I have a great respect for history teachers. As with English teaching, the amount of written work required in order to produce confident achievers in senior school exams is quite significant. The essential nature of “writing” makes for a hefty allocation of necessary marking and this can sometimes be overwhelming.  In essence then, I had to be very sure of why and what I was doing in taking “writing” time out of history lessons and replacing these with ICT activities. 

I have to admit that the first reason I chose to use web 2.0 in Key Stage 3 lessons was simply to add another, perhaps more fun and enjoyable way to consolidate the content of the lesson. I felt that the students must have grown a little tired of repeating similar written exercises in class and even though we had attempted role play activities, more was needed to stimulate continued enthusiasm.  I didn’t entirely expect that various web 2.0 tools would provide an enormous opportunity for assessment in learning.

The tools: Voicethread

Playing back the various students Voicethread comments during class discussion enabled those who hadn’t quite grasped the full meaning of the history cartoon to reflect on the contributions of students who had. This meant that I didn’t have to write long comments after each student’s work as they could see from other students whether they had written enough, and how and why their ideas needed to be developed further.

They read each others interpretations, assessments and descriptions and we were able to discuss correct internet research techniques. Several students had used a Google search to identify the phrase: “Taille, Impots et Corvee” and had then taken one of the first (incorrect) hits from a forum for their answer. In this instance I was provided with an excellent opportunity to correct it. 

It was quick and easy to collate a document of interesting and exemplary comments from the students’ writing, as well as to indicate that the French words were better researched individually, in order to ascertain their correct meaning. Although I assessed the cartoon work as I would a written paragraph, the best part of this assessment was not having to carry the student’s exercise books home, nor use a read pen across students’ work. 

I’ve always believed that a high incidence of what we remember is perceived through a visual. Bubblr is a very useful application for those times when image is everything. This is true for the study of Castles at Key Stage 3. I’ve yet to see a textbook which has real images of the defensive and attack aspects of a castle. In order for students to fully understand, I wanted them to produce their own pieces of work in this application. Simply by typing the various key words into a search. i.e. machicolation, trebuchet, portcullis, mangonel, crenellation, and so on, students were able to produce some good visual strips which were useful for consolidating the section of work. It enabled them to remember some quite tricky key words for their more formal assessments.  

Also at Key Stage 3, in Year 7, we’d spent a fair amount of time working with images and animations in ICT. The students had thoroughly enjoyed creating them, so I took this one step further. Instead of asking students to write a paragraph on the death of Thomas Becket, I asked them to present the events in animation format. For boys, this tale had everything they would want in a good story – soldiers (knights) two adversaries (a “good guy” and a “bad guy”) and a murder which was a little unclear in determining guilt or blame.  Their first tool of choice for this work was GoAnimate. I thoroughly enjoyed assessing what they produced and often laughed out loud at their unique presentations. (Select the images below to view the work.)

Two things stood out for me in terms of assessment and student learning; there was no way that the students could have copied and pasted chunks of text from internet pages and their understanding of events had to be clear in order to develop the animation. Another interesting factor was that I was quickly able to assess who hadn’t quite grasped the full details (sequence, cause and effect, motivation, conclusion) and was able to show a range of the finished work to the class, highlighting several animations which showed a sound understanding of events.   

In a similar vein, Year 8 students produced a short piece of work on Henry VIII and were given the option of presenting it in any format.  XtraNormal, Prezi or Glogster were amongst several choices. The focus was to be on producing a decent assessment of Henry VIII and not to get bogged down in the “frills” of the application. Again, reviewing some of the work with the class enabled us to assess who had a clear focus on Henry VIII’s strengths and failures.  Although Prezi could lend itself to “dumping” content from the Internet, it’s less likely than with familiar and equivalent Office tools. (Click on the images to see the work.)

I’ve included a video I made for a teachmeet on the tools and how I’ve used them in my lessons.

We’ve also worked on a new cross curricular project, which I hoped would enhance the production of empathetic pieces of work by Year 8 students. Several students found this type of work a very “high stakes” exercise and when asked to give a particular character’s perspective on the French revolution, they attempted to fit in as much factual content as they could. This wasn’t what I’d wanted, so I decided to try and use Crazy Talk animation, a knowledge of the events and people of the French Revolution and specific and relevant French phrases, in order to generate some very impassioned speeches. For this it was essential that I worked with my colleague Andrew, an MFL teacher. It’s been wondeful to team teach this exercise, as I’ve been included in the language development for the work. Observing how students relate and interact with another teacher has been really useful for my own professional development. Images for use in this project have been easy to collect and students have been very creative. I made a video of some of the responses which I thought, showed some excellent empathy.  
 

