Creating a vision for technology in education

The editorial for Digital Learning 1.1

In August of this year, Education Secretary Damien Hinds put forth a challenge to the tech industry to ‘launch an education revolution’.¹ Along with promise of funds to get more schools connected to ultrafast broadband, he placed a call for educators, government and technology innovators to forge a strong partnership which will ‘ultimately support and inspire the learners of today and tomorrow’.

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      string(316) "... other one would be in the area of mixed commercial reality. Both of those I think are already in action. One area of virtual reality technology that is really making a difference is in assistive technology. We have an immersive reading app that makes it easier for people with dyslexia ..."
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      string(3863) "of that work is distributed to everybody quickly and easily. And then the final thing you see with these technologies is that teachers actually are saving time because they’re actually marking in real time, during the lesson, and assessing work as it is done.So, rather than taking books at the end of the lesson and going home to mark them and then return them later, this can now all be done in real time, giving students timely feedback and making sure the teacher doesn’t end up with all the work at the end. One Step at at a Time In general, we’re not looking at the problems and trying to come up with the ‘next big thing’. We have a big investment ethic, and we see educating the community of teachers that we do have as being the most helpful thing we can do at the moment. We’re taking all the technology options and trying to set up bite-sized CPD. I think that one of the things that I’ve observed with schools that have made incredible progress is that they make changes slowly, addressing what feels to them like small, bite-sized chunks. We think that conservative actions can really make a big change. One of our primary schools has started to give over a chunk of their staff meeting every week and are seeing great results. For schools that are finding it hard to incorporate technology, they typically think of it as a huge big problem that requires a huge amount of money and full retraining of staff. To me it’s really about how to help people just get started on something. If someone sets out to learn how to use technology in education they’re setting themselves up for failure. It’s an impossible and gargantuan task now. The Future is BrightIn terms of the future potential of technology, we’re already definitely starting to see two areas that are extremely exciting and have huge potential. One would be in the area of artificial intelligence. I think the other one would be in the area of mixed commercial reality. Both of those I think are already in action. One area of virtual reality technology that is really making a difference is in assistive technology. We have an immersive reading app that makes it easier for people with dyslexia and with other literacy issues to read, and we launched a version of that for virtual reality. So wonderful. It’s really cool that you can take away all of the noise on the page, you can choose the font that’s easy for you to read, and the the color that’s the easiest for you to read on. You can break words into syllables, you can hover over a word and you can see a picture of that word. You can translate individual words into different languages or even the whole text. We can label nouns and verbs and things like that, and it’s a really powerful way to help content become more accessible to people that maybe find it a little bit harder to read. And the other thing that the teachers absolutely love about this is that it looks the same for every student. Since everyone gets to interact with the content in however they like, no one is singled out. Now someone might change the background because they like it to be a certain colour, but someone else might change it because that actually helps them read the words more effectively. And with these changes, nobody knows, since it’s not one person being singled out to use special glasses or a special device. I’m really very proud of the work that Microsoft is doing because it is opening up access for people who have historically found it more challenging and we’re seeing great progress in schools that are embracing the new technologies and getting the ongoing training and support from us to transform their teaching.Chris Rothwell is the Director of Education for Microsoft in the UK. "
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Digital Learning

