Novatia Blog

Novatia’s associate programme

2011-09-08T21:41:00.001+01:00

Novatia are expanding, both in terms of the business we’re winning in our traditional sectors (Educational, Technical and Procurement ICT consultancy for new build schools) and through expansion into new areas.

Novatia are involved in the launch of an exciting new Management Information System (MIS) into the UK. We will soon be helping schools to move MIS, with all the training and data migration that is implied.

Clearly, lots more work requires lots more people to deliver it – but people of a certain calibre, who will be able to carry out engagements and produce documentation to the high standards of quality which our clients demand, expect and indeed selected us above our competitors for. We are therefore looking to identify a small number of highly experienced and professional associates to provide additional capacity in this period of growth.

There are four main types of work we want our associates to carry out;

Educational consultancy: supporting schools in raising standards, developing educational briefs, curricula, etc.
Technical consultancy: integrating ICT into design and build projects, consulting to specify a solution, etc.
Project Management: overseeing the process which sees new schools go from concept to reality – with all the myriad steps in between
Technical MIS: SQL development, data migration, staff training

To be a Novatia associate, you will need to have:

a background supporting education sector organisations in the UK undergoing change
a personable and professional demeanour
credibility with education professionals of all levels
the willingness to travel nationally
the proven ability to create very high-quality outputs

To get involved in the Novatia Associate programme, or for an informal conversation to find out more, please contact our Project Support Office on 01392 314627

Free schools, ICT and the risk of not learning from past mistakes (Part 2)

2011-06-09T12:04:00.003+01:00

My last blog looked at the some of the problems with how ICT is now being funded in Free (and other new) schools, concluding that on top of the reduced budget for technology, PfS’ well-intentioned tinkering with the way the money should be spent is causing some serious issues of quality and risk.

Since then, Michael Gove has announced that PfS is to be closed and its functions (and no doubt the majority of its staff) brought in-house. This political side-step will allow the Government to purge off the final lingering whiff of BSF whilst strengthening its capacity to manage capital schools programmes centrally, as recommended in the James review.

This makes a great deal of sense and is one of the review’s findings which I support; a central ‘client’ with expert advice and strong experience will achieve more with the limited funds available than would be possible if the money was passed out regionally or locally.

The most important reason for this is experience; the Design process, from the build contractor’s perspective, is partially a cost suppression exercise which they only accomplish due to the naivety of clients who haven’t done this before. Most of these clients (currently LAs and Academy sponsors) come out of the process with a firm understanding of what they should have done, but limited opportunities to put these lessons into practice, especially with the same set of staff.

If the DfE’s experts are running repeated procurements of new build schools, one would hope that the tax payer would start to gain the upper hand over the build companies’ shareholders, achieving better school buildings for the same money. Of course, this theoretical benefit evaporates if the central client isn’t quite as expert as it purports to be, but that’s a whole separate blog.

Moving onto ICT and the Design process, however, I have an interest to declare here – I work for a company that specialises in integrating ICT into school builds and refurbs – but that doesn’t change the essential right-ness of what follows…

The current method of designing ICT into Free school buildings ‘works’ like this;

1. The Free school comes up with its concept of how technology should be used to enhance its aims (I won’t call this a vision, as the school usually hasn’t had the time or support to develop it in breadth or depth).
4. The Free school procures its ICT contractor with the support of PfS. As the sharper-eyed reader will no doubt have spotted, due to the absence of Step 2 & 3, this is little more than a speculative shopping list.
5. The school is built/ refurbished and the ICT installed. Due to the absence of Step 3, this will inevitably be a fraught process with impaired results.

What are the missing steps? Well, they’re actually quite simple and established routines for ensuring that school building design takes account of ICT, the problem is they require the DfE to pay someone to do them (Free schools themselves don’t have the expertise, PfS don’t have the capacity);

2. The school explores in detail how their ICT vision will be actualised in the building. How will technology support learning in Maths? What equipment is needed to deliver the Science curriculum? Moreover, the school considers what it is that will be important to them in an ICT contractor, as well as the multiple commercial issues which need to be tied down (how will you ensure your choice of Project Manager isn’t shipped off to another project? How will the contractor’s delivery be monitored, tested and managed contractually? Et cetera). The output of this work is an appropriately detailed Invitation to Tender document which leaves the market in no doubt what is being asked for and how it will need to be delivered, and with no room to wriggle out of its responsibilities. Without this, bidders’ responses will be vague and varied, and judging Value for Money is impossible.
3. The school goes through its building on a room by room basis working out how many power and data points are needed and in which locations. This should culminate in a Room Equipment Schedule detailing types of equipment, related power and data requirements, and the implied heat outputs. This is a devilishly complex task, as there are so many dependencies and variables, and missteps & omissions will result in either having to live with the mistakes or having to pay the builder’s costs to fix them. The process needs to happen early enough that the information can inform the builder’s plans, so that any required ICT isn’t bolted on as a compromise when it’s too late to design around it (“Oh, that room is full of computers and needs air conditioning? You really should have said something earlier…and the door to the Server Room is too small to fit the rack through? Not our problem”). It’s also a precursor to procurement as it’s essential to know what you need to buy if you’re interested in working out the relative cost merit of suppliers’ offers. Not doing this is akin to walking blindfolded into Waitrose, telling the cashier you’ve got £50 and then being surprised/ annoyed at how little/ how unsuitable the contents of your shopping bag are when you get home.

I have no doubt that the DfE will realise all this for itself after the experience of the first flawed Free school buildings has sunk in, but that seems a high price to pay, especially as these lessons are already well understood and the UK currently has the intellectual capital and industry capacity to do something about it.

Dom Norrish. Follow me on twitter.

Free schools, ICT and the risk of not learning from past mistakes (Part 1)

2011-05-23T14:12:00.003+01:00

Having been exposed to the evolving Free Schools process over the past few months, I’d like to raise a few area for discussion, specifically about how ICT will be planned and integrated, as I’m not convinced this has been properly thought through. In this first part, I’ll concentrate on the funding side of things.

The funding model is pretty different from that seen in previous capital projects (Academies, et cetera) and reflects the nation’s more straightened circumstances as well as an attempt to reorganise responsibilities;

ICT equipment funding spent with the ICT contractor (to cover all end-user kit, essentially) is capped at £800 per pupil, down from £1450. This is an approximate 45% reduction. See here for this potential impact of this.
The £225 per pupil for ICT infrastructure spent with the builder remains intact but is now expected to stretch further, covering active networking (wired and wireless) and some installation elements.

The positives
The £225 being stretched further is a good thing, as it was always too much money in my opinion for what the builder was being asked to do (the cabling, basically). Value for money was rarely achieved and even more rarely demonstrated – this funding tended to get swallowed up into the project more generally.

Some would also say that £1450 per pupil for equipment was too much – some schools struggled to spend it meaningfully, and struggled even more to maintain this level of investment in future years. I can’t argue with the logic of the second half of that; it is indeed easier and more realistic for schools to pay for the upkeep of a smaller ICT estate than a larger one.

Finally, I think it’s accurate to say that the ambition behind changes in responsibility for delivery (expanded on below) is that any new schools built on this model will be ready to go ‘out of the box’; all the ICT infrastructure (previously split between builder and ICT contractor) will be in place and ready for schools to hang whatever they like off it.

The negatives
Firstly, £800 per pupil for ICT equipment is certainly not enough, especially for small schools for whom infrastructural costs don’t scale downwards as they’re relatively fixed. This number, I assume, is predicated on schools outsourcing many of their services (and hence their servers) to external providers in what is popularly imagined as ‘the cloud’. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but carries several assumptions;

that the school can afford to dedicate a large chunk (£150-200 per pupil probably) of its revenue to paying for outsourced services;
that every school (remember, the £800 is a capped maximum, regardless of circumstances) has sufficient bandwidth to receive reliable remote services;
that every school wants to follow this outsourcing model, and many will be unhappy with the levels of control, flexibility and security it offers.

If I reference those assumptions against the three new build projects I’m currently working on, each project falls afoul of at least one of them.