 We also used an application called Museum Box and as promising as it first appeared, it wasn’t as easy to assess student work. This was primarily because with all the other web 2.0 tools, a simple URL suffices as the link to the students’ contribution. This is not so with Museum Box. One has to trawl through vast lists of titles on the website in order to find the work. It also very easily lends itself towards those keen to copy and paste text. So, as fun as it looked, I was underwhelmed by the application.

There are many other web 2.0 tools which I could have used during the year. Certainly if I’d taught Key Stage 4 or 5 I’d be looking to develop work on wikis and blogs. However, it was extremely important that we did a fair amount of writing and assessment of work in more traditional ways. This is something which is obviously vital for our students to ensure good GCSE results. In all, I do still feel that besides being visual, interactive and fun, web 2.0 applications have real relevance in the history classroom. They open up the opportunity to share good work and to remedy that which is less so, comments from the teacher are not hidden in one exercise book, but passed on to the whole class.  I also rather like the way it enables not only the “star” students, but those who are creative and inventive, to display their work to a wider audience.

Bubblr, CrazyTalk, Museum Box, Prezi, VoiceThread, web 2.0

I’m always thrilled when I come away from a conference or meeting with the requirement to revisit some of my prior thinking and planning.  The Frog 2010 Conference did as much. As usual, Frog looked after its 700 supporters very well. The event was free and in an excellent venue with superb catering. (Let’s get the important things out of the way first!) I’ll skip over the early dancing on stage to “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor and cut to the first few speakers.

Gareth Davies, MD of Frog was essentially the most interesting. A bit of his sales talk first; Frog is the most popular VLE in the UK, is in 10% of UK schools, (is that good?) have increased their staff from forty to eighty and is “cool” and “flexible”. That aside, I know that many have questioned what Frog has produced since it launched Frog 3 over a year ago. Gareth delivered some answers. Firstly, Frog Primary, which I rather like the simple look of, has a more streamlined interface than the secondary version and is aimed at enabling real ease of use amongst teachers. I do believe that this will be the case. It has a “feed” element, i.e. a teacher on a trip can post a message that he’s going on a farm visit and this would appear in the class, or school feed. He can then later update the feed with images so that those back at school can experience the trip as if they were there. Teachers can easily create class group pages and students will be immersed into a classroom environment where notices, images, work and a collaborative wall are displayed.

FrogPrimary also facilitates a wiki environment, where a teacher can create an activity and get children to collaborate by assigning groups to work in tabbed page areas. (Frog wikis are built into the class page with a “drag and drop” facility.)  Teachers and students can use Frog design templates to individualise their class and personal pages.   I must admit that I wondered why a WordPress MU blog couldn’t do similar, but I do know that working with the Frog “drag and drop” environment is a lot simpler than working via a dashboard. This alone might get teachers on board quicker – if the price is right.  

Things get a little grey for me here as I’m not a geek or technician. However, I’m sure Gareth said that Frog has developed its own APPS, and using Netvibes Universal Widget API (UWA), have opened up the Frog Developer Environment to enable schools to develop their own widgets. There are currently over 200,000 widgets available. (Where?) These will be sold in an APP-type store. It’s still all very new, but there was great excitement over the news that Frog was releasing its API and encouraging its schools to develop widgets for sale in an iTunes - type APP “store”.

Prices for widgets have not yet been established, but could be free, a pound, five pounds, or hundreds of pounds, depending on how time intensive developers had found the process. The thought is that if schools are paying their developers to produce widgets, then they should reap the reward. Fair enough, but I can’t help feeling that a Moodle community would work as hard and share its knowledge – for free.  I asked if there would be help files or documents for those wanting to have a go at the development environment, and the response was that training courses would be available from September 2010, that Frog will hold workshops at schools so that staff can work with the developers, and that Frog can build widgets at a schools request. I presume that all of these would cost.

One of Frog’s new partners, Softlink, a library management service (Oliver) gave a presentation on the four APPS which they’ve developed for use within Frog. These included overdue information for a student and a search facility. Gareth said that more than 150 companies were keen to produce SCORM packages and widgets for the Frog LP. 