Improving Access and Inclusivity One Step at a Time

8 Aug 2019

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      string(398) "... Stern is the Dean of Education & Theology at York St John University. ReferencesAbbott, C (ed) (2002) Special Educational Needs and the Internet: Issues for the Inclusive Classroom. London: RoutledgeFalmer.Rheingold, H (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access. Cambridge, Massachusetts ..."
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      string(3594) "religious and community activities going on. Yell.com, upmystreet.com, multimap.com and earth. google.com were used to map routes, to find aerial photographs and to find the names and addresses of organisations. The pupils also used company websites to write or email people to arrange a visit. By following the swans, the pupils were using computers to discover their city in which they lived and the people who lived in it. They were also covering about half the school curriculum – geography, design and technology, citizenship, history, RE and English. In the original version of the project, Pollard has a fifth swan, able to fly anywhere in the world. This is a fine opportunity for global work and could involve use of the international resources at British Council Schools Online (schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org). This global discussion could be further developed through environmental sites such as the RE and Environment Programme’s reepinfo.org, the Global Village project at www.100people.org, and the ‘measure your impact on the planet’ exercises at myfootprint.org and footprintnetwork.org. Saying Goodbye So, we’ve said hello to new people, and have met them where they live. Time to say goodbye. What would you do if you knew when you were to die? The remarkably unpleasant ‘Death Clock’ at deathclock.com asks health questions, calculates the respondent’s life expectancy, and tells them when the day they are most likely to die on. Despite its unpleasantness, teachers tell me its impact on moral education can be remarkable. There are many other ‘what if’ activities your class can enjoy. How would you feel if you were working as a ‘tied labourer’, a modern slave? antislavery.org provides case studies of young people currently forced to work as slaves. Their stories inspire vivid moral education classes. The Moksha Chitram board game has endless uses. The game was developed in India to train children to escape from the cycle of rebirth and achieve nirvana. It was copied by Christian missionaries – in the UK, we know it as ‘snakes and ladders’. The game can be used to help pupils reflect on the ultimate end of life. Each pair of pupils should be given a 100 square grid with each square numbered. They should position clip art pictures of snakes and ladders on the chart. In pairs, pupils should consider what they want to achieve in life, and represent that in a document with text, pictures or audioclips. The students should then think about what might hinder them from achieving their goals, and attach a file describing each hindrance to each snake. Next the students should think about some of the things that might help them to achieve their goal, and produce a document or file describing each form of help. These are the ladders. Edit a ladder onto the board, stretching or shrinking the clip art to get the correct length of ladder. Then hyperlink the ladder to the file. You can even play the game using an electronic die. Professor Julian Stern is the Dean of Education & Theology at York St John University. ReferencesAbbott, C (ed) (2002) Special Educational Needs and the Internet: Issues for the Inclusive Classroom. London: RoutledgeFalmer.Rheingold, H (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus. Stern, L J (2009) Getting the Buggers to Do Their Homework (2nd edition). London: Continuum."
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Computing and Coding

Soul and Chips

22 May 2018

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      string(340) "... this challenge on its head and roll out a comprehensive digital strategy. Our aim was to be the sector leader when it comes to using technology to overcome key challenges including pupil outcomes, access and inclusion, training and CPD, and staff wellbeing and workload.We started this journey three years ..."
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      string(5650) "For educators, it has always been our duty to prepare our pupils for their next steps – what that means and what that looks like has evolved over the years. We had the industrial revolution, the post-modern era, and now we’re living in a technologically based society that seemingly transforms everything in the blink of an eye, from how we communicate to how we travel to how we learn.Focusing on strategyWhen it comes to digitisation, it isn’t uncommon for technology to be introduced to schools in an ad hoc manner, usually as individual resources that either support pupils or support teachers. Typically the products come from a range of suppliers that are often not compatible with each other, resulting in increased workload due to issues like onboarding and teething problems. This becomes an even bigger issue at scale as a Trust, as these issues limit collaborative opportunities between academies, not to mention the inefficient use of funds.At Greenwood Academies Trust, we wanted to flip this challenge on its head and roll out a comprehensive digital strategy. Our aim was to be the sector leader when it comes to using technology to overcome key challenges including pupil outcomes, access and inclusion, training and CPD, and staff wellbeing and workload.We started this journey three years ago, led by our Chief Information Officer Stephen Sanderson, with a vision in mind. We wanted the strategy to be scalable, secure, for everyone, transparent, available, and clear value for money. We also identified four strands of work that we needed to support: an Education Network (for teaching and learning resources), Business Systems (operations systems), Innovative Educators (CPD) and an Analytics Platform (data management).We started from a low baseline. For example, each Academy had separate, and often local, IT systems and approaches to using IT. Technical infrastructure, management information, learning environments and technical support were disparate across the Trust. The systems did not ‘talk’ to each other, there was no single sign-in and the result of so many different systems being operated simultaneously was escalating costs.The drivers for change were clear: the need to cut costs to Academies; the imperative of providing security for sensitive data; the requirement to save staff valuable time and, above all, to ensure the final product was easy to use. Conducting our research, we looked at several professional services companies and agreed that a cloud-based solution was the way forward. It also become clear that using Microsoft’s Office 365 suite and Azure cloud would be the best way to secure the interconnectivity we hoped to achieve. Between January and September 2017, our in-house IT Engineers worked with the selected professional services company to build the system. This brought together cloud-based core services, WAN connectivity, LAN infrastructure, security systems, licensing servers, swapping data centres, single sign-in, automation, office 365, telephony, centralised IT support and a printing solution. It was a huge undertaking.Rolling out implementationMigrating the Trust’s 36 academies and Central Services team to the new system was also not something that could be done without rigorous testing of the system that was built. Two of our Academies piloted the new system first, ensuring we were able to address any weaknesses before rolling it out across the rest of the Trust. The pilots ran until every possible wrinkle was ironed out of the system and we knew with certainty that end users were happy with the system they had created. Only at this point was the migration programme for the rest of the Trust initiated.One of the key pieces of learning from the pilot academies was that, counter-intuitively, it was more effective to migrate academies to the new system in term time rather than during school holidays. Although most changes to our academies’ IT systems are scheduled to take place outside of term time, in rolling out our digital strategy it was a central tenet of our plan that no migration took place unless pupils and staff were on site. The reasons for this are obvious: you cannot provide a personalised handover to staff who are on holiday and you cannot solve teething problems if the Academy isn’t fully operational. Now, our 36 academies have been successfully migrated, with each having received a thorough, personalised, handover plan and access to high-quality training to enable staff to make effective use of the new programmes and systems they had access to. These included Microsoft Office 365 and key features such as OneDrive, OneNote and Teams. Tweaks were made based on teacher and pupil feedback as we went along. Gaining staff supportSo, what has been the result of this wholesale change? Principals and staff report high levels of satisfaction with a system they believe has transformed the way they work. It is improving their work life balance and has equipped them to respond to the demands of 21st century learners. We have realised the anticipated costs savings and secured for the Trust, a system to rival the best that exists in the business sector. Already we are focusing on the next steps to ensure the system remains cutting edge and fit for purpose in a digital economy.Individual academies are also benefitting because it has removed all servers and replaced it with the powerful digital cloud. 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Digital Learning