This approach removes choice from schools and burdens them with an ICT mortgage; it smacks of the worst elements of BSF to me.

Secondly, to enforce the stretching of the builder’s budget (the £225), PfS have changed the standard form ICT Responsibilities Matrix to include several items which I believe are best left in the scope of the ICT contractor;

Edge and core switching
Wireless (to be fair, this isn’t a change per se as it was always a builder responsibility, they just never did it)
The install of Data Projectors, Interactive Whiteboards and Signage screens
and, bizarrely, Weather Stations (I guess because they go on the roof?)

This raises all sorts of concerns around quality, installation, configuration and testing. The questions that spring to my mind are;

How will the specification of these systems be agreed? It will be up to the ICT work stream to specify them, but my experience suggests that an appropriately high, future-proof spec will be aggressively resisted by the build contractor. The resulting compromise? Weakened infrastructure.
How will the standards of installation be agreed? The thorniest issue in any implementation is usually the Audio Visual element, specifically meeting the school’s expectations. Again, without wishing to denigrate the building industry unnecessarily, I have doubts over the success of this.
Who will configure these systems? Physical installation is one thing, technical configuration is quite another. Even if the builder uses third party experts (they don’t typically retain their own), surely it’s the ICT contractor who needs to configure the network to suit the ICT solution? This is probably the most worrying and highest risk part.
How will the builder-provided elements be tested? Currently, the ICT providers we appoint are held to account via detailed User Acceptance Tests linked to payment milestones and delay penalties. This is enshrined in the contract and has taken a number of years to mature. I can’t imagine this approach being accepted by the big building companies. What is far more likely is that ‘sign off’ will be achieved through perfunctory testing which gives schools no assurance of a properly functioning system.

The elephant in the room
In an attempt to achieve clearer demarcation, the process seems to have created a raft of issues and risks, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The potential, unforgivable tragedy is the massive waste of public funds implied, and not just through poor outcomes; the builder – unable to do the work themselves – will in almost all cases simply subcontract these tasks to… the ICT contractor.

The outcomes will be worse due to reduced specification and issues over quality and testing, and the same people will do the work in the end. The main difference is that it will cost the country more. Is this really the way to build on the lessons of past programmes?

In the next part, I plan to consider the process by which ICT is designed and integrated into Free school buildings

Dom Norrish. Follow me on twitter.

Digital Clipboards in the Classroom

2011-04-05T17:20:00.001+01:00

I’m working with a school that’s just bought a small number of these digital clipboards for use in English lessons, primarily. I doubt this is a particularly new technology, but I hadn’t seen it employed by a school before so thought it worth exploring.

image: acecad.com.tw

The device allows students to write on normal paper during lessons (e.g. recording notes for revision, drafting a piece of writing) with a special pen (though it uses standard ink cartridges). Their notes are then uploaded to a computer as an image when the clipboard is next connected by USB cable.

Even better, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software supplied with the device converts handwriting into text which can then be manipulated using a word processor or other similar tool (such as MS OneNote).

I’m sure the school will come up with many different applications for this technology. A few which occur to me are;

Sharing the outcomes of group work with all participants, so that everyone has a record of discussions/ plans, etc. This would work just as well if it was the teacher recording a class discussion or collaborative development of an idea.
Allowing learners to generate mind maps/ flow charts/ diagrams (something which a computer is often a barrier to) in a natural way, and still be able to use the results digitally.
Encouraging disengaged learners or those with weak computer/ writing skills to take notes, which can later be expanded on away from the pressure of a live lesson. The fact that you get a high quality, clean copy of your notes in Word will add value here, I’m sure, especially for those who are convinced their work is always poor.
Digital note taking in situations where you wouldn’t necessarily want to take a laptop/ tablet; observing a sport, on the bus, in the Resistant Materials room.

I’ll report back on how successful they are in a few months.

Dominic Norrish. Follow me on Twitter

Are meaningful Digital Exams actually any closer?

2011-03-07T17:33:00.001Z

Back in the Winter of 2009 (wow, that sounds a long time ago!) I wrote this in response to some early stirrings around the imperative for examinations to move online. If you have the time to read it, you’ll find it’s a characteristic polemic about the need for change/ the shackles of the systems of the past, et cetera. I wasn’t expecting anything to actually, you know, happen – at least not in the lifetime of this Government.

Late this February, many media outlets (including The Independent and the TES) reported on the announcement by Ofqual that pen and paper exams must come to an end or risk becoming an irrelevance to candidates.

Image: geograph.org.uk

Isabel Nisbet (Chief Executive of Ofqual) remarked of learners "They use IT as their natural medium for identifying and exploring new issues and deepening their knowledge”, displaying a grasp of the drivers and needs of modern youth which quite frankly throws the rest of Whitehall into sharp relief. Just think - exams which measure people’s abilities not knowledge, their capacity to work together, to adapt, to understand and to remodel information. Sounds fantastic doesn’t it?

There are, however, some flaws in Isabel’s logic which (before we go into the street to declare the arrival of a new age of enlightenment in UK education) cause me no little concern.

Firstly, any examination system is by definition the output measure of its curriculum. For Ms. Nisbet’s vision of digital exams to become a reality, it must be preceded by similarly transformational thinking in terms of what is taught, studied and therefore valued by society. In short, the curriculum would need to shift significantly towards the development of the skills of assimilation and synthesis of information that she describes. This might be a problem; to judge from announcements by other offices of the DfE, the national curriculum’s direction of travel is quite the opposite, and is accelerating exponentially. No, I fear that what Ofqual are actually talking about is the digital administration and marking of exams, albeit clothed in the undeliverable rhetoric of ‘21st-century learning’. They are the tail, after all, and not the dog.

Image: commons.wikimedia.org

So if it’s not for the good of learners, what’s the point of digital exams? The bodies which stand to gain the most from a shift towards digital exams (not students – they’ll see no benefit until the content on the exams changes) are the examination boards themselves. The financial overheads and logistical complexities of pen and paper exams are vast and restrictive, particularly for an industry which earns a substantial chunk of its income from overseas markets. The key to retaining the UK’s edge as the world’s leading supplier of qualifications lies in getting the job done more quickly and with fewer people. Of course, I won’t even begin to speculate on how much easier it will be to outsource exam marking to the 2nd world once they are all digitally sat and transmitted.

This may in reality be nothing more than the cynical manipulation of the educational change agenda to further the interests of UK plc, without evolving to any degree how we actually measure and value learning.

Sadly we seem to lack the vision of the Danes to reinvent what exams are for, but those who make decisions about the nation’s curriculum and exams should consider this; not every country is in awe of PISA league tables and the regurgitation of facts and learned techniques that they laud. Those economies which will produce the kind of entrepreneurs David Cameron was calling for last week will do so through an education system which allows students to discover, collaborate and use their technology skills just as in ‘real life’. Successful C21st countries will have curricula and exams which reflect this, and those which fail to adapt will wither.

I'd be delighted to be wrong, let’s hope I am.

Dominic Norrish
Follow me on twitter @domnorrish

That was the week that was

2011-01-18T09:32:00.009Z

This week the UK’s educational technology community is collectively breathing out/ succumbing to flu following the annual lunacy of three frantic days at Olympia buying, selling and – mostly – networking. Annual lunacy which this year was prolonged (at least for the well-healed – tickets were several hundred pounds, although the Sunday was free) by the transplanted Learning Without Frontiers conference which took place Sunday to Tuesday.

LWF, clearly pitching to supplant BETT as the event for edtech cognoscenti and international delegations, used its marketing to ridicule visitors to the grande dame of ICT as sheep following the herd… and then proceeded to hand each of its own attendees an iPad without a trace of irony. By all accounts, those who went along had a lovely, multi-touchy time.