The next speaker was a very pleasant gentleman, but I’m not sure that Lord Stewart Sutherland’s message was entirely useful for an audience of people who work in Information Technology. The talk concentrated on, “how the Web is transforming life” and “education is the engine for change in society and schools must reflect this.”  I think we were supposed to get some insight into current government education direction and policies, but this was not forthcoming. Perhaps an unfair topic to present on, given the timing.    

The head and deputy from Corsham School spoke at length about their core school policy, “Creativity”. There wasn’t much about Frog here, and as a Visual Arts College, I would have expected creativity to be a key element anyway. However, they did produce some interesting ideas and amazing student work. The head’s approach was to ensure that his school had the same feel as a Junior School – bright and engaging. Two things which I took away from this presentation was their idea to use magnetic paint on a wall instead of having an IWB, and to paint the magnolia walls in the schools corridors in bright colours, with relevant subject murals outside academic specific teaching rooms. Brilliant!

Cramlington Learning Village presented on their growth from an intranet to a VLE. Much like Ninestiles School, Cramlington has had no shortage of help with getting their LP to its current exceptional state. How fortunate. I think they’re both Frog beta schools and have a lot of direct Frog support. Cramlington had three web developers and a project manager to assist their development.  Nonetheless, their products are excellent. Si Brown spoke about developing “If” statements to deliver specific notices to students and to remove them from the social network element of the LP, if they had broken the AUP. However, he was also quick to point out that they believe firmly in educating errant students through elearning principles. They are developing a quiz which students have to pass before being allowed back onto the social network aspect of the LP, once they’d had use withdrawn.  They’re also developing a “Learning to Learn” profile for each student, (what type of learner each student is) which will be added to the student’s environment on the LP. Teachers will also have access to these.

It appeared that Cramlington’s and Ninestiles’ widget development could signal the end of a need for a separate MIS. They copy their MIS data into Frog and assessment, progress and various other data elements can be pulled into a widget and dropped into areas of the Frog LP. An interesting one to watch. Their cashless catering is also in a Frog widget. Cramlington have purchased single sign on from their current MIS provider, SERCO CMIS. For me, one of their most interesting ideas was the production of an in house, termly Teaching and Learning magazine. I’ve wanted to get a TeachMeet going at our school, but time is tight. An online or printed magazine whereby we can showcase various academic departments’ use of ICT would be perfect.

Ninestiles disappointed me again. (They had done so last year.) It was clear that they were showcasing the Frog Developer Environment. Was this simply Frog presenting their business model through a willing school? There was a heavy Frog contingent seated at the back of the room and questions were deferred here.  I couldn’t help feeling that both Cramlington and Ninestiles had more money to throw at the development of their LP’s than most of us – no, all of us, and that what they were showing wasn’t a realistic achievement for all. But, perhaps I’m being unfair.

 The best talk (for me) came from a young Director of ICT, James Chester from Swan Valley Community School. Perhaps this is because he has the same “angle” as I do on the strategy, implementation, development, support and drive of the LP. With two feet firmly on the ground, no wiz bangs, exciting web developments, nor gimmicks, he accurately delivered how his school had measured the impact of their LP on learning and their environment. If his presentation lands on the Frog site – get it.

Unfortunately, one has to choose workshops at the Frog Conference, but it’s too much going to three or four presentations anyway. I missed Costello College, Attleborough and others, who from looking at the #frog10 Twitterstream, were all very good. And did I find that elusive evidence that the Frog LP can increase A* – C grades? Of course not. The best I got was that Frog’s internal logs show increased use of relevant academic pages by students after school hours.

(Images from Frogtrade.)

Conference, Frog, LP, VLE

“It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.” Dinah Maria Mulock

It’s not always easy to involve colleagues in the latest teaching developments in ICT. Time is tight and many are actively involved at every spare minute with extra curricular activities.

I’ve set about trying every which way I can, to snatch busy teachers’ time and to prompt it with a response towards the use of engaging and innovative ICT. We have found that one of the simplest strategies has been to provide a very visual display of the tools and utilities we’re encouraging staff to try. The thinking was that not all teachers are as constantly bombarded with the applications which frequent ICT users are, and that the amount of time they would be accessing their computers each day would also be rather less. We came up with the idea to create large Motivator posters to display on the ICT board in the staff room. Next to these we have wall “pockets” complete with ScreenSteps instructions of “How to” and handouts on each application’s usefulness in the classroom. We have also printed out Tom Barretts “Interesting Ways” for use here as well. (One copy of each to peruse.) The posters are also to reinforce the skill, utility or web tool contained in the weekly Elearning bulletin. I thought I’d share some of the posters we (and largely our ICT teaching assistant Sam Culshaw-Robinson) have produced.    

