Donohoe’s excellent Hack To The Future event at Our Lady’s High School in Preston on Saturday with 13 of our students, many of whom are on our GCSE Computing course.
There were many highlights, in particular I should mention Freaky Clown and his tales of a hacker turned good. I won’t repeat his story of hacking a whole country in 7 seconds as that would be bad form, but safe to say it was engrossing stuff and our pupils were intrigued by his story.
I spent a good portion of the day talking with the team from the BBC who were there with their pre-alpha software that was the much rumoured and discussed BBC Micro 2.0. I’ve written about this previously when Keri Facer put out her call for a response on the topic.
I felt a tad smug as my guess that a 2012 BBC Micro project should take the form of a software only programming environment, hopefully outputing HTML5 results, turned out to be pretty close to the mark. Parmy Brar has been the lead developer on the project and kindly talked me through some of his work so far. They have taken Eclipse (something I’d not come across before) and forked it to begin creating a simplified programming environment for children. Programming could be done in HTML or Javascript and the package was being developed to be as forgiving as possible for the amateur coder. In it’s basic mode there are 3 panels, one for coding, a browser to output the code and the final one a project file explorer. As well as outputting complete HTML5 websites, the team have an Android App output that was in semi-working form, and eventually will be looking at iOS output.
Integral to the project are built in lessons that talk you through the basics of programming different projects (akin to taking a course on CodeCademy). Parmy talked me through the back end to this area where he is creating a tool that will allow anybody to create their own help file / course for others to use. If this project is really going to take off this will be crucial as they look to build a large community around the environment. Michael Sparks had put together some exercises for the young learners to have a go at for the day and I saw kids ranging from about 8 to 16 all enjoying their first stabs at programming. Response from teachers seemed a little mixed, I saw many who were as excited as me but I also heard some discussing what was one show as scary looking (these were Heads of ICT!). I think this shows what a long way we’ve got to go on the rebirth of computing in schools and in particular the huge skills gap that we have to overcome. Projects such as this are going to be crucial in skilling up the teachers as much as the learners.
My coding experience starts with BASIC on ZX Spectrums & BBC Micros, takes in a tiny bit of Visual Basic and then stops. My experience of the past month or two with CodeYear do suggest to me that Javascript seems like a great choice of language for us to teach in schools. I discussed this with a few of the BBC team and they were all big proponents of the language, pointing out that it is now ubiquitous across the world and that almost everyone has a device that can and does read it on a daily basis.
More details about the extended BBC Hello World Project should be up at http://www.bbchelloworld.co.uk/ soon (it was online this morning but has disappeared again at the time of writing). I’m excited to see how this one develops.
Sometimes a couple of ideas come together to form a little flash of inspiration. I’ve had a Pinterest account for a while but not really used it personally or thought of using it in education. A blog post from Mark Warner got me thinking though. Pinterest is a social site that encourages users to create a virtual pinboard of images and videos taken from across the web.
I’ve been a great admirer of Dan Meyer’s efforts to drag Maths teaching into the 21st Century and the real world. He’s been campaigning with ingenuity against typical textbook Maths problems. Particularly their over abstraction and removal of any space for thinking creatively about problems and making links between the real world and the maths thats being taught.
Dan’s TedX Talk is essential viewing:
His latest post sums up a lot of these thoughts well:
Original image ripe for mathematical questioning and modeling.
Mathematical abstraction.
Textbook example cutting out the important process above.
Dan’s work in this area started with his What Can You Do With This? (WCYDWT) series. A photo or video provided on his blog for readers to suggest Mathematical teaching ideas, inspirations, questions. He’s more recently been churning out 3 Act Tasks. These start with a piece of media (normally video) ripe for mathematical abstraction and modeling and some expected lines of questioning from students (Act 1). Act 2 involves some carefully crafted questions and perhaps an additional layer of information to enable investigation. Act 3 provides a solution. Have a look through them, there’s some great stuff there.
So put these two bloggers ideas together and what do we have? A Pinterest board of Mathematical inspiration:
Pinterest Mathematics Inspiration
I hope this can be a great way to crowd source some rich mathematical resources. If we can build this into a library of visually arresting media surrounded by great questions and potential problems and solutions I’ll be delighted.
If you’d like a Pinterest invite then please let me know in the comments, equally if you’d like to be added as a contributor to the board then I’d be delighted to oblige.
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BYOD and 1:1 are not the same -
Ryan Bretag nails some thoughts I’ve had recently on Bring Your Own Device as an IT provision in schools. It’s nice to have, and common sense in this day and age to allow learners to use their own devices in your classrooms and on your networks. But it’s no replacement or real alternative to running a 1:1 environment.
I was most impressed with the Desmos Graphing Calculator last year. It’s a powerful and user friendly graphical calculator.
It’s just been re-written from the ground up in HTLM5 which means it will work perfectly on an iPad or other tablet. It’s genuinely impressive and exciting to see what magic coders are starting to weave with HTML5.
Head over to https://www.abettercalculator.com/c on any device to try it out for yourself.
(Source: hackeducation.com)