Image: opencage.info

However, LWF’s organiser Graham Brown-Martin (@GrahamBM) has got a point. In the post-Becta policy vacuum, the ongoing relevance of BETT 2011 has been repeatedly questioned the twitterati. An inevitable focus of ‘product’ not ‘practice and policy’ was predicted but did not, in my opinion, come to pass. I think this was for three main reasons;

The decision of an increasing number of companies to use *gasp* real teachers and children to demonstrate and explain how the product in question helps with learning
The fact that the policy and practice aspects of previous BETTs had always read well in the pre-show seminar list but often failed to deliver, usually being a rehash of ideas or a skating over of the surface of an issue
The ever-growing prevalence of teacher-led training events such as TeachMeet Takeover

Playful rumours of BETT’s death (from @johnmclear in this instance) therefore proved to have been partially exaggerated, to misquote Mark Twain’s phrase – the place was as full as ever of pushy vendors, excited teachers, and garrulous foreigners - but it's certainly evolving. See @theheadsoffice's blog for details.

Image: timloughton.com

Speculation that education minister Nick Gibb would be speaking on Wednesday proved groundless (which would have been a bit like Darth Vader eulogising at an Ewok funeral anyway), but we did hear from the acceptable, cuddly, eSafety face of the DfE in the form of Tim Loughton (“the time has come to place technology at the absolute centre of our aspirations for a world class education sector” – note the word aspiration. That’s politician code for ‘un-enforcably vague promise’).

Image: trixter.net

As usual, there was a lot of familiar stuff cluttering up multiple stands. The industry clearly seems to think schools really need huge interactive plasma screens (starting at £3000) and 3D projectors. Time will tell, but I’m with Dr. Kermode on this one. I’ll also be interested to see if the virtual mountain bikes being promoted on European Electronique’s stand find a market.

So what was worth seeing? Having long been a proponent of games in education, it was great to see so many games companies emerging into the education space. Playing History seems to be a great way into some hard to visualise topics for KS2 and KS3 students, with players navigating their way through a point and click quest-style storyline. Alternatively, Games Ed’s Sustainaville takes the approach of using a single class version of a SimCity-like game to inspire groups to tackle various urban problems, co-ordinating their approach with other groups and debating decisions before they are modelled by the game. A great approach to developing thinking and team-working skills. Not new but still brilliant, I remain a fan of Stock Market Challenge which, for all its brazenly capitalist ideology, is a superbly motivating way to get students to understand the interconnectedness of economics through competing with their maths and business skills to beat their friends. A use of technology in schools the current administration would unreservedly condone (knew I’d find one if I looked hard enough)!

Image: betterteaching.com

Something else I was pretty impressed with was the classroom observation kit provided by Iris Connect. I’ve been recommending fixed camera's into CPD suites for a few years now, but Iris Connect’s back-end software has been superbly thought through with a view to making video footage a really effective development tool for teachers and observers. It’s portable between classrooms too - highly recommended. I don’t know if the company has been floated, but if so, buy some shares now - with the Government’s plan to move teacher training out of Universities and into schools, these things are going to start selling like hot-cakes.

Dominic Norrish. Follow me on twitter

The Rising Tide of Games in Education

2010-12-08T08:51:00.006Z

This blog post was inspired by Karl Royle and Scott Colfer’s comprehensive and very accessible paper on Computer Games and Learning which I revisited in the wake of a depressingly pointless Panorama programme on games addiction.

Whilst reading the report, I was reminded many times of the aphorism "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come" (which www.quotedb.com tells me was coined by Victor Hugo) – the overwhelming sense the paper leaves you with is that no matter the direction set by the UK’s current administration, games based learning is irresistibly inching up the beach-head of mainsteam education.

“The Secretary of State for Education may be exposed as a modern day Cnut (not a typo), wagging a finger at a relentlessly rising tide.”

If you are questioning why games should play a role in the UK’s schools, I recommend a quick read of pp13-14, which set out the case admirably, linking a range of vital C21st skills and behaviours (all desirable in the nation’s youth) to the affordances of GBL. Why wouldn’t we want to make use of engaging tools which will help develop a future society of lateral thinking, creative, resilient team players?

The main reason for optimism about the rise of gaming in education is the extent to which our culture is now saturated with games playing. The point that the lives of our children are informed constantly by computer games is well made; the report (p6) cites evidence that 99% of boys and 94% of girls are gamers. That’s more than attend school daily.

But more vitally, the spread of gaming beyond what some would snootily regard as an adolescent pass-time is also made clear; the average age of UK social game players is 43 (p7). Michael Gove was born in the summer of 1967, placing him front and centre of that demographic, but I am not anticipating the imminent integration of Farmville into the English Baccalaureate.

The way games are accessed is also changing dramatically. I remember well the disappointment I felt at not being remotely able to afford the BBC Micro required to play Elite in 1985, when gaming was pretty much the preserve of the technology-rich. The revolution in gaming platforms seen in the 90s (computers to consoles) is being repeated today, with 23% of gaming now done on phones. We’re probably only a year away from another dramatic jump in this figure, as smart phones become the standard and affordable handset of choice for all teenagers, as they already are for those who pay their own contracts.

Despite the undeniable ubiquity of gaming in modern life, this isn’t yet reflected in our schools, which in many other ways are a faithful macrocosm of society.

Royle and Colfer explain that “42% of teachers never play computer games for their own leisure” (p25), a significant barrier to adoption within schools. I’d suggest a couple of reasons for this disconnect; 1) they’re too busy 2) the demographic profile and social background of the average teacher (both obviously generalisations). This profile is changing gradually and the work of several high-profile GBL evangelists (e.g. Dawn Hallybone & Ollie Bray) within and outside the classroom is also helping to create momentum.

More importantly, a shift is needed in policy before GBL can achieve anything more than peripheral success: “to make these initiatives part of a wider engagement with the digital age, systemic change is required that aligns curriculum objectives and outcomes with the process and product skills engendered by engagement with digital culture” (p24). Basically, school should be about real life, not outdated notions from a mythical educational golden age (anyone for Latin?). I fear that this won’t alter in the lifetime of this Government. In fact, the current direction of change is backwards.

This must be understood by policy makers as a massive risk to the relevance of education offered by our schools. Royle and Colfer explain this adroitly; “When ten year olds can play a computer game that allows them to manage Barcelona Football club at an operating profit and make complex decisions on a regular basis it is unsurprising that learning in school leaves them disappointed and less engaged” (p27)

The Secretary of State for Education will no doubt continue to cite PISA data and demand a return to robust measures of success in core subjects, but this policy will inevitably expose him as a modern day Cnut (not a typo), wagging a finger at a relentlessly rising tide. Irresistible change is coming.

Dom Norrish
Follow me on Twitter

The impact of capital cuts will be felt most keenly by learners

2010-11-08T21:36:00.003Z

If rumours are to be believed, part of the 60% cut to capital spending on schools is to be found in the dedicated ICT funding all new builds and refurbished schools received under BSF and other programmes.
ICT funding for Academies and BSF projects has for the past few years been based on a formula which saw schools receive £1450 per-pupil for ICT equipment and £225 pp for infrastructure. The two sums were kept separate, the infrastructure money typically attached to the main budget, with the build partner delivering the ICT passive infrastructure (cabling and containment, mostly) and an ICT provider being procured through whom to spend the £1450.

These levels of funding (about £1.8m for the average sized secondary) have proved time and again in my experience to be just sufficient to achieve the school’s/ LA’s ambitions for learning, granting schools the freedom to innovate with the interface between space and technology in ways which would otherwise be out of reach for most. New Line Learning, a federation of Academies in Kent, is a particularly good example of this.

However, from talking to several interested parties (builders, ICT equipment providers), the whispered consensus is that this £1450 equipment funding is regarded by the Government as overly generous and will be reduced to somewhere around £800. Presumably this is predicated on the generalisation that ICT is ‘well embedded’ in UK schools and doesn’t require additional investment. Quite how this applies to new builds I am unsure.

This will inevitably impact disproportionately on learners. The cost of server infrastructures, wireless network, smart cards, Management Information Systems and a host of other ‘must haves’ don’t scale very neatly; they cost what they cost. Schools’ only real option will be to reduce their expectations of the number of mobile devices, visualisers, projectors, cameras, etc which their students will benefit from. They’ll simply be able to afford less stuff for learning. The first casualty of this funding skirmish will be innovation, as ‘luxury’ of experimentation will no longer be affordable when set against the harsh alternative of having some spaces lacking even the ability to project, for example.