There isn’t much new in the approach we’ve used, but there are several other strategies we’ve been using to increase the support for innovative use of ICT in the classroom:

• A weekly e – bulletin newsletter
• Meetings with the academic HOD & the whole department to discuss subject related software, ideas for ICT integration & the identification of specification opportunities for the use of ICT.
• Lunch time and after school ICT CPD which includes the use of basic application skills, web 2.0 tools and utilities to aid teaching, learning and organisation, and the use of basic hardware such as scanners, plotters and visualisers.
• Booking individual sessions with myself and the ICT Teaching Assistant to improve ICT skills and capabilities.
• Creating opportunities for a TeachMeet style ICT ‘show & tell’. 
• Creating a questionnaire to identify needs for skills training and to highlight any strengths and weaknesses of IT resourcing. 
• Expanding the use of the VLE.
• Ensuring that the skills taught in discrete ICT enable innovative use of ICT in teaching and learning.

(Acknowledgements to Russel Tarr for his Random Pupil Picker image)

ICT cpd, time, Web 2.0 tools

I recently recommended Write Online from Crick software to our school Learning Support co-ordinator. I’d seen it at BETT and thought it a very good product. On a global level I still do, however, I’ve had a little more time to look closely at the product and have been rather surprised by some of its inadequacies. I took a piece of creative text from a teenage dyslexic and compared the results in both Microsoft Word and Write Online.

In the first sentence the word “replayed” was seen as incorrect by Write Online and correct by MS Word. Write Online gave limited optional answers, neither of which the student considered of use. Write Online didn’t display incorrect punctuation, but Word did, and Word also highlighted possession for the word “mother” which Write Online didn’t flag up at all. Neither application picked up capitalisation of the word “Stubborn” in the middle of a sentence.

MS Word indicated that sentence structure of several sentences was not grammatically correct and that these needed attention (as seen by the section underlined in green) – Write Online did not. Neither application had a clue what to do with the word “rotummed”, only providing accurate alternate answers for the word “covered”. Write Online wanted the piece to change “scrunched” to “crunched” even though the online Oxford dictionary defines “scrunch” as “…crush or squeeze into a compact mass”, which is entirely acceptable in the given context.

Neither Word nor Write Online corrected “impatience” effectively. Write Online simply offered the option of removing the “s”.

Only Word correctly gave alternatives for the word “imagine”, whereas Write Online fell well short of an acceptable option for that sentence. Word also came up trumps with underlining the incorrect grammar of “…the leafs” when Write Online didn’t flag it up – again.

MS Word consistently dealt with grammar and spelling far better than Write Online. This is a pity as the voice playback; prediction tool, mindmaps and wordbar are all extremely useful as learning support tools for word processing. Write Online’s free resource wordbars contain key words from many different subjects and the predictor is extremely useful for developing vocabulary when one is typing up a piece of work.

For those reasons, I’d stay with my previous recommendation for Write Online in a learning support environment, although I’d probably not recommend its spelling and grammar check facility.

(Write Online Wordbar – Literacy – Descriptive Writing – Powerful Adjectives.)

No tags

The “jump” from older versions of MS Office (98 – 2003) to Office 2007 was a rather big one. Drop down menus were replaced by a tabbed ribbon, the File option – where documents began and ended,  was replaced by an Office button and emphasis was placed on a more visual interface in order to increase usability of the various tools. After a very frustrating start for most, it became obvious that 2007 was actually a very handy graphical product. Choose the option to insert a table, or make adjustments to an image and the difference with this new Office version was marked.  The option to save as a PDF from Word was a bonus, as was the facility to preview many of the tool options.

I was shown MS Office 2010 at BETT by a very bored and disinterested gentleman. He briefly demonstrated the UI and when asked the specific question, told me that the “Academic” ribbon tab in Word was something new. After this uninspiring start, I personally gave the MS Office 2010 beta a turnip for its lack of initiative in design. Neither surprises nor gasps of glee here. However, I’ve recently downloaded and trialled the 2010 version and I have to admit that there are several features in the new suite which I quite like.