Are You Asking Enough of Your Digital Strategy?

10 Mar 2020

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      string(415) "... Primary) category. BECTA(Bringing Education Creativity To All)is the Government’s key partner in thestrategic development and delivery ofits information and communicationstechnology (ICT). The Inclusion category ofthe BECTA Awards recognizes and rewardsschools who have developed the use ofICT in a way which supports inclusion andpromotes access to learning, particularlybeyond ..."
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      string(3237) "otherroom was designed to encourage more interactive play byincluding Softplay Noisy products with auditory rewards– Stepping Blocks, Steps and Slide – in addition to SpaceTubes and a Softplay Den. Both rooms were lined withSoftplay Walls and Floors, which also formed the structureof four Soft Calming rooms at the school.SpaceKraft® fitted the school’s Hydrotherapy pool withSensory Show Magic interactive sound and lighting, and theShow Magic System was also installed in the Music room,the school’s Music and Drama Hall, and a science classroom.As the Show Magic System enables the teachers to designflexible programmes of learning, entertainment or play, theendless possibilities for providing students with interactiveaudio-visual experiences has proved to be a vital teachingaid, greatly enhancing understanding in maths and sciencelessons and encouraging participation in drama and musicactivities. With the Show Magic technology being commonto all of the sensory areas of the school, the teachers onlyrequired training in the one system before they werecapable of programming and operating the audio-visualequipment throughout the school.In addition to its primary function at the core of TheBridge School’s curriculum, the multi-sensory equipmentinstalled by SpaceKraft® has also greatly benefited theschool’s inclusion work. Local therapists are invited to usethe hydrotherapy pool and the multi-sensory rooms forassessments or ongoing work with their own clients, whileteachers and pupils from the two mainstream schoolswithin the Hadley learning Community building are alsoencouraged to visit and use the Show Magic audio-visualfacilities for projects and learning programmes of theirown, helping to engage mainstream pupils in mathematics,science and literacy.Deputy Head Teacher Heather Davis explains, “Ourvision, in terms of inclusion, is that the facilities that wehave here should be available to the community as a whole,bringing our pupils into social contact with members of thecommunity and vice versa. Interaction of this kind is veryimportant to our pupils’ understanding of the world beyondthe walls of the school, as well as promoting understandingof our pupils in the minds of the visitors, the majority ofwhom would otherwise have no contact with youngsterswith severe and profound learning and physical disabilities.The facilities that SpaceKraft® have provided are fantastictools for encouraging a meaningful social interactionbetween our pupils and the mainstream community.”The ongoing inclusion programme at The Bridge Schoolhas proved so successful that in November 2007, it wasannounced that the school had won the 2007 BECTAAward for Excellence in ICT Practice inthe Inclusion (Primary) category. BECTA(Bringing Education Creativity To All)is the Government’s key partner in thestrategic development and delivery ofits information and communicationstechnology (ICT). The Inclusion category ofthe BECTA Awards recognizes and rewardsschools who have developed the use ofICT in a way which supports inclusion andpromotes access to learning, particularlybeyond the learning of ICT skills.Advertisement Feature"
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    }
  }
}

Learning Spaces

Extensive Multi-Sensory Environments

6 May 2009