Some will offer the specious logic that even now some schools don’t have technology in every learning space, but I just can’t see how that has any relevance to an argument about how we should be building (today) the absolute best environments for the next 25 years of children to learn in.

It is probable that the £225 for infrastructure will also suffer similar cuts, which will only serve to hamstring the new environments & approaches it is supposed to enable. Even under current funding conditions, build partners invariably resist schools’ requests for floor boxes (to provide flexibility away from dado trunking) and redundant cables (e.g.providing capacity to expand wireless in future) on grounds of cost. The common number applied is 1.5 data points per student, which is just enough, in my experience. If the £225 becomes, say, £150, I fully anticipate the next round of new/ refurbished schools will be built with partial networks (them::“What do you need it in the sports hall for?” me: “Um, to improve learning in sport through technology?”) and an over-reliance on wireless, in a landscape of ever increasing data demand from a personal devices and changing behaviours. It’s a recipe for unreliability, unavailability and continued reliance on traditional methods. Which is probably the point.

Dom Norrish

Follow me on twitter @domnorrish

Self Review – someone still loves you

2010-10-06T10:04:00.003+01:00

This post is about the importance of self review and touches on both the Self Review Framework for ICT (SRF) and Ofsted’s Self Evaluation Form (SEF). My contention is that they have never been so useful as now.

As you will no doubt know, the Government recently removed the SEF from the Ofsted inspection process for schools. Many saw this as a Very Good Thing.

The SEF had been widely criticised by school leaders for being onerous and bloated so, in a further strike against Gove’s current bête noire, it has gone the way of other ‘bureaucratic’ hindrances such as Becta and the QCDA. The sound of supermarket-brand Cava corks popping was heard from staff rooms the length and breadth of the land.

A couple of facts which can be easily forgotten in the initial rush of euphoria should be noted though;
Firstly, schools were never actually required to submit and maintain a SEF by Ofsted. Admittedly to pursue this route you had to be pretty gutsy/ have bullet proof exam results.

Secondly, schools still are required to self-evaluate their performance actively as not only is this by far the cheapest way for Ofsted to get close to understanding a school’s performance, it’s also a pretty rewarding process for the school to undergo. Physician, know thyself.

It seems to me that the SEF is a pretty well designed tool for precisely this, one with which schools are very familiar and which has been further sharpened by the knowledge that its more peripheral chunks can now be safely discarded. My advice is to keep the SEF, or at least it’s tenets, at the core of your schools’ self-evaluation process and use it to continue the detailed discovery and evaluation which leads to school improvement.

Image: sha3teely.com

And so to Becta’s ICT Self Review Framework, the SRF. Those of you who did battle with this tool in its original incarnation will know whereof I speak when I say that the words ‘repetitive, tedious, tangential and fussy’ don’t come near doing it justice. Luckily for me, it’s a big part of my job so I must have been through it with a dozen schools over possibly hundreds of hours.

However, it has recently been revised (from 8 elements and 72 questions down to a more manageable 6 and 57 respectively) and is infinitely improved. Gone too are the same questions asked in 7 different ways (and so poorly worded that it’s hard to tell what they’re asking). In short, it’s been made user-friendly.

What remains is very useful – a simple framework for a school to examine how it uses technology to be more effective across every aspect of its business. It still requires a considerable and coordinated effort to make judgements about each aspect and provide evidence, but it is unlikely to induce homicidal thoughts towards those well-meaning bureaucrats in Coventry anymore.The future of the SRF is still unknown, though Naace are keen to take it back.

Of course, knowledge gained from the SRF can feed into wider school self-review processes (see above) but by far the most beneficial outcome is a Strategic Development Plan which identifies the gaps and sets out achievable steps to bridge them in the coming 2-3 years. For some reason, it’s this step which many schools falter at. What’s the point in self-review which doesn’t lead to change? That’s just narcissism, surely?
All this reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, which puts the case for self-review with a wonderful clarity;

“To understand is hard. Once one understands, action is easy." Sun Yat-sen

Dominic Norrish
Follow me on Twitter @domnorrish

Immersive language learning through technology

2010-08-27T20:49:00.004+01:00

I have been working recently with a centre which is being established for the learning languages which are rarely taught (in the Secondary sector currently, at least) – Russian and Arabic being two examples.

The centre aims to provide a really rich offering for local schools (whose pupils might study there part time) and nationally, for distance learning. One of the guiding principles of the centre is that language learning is easier, more enduring and deeper overall if students can be immersed in the language and culture in question. It’s palpably true even for language dimwits– a weekend in Paris and I’m bonjouring and shrugging disinterestedly with the best of ‘em.

Technology is seen as a key enabler of this immersion and I thought I’d share a couple of the ideas which we’ve been developing with the centre’s staff to hopefully achieve this.

The centre is very keen for visiting learners to have a fun experience and to not feel like they are at ‘school’ (not that those two concepts are mutually exclusive, obviously). For this reason, one of the immersive technologies being developed is a serious game for language learning, set in the rich context of the target language’s native country and based around an engaging mission (for example, arriving in a city and trying to track down a long lost friend, encountering challenges and twists along the way, naturally).

Image: alelo.com

The concept is that learners will play the part of the game’s main protagonist and their progress through the game’s challenges will depend on their accurate understanding and use of language, both textual and verbal, through the use of keyboard, mouse and microphone. Other characters will react differently to learners based on the skill with which they speak and their observation of cultural cues. Varying levels of scaffolding will be available for learners (e.g. English language translation of possible responses) and teachers/ peers will be able to play the part of other characters, to offer help to players. Sub-games will build skills/ vocab and a smartphone application may also be spun off from the main game. Similar games have been developed, mostly with military customers in mind, but this FPS will be more First Person Speaker!

There are lots of little immersive touches (such as target-language console games in the student social area and digital room signage which alters to match the right context) but a second ‘big idea’ is the use of digital facades in one of the large spaces to recreate a street scene in which various interactions can take place.
Footage of shop fronts and interiors will be projected onto and around existing architectural features such as the space’s windows to create the illusion of a living street, assisted by various pieces of furniture and props. Fixed discrete cameras and microphones will help learners record evidence of their capability in various scenarios.

Image: 2dcode.com

The use of QR codes, and an integrated MS Surface-like product to recognise them, will enable objects to be used creatively by the educators planning uses for the space. For example, at a KS2 level, the activity could be around buying ingredients to produce a local speciality dish. Procuring various tagged food objects being ‘sold’ on the street would be the basis of an extended role-play between learners of different abilities/ adults. Successful interpretation of the recipe, negotiation of the buying process with the various ‘shop keepers’ and placing the full set of items on the smart surface would result in an output from the surface’s screen; instructions on how to prepare the dish, perhaps (which would then move this group’s activity to the centre’s kitchen facilities). Equally, if the output could be a hint on where to find the missing ingredients (and the vocab to use).

The above example is just one that occurs to my (History-teacher-who-covered-the-odd-period-of-French-when-Madame-was-on-a-course) mind; the opportunities to create engaging, collaborative language use scenarios for students of all ages are vast for talented MFL specialists.

The project is still at a relatively early stage, but we’re approaching the point at which we’ll go to market (excuse the unintentional pun) for the ICT solution to deliver the centre’s aspirations. Watch this space for updates!

Dom Norrish
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Back to the Future for Schools?

2010-07-05T22:55:00.001+01:00

This afternoon’s announcement by Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Education) of the strange death of Building Schools for the Future, a twitstorm raged across the ether as various educators, architects, technologists and seemingly anyone with an interest in this nation’s future expressed their incredulity at the savagery of the cuts. The DfE’s press release is charmingly titled as an ‘overhaul’, in reality it’s the coup de grace on a programme that was, in truth, just too New Labour to be allowed to survive.

For me, the tweet of the day came from @photocritic : “In 'Back to the Future', Doc sets clock in the DeLorean to a day 25 years in the future. Today is that day.”