Firstly, this is not a comprehensive overview of the suite, Google can do that well.  But, having used it for a few weeks, I’ve noted several new features I’m beginning to use regularly.  As far as I can make out, there is an “academic” version of the new MS Office, but I suspect this relates to licencing and not to the structure of the tabbed ribbons, as I had anticipated. The Office 2007 button or orb has been replaced by the File option again and a few tools have been moved around. Still, it’s a much quicker learning curve than previously, because not that much has changed. More notable are several enhanced features.

Those which I find I’m using regularly are the picture formatting tools in Word. The option to make various corrections and even remove an image background, without a separate image editor, is extremely valuable for class presentations.  Simply by selecting the image and then hovering over various image editing options, one can preview the picture as it will appear when complete. I recently needed to brighten up the blues, reds and gold in several images for a lesson which included medieval manuscripts. The copied images were dull and didn’t really emphasise how beautiful the original images might have been.  

I also wanted students to colour a picture in bright, religious medieval colours and I was able to adjust an image’s contrast and colour to provide a picture suitable for students to complete the task.

The “Academic” tab which the gent at BETT had shown me comprised a set of Maths tools and I believed that this was a new feature in Word. I hunted high and low for it in my downloaded version and became increasingly frustrated at not being able to do so. Whilst reading a little more about the newest version of Office, I discovered that 2010 has the facility to edit the ribbon tabs and I was able to construct a Maths tab with tools of my choosing. 

This means that ribbon tabs can be customised to provide tools which a user makes more frequent use of, all in one place. More about this feature here.

Outlook has had some important changes, some of which I’m still getting my head around. I’m sure that one is able to change this in the “View” option, but the grouping of emails according to subject first and then chronological order initially threw me.  What Microsoft labels “Conversation Groups” is a powerful feature and it does mean that emails should have a very clear subject headline. 

No subject header means that ALL emails which are without a subject line are grouped together with the latest email first and all previous emails, however old they are, in the same group.  This is quite confusing if emails from several weeks back suddenly “reappear” in the inbox. However, a benefit of conversation emails is that if one labels the subject line well, all responses and even ones own sent mail will be grouped together. A drop down arrow allows one to collapse or expand that conversation and allows for quick deletion. More about this can be read here.

There are several things to be aware of with this beta version of MS Office, I still have Win XP on my laptop and it loads unbelievably slowly.  However, colleagues have downloaded the MS Office beta onto Windows 7 and the Office suite flies on loading. Time to upgrade methinks. I’m also not delighted about the removal of the option to save to PDF from Word. Finally, I’m not sure whether it’s the beta or XP which is “losing” addressees from my emails and therefore not delivering them, or what exactly is responsible for dumping emails from our Head into an “unread” folder (!!) before they land in my main inbox. This can’t be good – surely?

All of the above aside, when the full version is released in June, I’d recommend the upgrade. 

(Outlook Conversations image sourced from getset2010.com)

Office 2010 beta

Take twelve weeks, a group of sixteen year olds, add in a course which should be relevant and free, has interesting and appropriate content, and the programme is complete.

It’s not a case of struggling to find what to include, its struggling to find what should be left out which provides a dilemma. Avoid programming languages and you displease those with programming flair, eschew graphic manipulation and we alienate budding artists, steer clear of work on advanced features of MS Office and possibly leave students frustrated with their ability to present work in a more professional format.

It would be good to canvas students’ views on what they perceive should be included in a “relevant “course, but this might also bring in as many opinions as people. So, I’ve come up with something. It hopefully steers a middle line, enables those with or without specific IT skills, fulfils the germane requirement and can be completed in a short period of time. Its not intended as in depth coverage, is still very rough in outline and in need of several revisions. Opinions on it are welcome, however, here it is:

1. Create a course wiki and sign up all students. Explain the nature of wikis and that each student will contribute by writing full summaries of everything covered in the course. They will be encouraged to investigate further, any area which interests them and state whether they thought the section of work was relevant, or not – and why.

2. Social Networking:  i) Facebook. Students are adept at using this tool, so it would be pointless to explore it in the way they currently use it.  However, discussing digital reputation, applications which are used for marketing and advertising, how businesses, organisations, education and societies such as alumni use it to reach communities and how successful these are, could be useful for students. This could be pertinent as students enter a more corporate world and become more aware of social networking beyond the social.