This co-incidence of policy and zeitgeist is too sweet to ignore.

In 1985, as Michael J. Fox was portraying the time-travelling Marty McFly on our cinema screens, the UK had;

A Conservative government bent on retrenchment and tradition
An education system focused on the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next
An economy failing to adapt to the needs of a changing world market
A decent national football team

Many things have changed in the interim (well, at least one of those things) but are we any closer to achieving a leading place on the (no longer futuristic) world stage? Are we now well positioned as a nation to provide the next generation of team workers, creative thinkers, collaborative investigators and independent problem-solvers which will characterise the successful economies of the next 25 years?

My personal view is ‘no’. And less so today than yesterday. BSF wasn’t just about school buildings you see, it was about transforming education, it was about producing different outcomes – and this, I feel, was the real target of Gove’s axe. ‘Transformation’ implies change is needed, which is an ideological bridge too far for an Education Secretary on record comparing rote learning of poetry to iPod ownership. Seriously.

BSF’s greatest potential contribution to the UK’s future was in changing what it like to learn at school, providing choice, agency and investment in their education to a swathe of disaffected young people to whom Miss Havisham (Nick Gibb’s barometer of educational success) is an irrelevance, but who nevertheless need to find their place (and a job) in the C21st UK.

£5Bn was saved in a stroke this afternoon, a short-term quick win for a tough-guy Government. The continuing inappropriateness of our education system in the face of technological and global economic reality will cost an awful lot more by the time Back to the Future reaches it’s 50th anniversary, however. Will the Government realise this in time? I doubt it; as Marty McFly says after introducing his parents’ prom dance to Johnny B. Goode “I guess you guys aren't ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

Dom Norrish

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Why Becta's demise is a disaster for learning with ICT

2010-05-24T15:18:00.000+01:00

The new ConLib government today announced that Becta, the lead agency for ICT in education, is to be scrapped, perhaps as early as November.

I first blogged about this last August, when the sabre-rattling began. What follows is an update to that content:

First up, let me declare an interest; I've worked with several people from Becta on new build school projects and have even freelanced on some research for Becta back in the mists of time when I was an ICT teacher. However, this is offered in the spirit of common sense.

The job of Becta is/ was to develop the use of technology in schools and colleges and through things like their Self Review Framework, ICT Mark and the targets set for the take up of Learning Platforms, things are (slowly) changing. The pace of this change is the basis for many criticisms of Becta. Schools must bear some of the weight of responsibility to engage in these processes too, though. It is recognised by all the teachers I know that to meet the needs of the '21st Century learner' schools' offerings need to be much more engaging and relevant. ICT is a powerful tool to achieve this, and Becta is doing a pretty good job of pushing schools on this front. It's not fashionable to say it, but I am sure that there are some schools who will take their foot off the gas without this external pressure. The head of steam which has gradually been building will dissipate and progress will stall.

Similarly, working in an industry where it is pretty evident that other organisations are very keen to do things 'their way' (especially if there's a 'saving' to be made), Becta have made themselves fairly unpopular by insisting on a level of standardisation, both technically and in terms of approach. Their guidance on developing visions, for example, ensures that schools think about the full gamut of local and national priorities. Their work on establishing a common framework for MIS data (SIF-UK) will make data transfer between providers effective and timely. Becta's Technical and Functional Specifications have formed the basis for the evolution of many schools' systems. Unless these and similar functions are transferred elsewhere, what we will very quickly see in the Educational ICT Landscape is a return to the 'islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity' situation, as excellent schools continue to excel and those in different circumstances are left to flounder.

Another criticism always levelled at Becta is that despite all their work, little effect on exam results due to better use of technology is evident. Despite this being not (quite) true (see here), this argument is akin to criticising Usain Bolt for not winning gold in the mixed Dressage - effective use of ICT is only ever going to have a tiny impact on something as structured as the formal summative assessment of what 16 year olds can remember about the Agricultural Revolution... If our assessment system measured creativity, problem solving, the ability to work with others, or working to a deadline and to high standards, I imagine Becta's work would be seen in quite another light. Curiously enough, these kind of 'soft skills' are exactly the type of thing most employers value over a C in GCSE History. And this is the nub of the issue; the incumbent government value the latter and barely acknowledge the former.

Stephen Heppell (@stephenheppell) has rightly and pragmatically declared this an opportunity for the "many wise and helpful bloggers and podders and tweeters that are already providing a mass of inspiration and effective practice for others – a bottom-up army of authentic practitioners" to take up the baton. Let's hope their efforts can be shaped effectively by some kind of structure (Naace perhaps?) and pointed towards the Greater Good, rather than personal hobby horses. Most importantly, any ground-up, crowd-sourced approach has to be adequately separated from the distracting attentions of suppliers and other commercially interested organisations... You know who you are!

Follow me on Twitter @domnorrish

Is there any more of that BSF left?

2010-05-12T17:37:00.001+01:00

Following on from my wild pre-election speculation about the future of BSF under a Conservative Government, the events of the last few days have led to Michael Gove becoming the Secretary of State for Education.

It is my opinion that Building Schools for the Future is a Good Thing. I'm sure things about it could be improved, but it's pretty hard to argue against the fundamental tenets of the programme (it's all in the title really). However, it wasn't the Conservatives' idea and apparently in politics this can be a problem.

If you are in any way involved in a BSF project, you may wonder what this means for you. Well wonder no longer, as I have put together a brief, equally speculative and definitely light-hearted

BSF READY RECKONER

Take the quiz, find out what you could have won!

Follow me on Twitter @domnorrish

Integrating ICT into a new build school (Part 3)

2010-05-05T23:17:00.001+01:00

This series of blogs draws on my experience from various single-school and BSF new build projects in the UK over the past few years, the aggregated lesson of which is that many, if not all problems related to ICT can be easily overcome if identified and planned for at the outset. The inverse of this is sadly equally true - show me a design team which has failed to consider integration issues and I'll show you a 'new old school' which will transform very little about its students' education. There is a reason why on any Risk Register for ICT you will find, right at the top, next to a big red flag, a risk labelled 'Integration with Design'...

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This week, dear reader, it’s the ever-enthralling topic of… integrating legacy stuff! Hang on in there though, as this is every bit as important as the shiny new kit.

Legacy Hardware

As the majority of new build schools are replacing a predecessor (and sometimes one whose buildings which will be providing interim facilities), it is probable, and a financially attractive proposition, that a proportion of the technology in use in the old school will require integration into the ICT solution in the new building.

The first thing to realise is that legacy kit may not necessarily translate into savings - there are always costs associated with the the integration of legacy into a new ICT solution (and its maintenance thereafter).

Legacy equipment and services;
•    may not be under warranty;
•    carry an increased risk of failure;
•    will require integration with new systems, which will have associated costs;
•    may not represent the best product currently available.

This isn’t to say that everything the school is currently using needs to be junked, just that schools should develop a sensible legacy protocol to sort existing kit based on the level of risk it represents;

•    Establish basic standards for devices which will connect to the network (e.g. 10/100 Networking)
•    Set a minimum specification for staff and student computers to be retained (e.g. meeting Windows 7 requirements)
•    Decide an age limit for each device type at which equipment might reasonably be judged too high a risk for inclusion within the solution
•    Identify legacy kit which can be used with minimal risk until it fails (e.g. peripherals such as voting devices, digital signage screens)
•    Ascertain if any legacy equipment not suitable for live deployment might provide cold spares during repairs (e.g. laptops) and redundancy for single points of failure within the system (e.g. switches), or even have a future with new owner, via eBay or similar

The worst thing that can happen is for capital savings to be made (e.g. buying less stuff and making use of inappropriate legacy) which end up costing the school more in the long run and impacting on what they can do with their revenue funding.

Legacy Software

Integration of legacy software can also carry hidden costs if the predecessor school was under-licensed or cannot, um, evidence its licenses, as the ICT integrator has a legal responsibility to only install licensed products. Put simply, if you can’t prove you own it, the supplier won’t touch it.

Up-licensing can be very expensive, especially if you ask teachers which legacy software is essential: the only answer I’ve ever heard is that it’s all essential. Use of an intelligent discovery agent programme to audit actual software use is recommended, to rationalise/ validate the requests of staff for the integration of legacy software. Often it’s a simple financial argument which moves thinking forward: choose between spending £10k virtualising that ‘must-have’ piece of 16-bit times table software, or spend £2k licensing something produced last year which will actually engage the students and do a much better job…It is often the case that the functionality of a valued legacy programme has been matched or surpassed, for a lower cost.

Some new build schools (such as Academies) open as a ‘new business’, meaning that many of their software licenses will become invalid and require repurchasing. This is of particular relevance in the area of Management Information Systems (MIS). If you’re being legally forced to spend £30-50k on a ‘new’ MIS, why plump for the one you’ve always had, just because you’ve always had it, with no further thought? This is an opportunity seldom given schools – the chance to really consider what you want your MIS to do and to pick one which delivers, freed from the ties that bind. Of course, the market-leader didn’t get there by accident and in this era of 14-19, the decision won’t only be about the needs of a single institution, but schools really should think about their requirements in this area just as they would for any other element of their ICT provision.

So, lots of things to think about in relation to legacy but if I had to boil it down to a single sentence of advice, it would be this: consider legacy kit and software just as carefully as you will the shiny new boxes (with blue neon blinking LEDs, naturally) which glitter so alluringly from the pages of suppliers’ catalogues…

Dominic Norrish
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Integrating ICT into a new build school (Part 2)

2010-03-29T12:46:00.002+01:00

CCTV

I know what you're thinking, but such are the times we live in, so we may as well make sure it's not a total waste of money...

CCTV is typically provided outside the ICT contract and will be provided and specified between the Mechanical & Electrical people and the Builder. However, value for money as well as environmental and ongoing sustainability can be enhanced if the CCTV system makes use of the ICT structured network, rather than a proprietary cabling system or even (yes, it does happen) a separate IP network.

Liaison between those specifying the CCTV and those specifying the network infrastructure is required as early as possible. This is to identify the location and quantity of the necessary Power over Ethernet (PoE) network points and associated active networking equipment. The joy of PoE is the fact that it removes the need for small power - many CCTV cameras can draw the electricity they require straight down the same network cable they are using to send and receive data. This means that you can stick a PoE device (in this case a CCTV camera) anywhere where there is a PoE cable - and that's pretty handy in terms of future flexibility. The flip side is that switches capable of serving PoE devices cost more and this is bound to be a bone of contention - who should pay for the infrastructure to support CCTV? Should it be allowed to reduce the money available for student equipment? The answer seems stunningly obvious to me, but there is often fun to be had before various budget holders agree on it.

The location of cameras needs discussion, as this obviously has a knock on effect for the number of PoE switches needed. A good compromise, if future requirements cannot be accurately foreseen (imagine that!), is to provision a number of PoE outlets in likely spots or places which no-one can seem to agree on, but not to make them live (i.e. don't buy the switch to plug them into yet). This means there will be some future flexibility without too much initial outlay.

Access control
Electronic access control throughout a school has the potential to provide a token or biometric-based, secure and sustainable access strategy with layers of privileges based on role (e.g. student, 6th former, community user, teacher, site agent) - imagine no keys and a school which intelligently knows who should be able to get into each space. This principle can be extended beyond doors too - Lapsafe offer a pretty cool access-controlled laptop store, and things like the staff car park barrier can also be integrated into the solution. However, access control also has the potential to be prohibitively expensive if not intelligently designed in to the building/ grounds at the planning stage.

Schools are well advised to consider in detail a design which will allow their building to be zoned, permitting the easy and efficient locking down of areas when not in use, sparing the expense of mechanical locks and card/ biometric readers on every door. In a zoned school, only key doors are accessed controlled, reducing costs and enabling the school to focus money ensuring that certain important shared resources (e.g. laptop storage rooms, staff workrooms) are electronically accessed controlled, giving open access to these resources to whoever needs them, rather than who happens to have cajoled a key out of the caretaker. Failing to go through this thinking process this at the design stage an (in my experience) only results in one thing - access control is deemed too expensive and is removed or watered right down (e.g. only the front door or a separate system, not linked to the cards/ biometric tokens being used for other things like cashless catering).

Similarly to CCTV (above), Access Control can utilise of the structured network for cost savings and flexibility. Equally similarly though, the implications of increased PoE switching must not be allowed to detract from the educational impact of the ICT budget.

For both technologies, if the IP network is down or slow, so are the CCTV & Access Control. Who is accountable for designing/ configuring/ testing this aspect of the service and who takes the penalties for poor performance? These matters need to be discussed and understood by all parties.

Next (and last) time: legacy, cabling, M&E and FF&E

Dominic Norrish. Follow me on Twitter

The future of BSF under a Conservative administration?

2010-03-04T22:29:00.002Z

Whilst recent weeks have seen plenty of speculation on the future of the world's largest school rebuilding programme in the event of a Conservative government, facts have been rather harder to come by.

Nick Gibb (shadow schools' minister) has come closest to letting the cat out of the bag during a couple of relatively low-key events, but the people who actually know the answer (Dave C and Mike G) are keeping their cards closer to their more experienced chests. Bob Harrison's coverage on Merlin John's website of Gibb's statements can be read here and here.

Personally, however, I'm not convinced the Tories will dismantle BSF, for a number of reasons;

Firstly, Gibb's statements have the ring of politicking about them - sabre-rattling without actually making any commitments or stating a policy position. I mean, the guy has got to say something, and "our policies are essentially the same as Labour's" doesn't sound that impressive, however accurate. Someone who really ought to know the truth recently told me that Gibb may have been 'off message' on this one. Indeed, one of his statements last week reveals a lot about his role in the decision making process; "I'm not shadow chancellor, and shadow ministers are told on pain of death not to make spending promises".
I'm not the shadow chancellor either, but I do know that one of the things even inexperienced administrations don't do in tough economic times is cut spending on public works as it only makes things worse, with unemployment jumping as (in this case) thousands of builders find themselves out of work. Ally this to the somewhat cynical view that the big building companies and core Tory support have, er, aligned interests, and a dramatic slash and burn policy seems even remoter.
Michael Gove has been quite clear on some of the targets of his axe - the National Programme for IT in the NHS and quangos such as Becta for example, but no mention has been made of BSF. If the programme was actually on the blacklist, I would have expected far more political capital to have been made from its high-profile 'failures' over recent months.

What seems much more likely is a reshaping of the programme along Conservative lines. In my opinion, BSF under the Tories might look like this;

Sped up - a money saving tactic, which carries the risk of inappropriate/ broken outcomes. In my experience, unfortunately, it's the lack of time which detracts from projects' success even under the current time scales.
Slimmed down - in order to achieve the time savings above. The obvious way of doing this is to shorten the procurement process, and one route might be to remove choice and variety - school designs could be standardised and the 'architectural vanity projects' which seem to be the real focus of much of BSF would disappear. Expect many more refurbs and reuse of commercial properties, with far, far fewer new buildings.
Regionally delivered - this fits closely with a Conservative philosophy which militates against big government and as Nick Gibb said, the centrally planned nature of the programme "works against the direction we want to go in". PfS don't seem unduly worried right now, so perhaps a reshaped administration is possible?
Less emphasis on transformation - the very word implies that something is wrong with the way things are done, which isn't necessarily how Cameron et al see it. The emphasis may well be on, in their own phrase, 'benefits realisation' which roughly translates as 'better not different'. This is obviously worrying to anyone who actually knows anything about education in this country. The Conservative view has historically been backwards looking, which leads me to the final change...
Minus the 10% ICT investment - many commentators in the Twitterverse and Blogosphere have noted that the Conservatives don't 'get' the need for education to use technology, much less the fundamental change implied by putting students in control of their learning through ICT. It's a quick win, an easy way to speed up and slim down the process (removing the need for consortia of builders and ICT suppliers) and much less likely to result in lower tax receipts due to unemployment. It's also the only change which would pose a genuine threat to this country's long term economic security. Worryingly short sighted.