3. Social Networking:  ii) YouTube and LinkedIn. Both of these platforms originated as something other than what they are now. YouTube was a video sharing platform and LinkedIn a professional network which built on relationships within trusted circles. Nowadays both offer more; YouTube has a personal profile page, called a “channel page” and enables “friending.” LinkedIn groups enable more personal associations based on interests, rather than those on a purely professional level.

4. Social Networking: iii) Twitter. Most students have the opinion that Twitter is “rubbish”; this is an opportunity to study why Twitter has become such a powerful medium. Example:  “Five ways to use Twitter for good.”  

5. Blogging with Blogger. It stands to reason that blogging would lead on from Twitter. How else is the 140 character post best expanded? What is the purpose of blogging? Any blogging tool can be used here, but the ease of Blogger provides a good springboard.

6. Blogging with WordPress. The point here being that students who are keen to blog would be taught how to sign up with a host company, secure a site name, learn more about plugins, manipulating blog content and become comfortable with either html or CSS.

7. Further Collaboration and Management Tools:  Google. Why should students collaborate? Are there benefits to collaborating? What are management tools and how could they assist students with planning?

8. More collaboration and Management Tools:  Flash Meetings , RSS and Feedburner, Delicious , Diigo, Digg, StumbleUpon and Box.net.  An exploration of the usefulness of crowd sourcing tools, tools which enable efficient delivery of new and relevant items, tools which enable easy tagging and storing of files and data, and the benefit of video conferencing.

9. Web 2.0 Learning Tools: A discussion of what web 2.0 tools are and why and how they compare to traditional word processing and other presentation tools. Included here will be a section relevant to using the tools responsibly in education. I.e. Edmodo, PrimaryPad, Wordle, VoiceThread, Animoto, Bubbl.us – to name but a few.

10. Gaming in Learning: How those in education are using commercial off-the-shelf games to extend  learning. E.g. Myst, Zoo Tycoon, Harry Potter, Endless Ocean Wii.

11. Copyright, plagiarism and creative commons: Any student working in an online environment should be aware that there are tools which educators use not only to detect poor online behaviour, but also to stay fair of the law. These might include: Flickr, Plagiarism Checker, and TinEye.

12. Collation and discussion. Summaries completed on the wiki.  Discussion of content coverage and suggestions for improvement for the next year’s course.

Image sourced from theirhistory

IT skills, key stage 5, relevance

“Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first. “ ~ Frederick B. Wilcox

This week I’ve decided to try something new with my eleven year old students. For the last twenty minutes of a lesson, I won’t be answering any of their questions on the ICT work we’ve been doing during the one hour and twenty minute lesson. Harsh? I don’t believe so. Controversial? Perhaps.

The eleven and twelve year olds some of us are currently teaching are dubbed as members of the Net generation; youngsters with unique characteristics who could have a significant effect on education and business in the future. These are the students who have purportedly spent a large chunk of their early years at a computer. They’re supposedly confident, capable and explorative users. Through various discussions we’ve had in class, I’ve learnt that my students definitely are competent computer users in their own homes.

So, what happens when they get into a formal environment like the computer classroom?  Why do these same youngsters appear timid, reluctant and uneasy about technology? A number of students are loathe to select a “yes” or a “no” option when a message window appears and several will be rendered almost immobile until I tell them which option to choose. Some are nervous to select logical, yet random menu items in order to see if a particular function is the one which they were looking for. Where are the students from the oft repeated statement who will, “…click on anything”? Is their inertia partly because they’re not reading the onscreen message?

 Legend has it that students are, “…so much better than adults with computers”. “Fearless”, they’re called.  But, are they? We’re a good fourteen weeks into the school calendar now – the students know me and I’ve got to know more about them as well. It’s not unfamiliarity with me as the teacher then. I’ve looked carefully at my teaching style, at the way in which each of my lessons progresses, and tried to assess what I can change in order to create more adventurous and, in my eyes, more competent computer users.

In my classroom therefore, my plan is to create an environment where for the last twenty minutes, students will be encouraged to take chances – to face up to what to them might be risky decisions. I want them to gain the confidence to learn that they can resolve a situation if the option they’ve chosen is an incorrect one. In this way the hope is that I’ll have made some progress towards creating a learning environment which will allow the Net genners to truly begin to grow.

What do others do?