These are just my personal opinions; it will be interesting to see how they pan out over the next few months, should the Conservatives manage to rejuvenate their currently shrinking lead, of course...

Dominic Norrish
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Integrating ICT into a new build school (Part 1)

2010-03-02T16:48:00.002Z

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Integration of ICT with the Design
Lessons learned from previous new build projects recommend consideration of how ICT will impact on the building at the earliest opportunity to facilitate the accurate capturing of requirements in the architects’ Design Brief.

Unfortunately, I have worked on too many projects where this advice was only brought on board relatively late in the design process, the upshot of which being that decisions and assumptions had been made, many of which were incorrect or did not reflect what the school's staff and students actually wanted to do in the spaces concerned.

Schools' voice in this process is surprisingly small and can be drowned out by those of the 'design professionals' - the architect, builder, mechanical and electrical people - and perhaps we shouldn't be shocked that the Headteacher or Deputy leading the project for their school is guided by these professionals. The thing to remember is that rarely do they have any firm grasp of what a C21st school should be like - this is the main thing school staff must repeatedly and loudly champion in the design process.

A lack of educational thinking becomes a real problem if the build contract is let without considering technology integration. If the builder has provided a price based on a set of requirements, it is understandable that they will robustly resist attempts to add items to the list without the budget rising commensurately, and this is essentially what happens if full consideration of ICT has not taken place prior to the main contract's tender.

An example would be if the builder had priced for every power and network point to be delivered via dado trunking on the walls (a common assumption - it's how it's done in many other sectors), only to be told a couple of months down the line that the school's requirement for flexible learning spaces means power and data needs to be served through floor boxes. In this scenario, only one thing happens, in my experience: the school is forced to curb its ambitions. It's labelled as a compromise. What it actually amounts to is poor project management leading to a constraint on the education of generations of students who will have to use this hobbled building.

So, with that cautionary tale in mind, let's look at three of the key areas to consider:

Server and Hub spaces
The quantity, sizing, construction materials, operational use, location, power supply and air conditioning of spaces to house server and edge network equipment requires specialist technical advice as mistakes or oversights at the design stage can inflict serious and ongoing risks to the school’s ICT service. Get this wrong (and I've seen them placed next to toilets and in damp basements) and a lifetime of network fragility beckons. Cable run lengths are pertinent here too, with 90m being the accepted technical limit for copper network cables. For example, your most distant outpost of the wired network (e.g. an external Wireless Access Point on the building's external wall) must be within 90m of a hub room. Obvious stuff, but often not fully thought through, resulting in genuine questions such as "What did you want wireless coverage outside for anyway?"

Shared technology spaces
The need to design-in open access areas for shared resources is critical. This provision can range from simple breakout spaces for groups, capable of hosting/ storing printers, cameras etc., to full plaza-style technology- heavy rooms with fixed and mobile devices, providing computing services for up to 90 students. The concept remains the same; local, open access to centralised resources reducing the need to duplicate provision in every classroom, promoting sustainability and optimal utilisation. The alternative to not thinking about this? ICT suites with 30 PCs around the periphery...

Without adequate provision for, e.g. a place to site shared printers, the inevitable result will be that users of every separate room will perceive a need for a local device; hardly an affordable or sustainable solution. Essentially, schools need to ask themselves questions about how spaces will be used; What kind of activities using technology might take place here? What happens once 300 students start concurrently using their iPhones in here in 3 years time? How many computers will need a wired connection to the network in this space? The answers to all of these questions (and more) have serious implications, e.g. for the quantity and location of network cables.

Mobile Device storage
School-owned mobile devices of some description are likely to form the core of flexible provision to computing resources in the medium term. These devices will need to be stored securely, especially if parts of the building will be open after hours and used by members of the community. Of equal importance is the need to charge devices without the resultant heat impacting on learning environments. Both requirements suggest the consideration at the design stage of defined charging spaces capable of being securely isolated from general access and mechanically ventilated. The result of not designing such storage in? 'Shared' technologies which actually never leave their host classroom, creating silos of good practice at best.

It's not all doom and gloom, thankfully. Most projects I have worked on have taken the time (or taken on the capacity) to take this step back and ensure that the building is designed around the collective experience of the leaders, teachers and students who already know what its like to use technology in schools not designed to accommodate it.

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Next time; CCTV and Access Control - how to save money and actually get the provision you want

Dominic Norrish
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Why innovation in education will remain an extreme sport

2010-01-29T17:52:00.000Z

Reading Becta's Impact of Digital Technology paper from the end of last year I was struck by agency's use of the phrase "educational leviathan" (p21), a very refreshing if resigned admission that within this sector, pushing for change is exhaustingly slow and additional levers are needed. Or as Roy Scheider would have said, "We're gonna need a bigger boat".

It's not just that change leadership/ innovation is tough and lonely - it's dangerous too, with the hunter just as likely to become the hunted. Becta's report goes on to explain why we often see only small changes which “fossilise practice” (e.g. Interactive Whiteboards; technology bending to fit schools, in Heppell's phrase) due to the risk of innovation.

Being risk averse is no surprise if you are under constant psychological attack; from the students who are quick to label your teaching boring; the colleague whose lessons always sound disconcertingly fantastic through the wall; from parents who – having been to school themselves – are naturally experts in the field; and principally from an inspectorate which is ready at a moment’s notice (well, 2-5 days anyway) to grasp any teachers’ self respect and confidence and run it through with a demonic trident labelled ‘satisfactory’. Ok, that was a little over the top, but it’s only been three years and I'm still incensed by it.

Such are the internal and external attacks levelled against anything that challenges the orthodoxy in education, an abundance of confidence is needed to innovate, which is why innovators may occasionally come across as self-publicising and just a little bit pleased with themselves. The pressures of the education system do not breed self-deprecating innovators, so we shouldn't be surprised or (too) homicidal if they use Twitter to remind the world hourly of their total awesomeness. Back on point, however, I suspect that we won't see widespread innovation or even acceptance of change whilst the system retains top-down measures of effectiveness and a big stick approach to 'failing' schools.

This paragraph contains a series of massive generalisations and for any teachers reading, I exclude *you* from what follows, naturally, but it must be said... teachers are also one of the great conservative forces in education and it is the drag factor of the current workforce which holds back many innovations. Psychologically speaking, most teachers’ entire career has been a series of daily re-enforcements to the message that they are in charge. 4 years of university and many more in practice have served to underline their self-image of ‘the sage on the stage’. These are the bricks and mortar of the defensive walls we as teachers have gradually erected to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (in case your Hamlet is rusty, that was Shakespeare describing Ofsted). Technology, particularly the social kind, is massively threatening to this world view. The resistance we often see in schools towards change is a powerful, ego-protecting mechanism which is neither easily or quickly overcome.

This superb short video ridiculing people's attitude to change may seem like a farcical extreme, but it echoes for me the fear-induced or ego-preserving comments made in hundreds of staff meetings I've attended. Its message is clearly Darwinian though - adapt or perish. I remember thinking on entering the profession that it was probably the most mechanisation-proof career in the world - after all, who'd entrust their child's education to a machine - but just look at 2035 in the frankly scary education futures timeline for a revised view on that!

So, in a landscape where the castle is under siege from without by a vicious collation of enemies and its defenders are too busy frantically pushing away scaling ladders to investigate the possibilities offered by gun powder, it would seem that the cause of change and innovation is hopelessly futile. Prior to my current role, I was a deputy headteacher for four years which involved an awful lot of the management of others and here's a quote from my favourite management book which articulates quite how risky being innovative is:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them."
Niccolo Machiavelli, 'The Prince', Chapter VI

Despair not, there is an answer, but as always in education, you're probably not going to like it; Change has to begin in the local context and requires gifted leadership by charismatic people willing to put in a great deal of hard work over a number of years, all of it in the face of opposition. Change Management is every bit as logistical and process-based a challenge as something like building a new school is, but it never seems to attract the same attention or even a fraction of the funding; there's something which can easily be addressed at a national level.