(Image sourced from breakingpointsystems.com)

ICT, Net Genners, students

And why shouldn’t he? With many educators wishing to explore the value of new technologies, our head is also keen to see whether a tool like Twitter could be effective on a number of different levels. It’s early days yet, but it’s clear that he’s already getting incredulous, yet delighted responses from students who are telling each other that the head wants to ‘…communicate with us!’  The fact that he even knows that an interactive social medium such as Twitter exists, has generated a big ‘thumbs up’, with boys tweeting that it has made him appear more approachable (as opposed to busy, busy, busy). 

Besides wishing to engage with other senior leaders and build up a PLN, our head wants to use Twitter and his blog as tools to communicate with parents and current and past students. All of this may take time to build up into a successful venture, but it’s a solid first step.  I don’t say ‘bold’ because the number of Senior Leaders using social media appears to be growing. Miles Berry (former Head of Alton Convent Prep School) in his ‘Thriving Too’ blog interview, suggests why this could be so. His assumption is that blogging and engaging in social media could be a generational thing. ‘It’s only now that Tapscott’s N-Geners are moving into headship.’  (Don Tapscott: Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation)

Any educator launching into the world of social media has to know its risks. We think we do at our school. For advice, our head has asked Jose Picardo, a well-known Head of MFL, and myself.  Jose uses several blogs, Twitter, Edmodo, and Flickr to develop a range of educational experiences in and outside of the classroom, as I do. We have both dabbled in Facebook; have given it credit for being a successful social networking tool on a more personal level, but found better tools for in class use.  Although Kevin has asked our opinions, he has some pretty strong ideas of his own as to how he’d like to use the different social media, and has jumped straight in without a backward glance. Yet even though we like to think we’re fairly good users of social media, we’re not careless with it. As with other schools, we have factored in the use of social networking into our ICT policies and have accepted that some networks leave educators far more vulnerable than others.

 One evening, after reading several posts on Twitter, it was mentioned that school Acceptable User Policies were declaring that all contact with students on social media was to be avoided.  I followed this up by asking my PLN what they thought of students following teachers on Twitter, or of friending students on Facebook. The replies were many and varied. Teachers, who wanted a free and open medium to use in the classroom, felt strongly that the medium which enabled contact with students was the one which students used frequently i.e. Facebook. They eschewed any real ‘friendship’ with the student, but preferred the medium for its ease of use and effective contact. Many others warned off all use of social media in an educational setting, and I’d admit that they have fair reason to do so.

There are strong cases for and against its use. Most important is where the very public nature of social media spotlights professional conduct, where it is used as a vehicle for bullying, or presents us with evidence which we might need to flag up or report to a higher authority. Teachers worry that their natural way of conversing; expressing themselves after a frustrating day, or humorous posts about their personal life could compromise their position at work and result in a telling off from a superior. Yet we teach children to mind themselves online. Within reason, do we not need to consider the same? My belief is that as more students and NQT’s are educated about their use of social media, so the number of incidents which have resulted in censure will become less.

 It was not only social media’s public side which we debated at our school, but the facility to directly communicate with a student outside of a ‘walled garden’ environment. Twitter, Edmodo, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, all enable direct one to one communication with a student outside of the gated community – our internal network. We had a choice to make; instruct staff that they must not (we decided that ‘should not’ was not worth the paper it was written on) put themselves nor the school in a compromising position by using any social media, or choose those media which we felt allowed us free and effective communication with large numbers, on a reduced risk basis. We believe that Twitter and Edmodo fit that purpose.

So Twitter is not blocked at our school and we’re not afraid of what we say online. Careful, yes, but no more than any professional would be. As for students following us and finding out a little more about us as people? Well, it comes with a hearty dose of educational information as well.  I really liked the comment Pat Parslow made on a blog post by Josie Fraser, ‘Should you friend your students?’  He said, ‘How sad it is that “we” don’t think teachers should be able to share any of their personal lives with their pupils. My best teachers shared at least some elements of themselves with us, and our education was, I believe, richer for it. Apart from anything else, it helped with learning how to negotiate boundaries and what was, and wasn’t, inappropriate to share. Frankly, I think it is hardly surprising that more recent generations seem to have more difficulty with social skills if teachers really aren’t able to model this sort of thing for them. ‘

Kevin Fear is Head at Nottingham High School and is @kevinfear; Jose Picardo is @josepicardo; Pat Parslow is @PatParslow; Josie Fraser is @josiefraser and Miles Berry is @milesberry on twitter.

Picture sourced from FL4Y under Creative Commons

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