Dominic Norrish. Follow me on Twitter

A Managed Service metaphor

2010-01-04T09:50:00.001Z

I often work with schools in the early stages of BSF and one of the important messages to get across is that the ICT Managed Service does not have to be a top-down imposition but, if schools engage fully in the process, can be shaped to suit their needs through a high quality Output Specification.

To paraphrase PfS' Steve Moss at a recent NAACE event, no matter what you think of ICT Managed Services in BSF, they aren't going away anytime soon, so let's focus on making the approach work really well for schools.

When talking to (understandably) sceptical heads and other school staff, I find it helpful to use an example from my 'real life' to illustrate how the MS can be defined and provide real benefits. This is because I have recently opted to take a Managed approach to my requirements for a car Service, and for the same reasons schools are encouraged to.

Rather than buying a car as a capital investment, I have (like many others these days) entered into what is effectively a Managed Service contract with the supplier, under which they provide the car, service it and fix it and give me a replacement if it breaks down; effectively it belongs to them, as does the all the risk. My responsibilities include not damaging it, keeping under an agreed mileage and paying a fixed, monthly fee, for which I get to drive it places.

Unsurprisingly, as the customer, I had a choice in the spec of the car I would receive rather than being given the same thing that the supplier gives to everyone, and it was the same level of choice that a cash-purchaser would have. Schools have exactly this agency in the BSF process, and the Managed Service needs to be understood as the outcome of the SfC and Output Specification documents, rather than being a generic and monolithic slab of inappropriate IT.

Prior to this experience, I've 'fully' owned cars and for various reasons, not done terribly well out of the deal, having to assume the entire risk for their management and maintenance. I cannot maintain my own car and I neither want to or see why I should have to. My interest in the automobile is limited to its affordances (it gets me places quickly and in relative comfort/ solitude) rather than how it works. My understanding of the internal combustion engine begins and ends with the fact that it makes petrol explode in some cleverly controlled fashion, which spins the spinny bit and makes the wheels move. But that's fine; I don't need to know any more than this, my expertise is directed entirely towards driving the thing without incident.

Such should also be the case with schools' ICT systems. I cannot think of many other medium sized businesses (say an hotel, for example) which are so intricately involved in the technical management of the ICT they use, with all the risk of failure that this carries. A Managed Service provides a system which is contractually guaranteed to work as requested, and should allow school leaders and teachers to focus all of their ICT-thinking on what to do with the technology, not how to get and keep it working.

The perception that a Managed Service ties the user's hands should also be challenged. True, if I decide I want to suddenly upgrade my VW Fox for an Alfa Romeo Spider, there may be a small implication for my monthly revenue cost but BSF Managed Service contracts are evolving to remove restraints and are much more flexible. For instance, it is now common for the contract to be structured in such a way that schools wishing to try something new and innovative (previously a big no-no for MSPs, who would be responsible for making it work) can agree with the ICT provider to effectively 'switch off' parts of the ICT contract while the trial takes place. The upshot of this is that schools aren't restricted to the technology specified at the start of the contract and MSPs aren't penalised for allowing this experimentation.

The elephant in the room of course is that even the most advantageous and appropriate Managed Service cannot itself transform how ICT is actually used by schools. The fact that I chose to drive my Managed Service car only between my house and Tescos is not the fault of the car but of the driver's vision. This issue is well understood by PfS and a greater (funded) emphasis on the (visioning) SfC stage and the (making it happen) Change Management aspect was recently recommended by the recent Beyond Buildings inquiry.

To sum up, Managed ICT Services can work for schools, the secret is to get in and drive the process. Here endeth the tenuous metaphor.

Dominic Norrish
Follow me on Twitter @domnorrish

Digital exams - the future of assessment

2009-12-22T17:26:00.016Z

I write as a serendipitously successful product of the school system and as an individual who found examinations to be, if not fun, then at least a satisfying opportunity to demonstrate how hard I had worked, but I recognise that this makes me a bit weird and not representative of the wider population. So, reading about Ofqual's announcement in last Thursday's Times that children entering primary school next September will sit digital GCSE and A Levels when they reach Key Stages 4 and 5, I was briefly filled with hope that one of the major bastions of our nineteenth century education model was being slated for (very gradual) demolition. Hopeful that is until I read the public's comments at the foot of the story.

The criticism centres around two highly charged points. Firstly that all this will be cheaper for the exam boards to administer, the implication being that for an assessment system to be of value it should be paper-heavy, unwieldy and bureaucratic; I don't pretend to understand this point of view. Secondly, voices of dissent were raised over the effect of online exams on the nation's handwriting. I'll have to admit I'm struggling with the import of this one too.

On the plus side though, potentially thousands of children with perfectly functioning and useful brains but who've otherwise been failed by poor literacy (think screen readers and voice recognition software in tests), social pressures or nerves (imagine exams taken whenever and wherever the student prefers), short attention spans or small memories (with learners able to demonstrate what they can do, not what they know) may just be able to emerge from school with something to show for it. Other than neat handwriting, of course.

Despite the impotent fuming of the Times' readership (and if ever there was a neat demographic overlapping successful exam-passers with those with a vested interest in the status quo, this is it), online examinations seem to be an international trend. The BBC report that the Danish government are also of the opinion that "if the internet is so much a part of daily life, it should be included in the classroom and in examinations" and I find it hard to disagree. Information has been truly democratised (a movement started by Gutenberg in the mid-C15th and continued by Google in the late-C20th) and is available to all, irrespective of an individual's capacity to retain it, so for me one of the key challenges in education over the next decade is to devise assessments which measure how well students do something with all this information. This is indeed the Danish ambition, where the students are "no longer required to regurgitate facts and figures. Instead the emphasis is on their ability to sift through and analyse information"

In my opinion, the most salient argument for open-laptop exams is that the current system does not reflect 'real life' and thus is not really measuring anything that's of use to society. An example from the world beyond school is illustrative here; take a medium-sized organisation (a government department, say), which has occasional tasks or problems which present themselves (e.g. a report which needs to be researched, written, checked and released to the media). Such tasks could be identified, I am certain, in any work context across the UK, but in none of these real contexts would the task be sprung on single employees who are then stripped of their access to the wider canon of human knowledge and experience, quarantined from others and sanctioned against collaborating, given tools which constrain creative thought, speed of work and their ability to manipulate language and told to get it done in 3 hours. No; for the C21st century skills of creativity, problem solving and team work, a different model of examination will be needed.

Real life just isn't like that, so why is our exam system so restrictive? The answer, of course, is *history* (for which read 'inertia' and a fair degree of "If it was good enough for me..." See Times comments above...). Written examinations are a paradigm of assessment dreamt up in the C18th by scholars who lived in a culture and a time where learning and intelligence were judged by one's ability to memorise facts. It's worth remembering that this was an age where books were mankind's only way of storing its collective knowledge; developing human receptacles into which a lot of this information could be poured, stored and rapidly searched & recalled was highly prized and these individuals' storage capacity needed measuring. The written examination was first used in the 1850s to promote social mobility (cue bitterly ironic laughter) but today remain only a demonstration of studiousness or memory, and in some cases both (though not in mine!)

Epistemologically, exams are the logical result of projecting an empiricalist philosophy onto education and politicians love the scientific purity of this; the numbers speak clearly to the voter in the street. However, you don't need to be a genius to work out that there is no 'provable truth' in anything as diverse and organic as a school, you just have to have worked in one, which may explain why this approach remains so enduringly popular in government. Still, this news represents genuine progress and if a career in education has taught me anything, it's that progress in this sector is gained a foxhole at a time. To horribly paraphase a former PM, this is not the beginning of the end but it may be the end of the beginning.

Dominic Norrish, B in GCSE Religious Education ('achieved' by reading St Mark's Gospel the night before the exam).

Follow me on Twitter @domnorrish

Lies, damn lies and quantitative analyses of teachers' perceptions of technology use.

2009-11-09T12:09:00.007Z

Both BESA and Becta have released reports in recent months which present statistical evidence of how technology is used in education. Putting aside the validity issues surrounding reporting respondents' perceptions as reality, I've been struck again by the (annual) message that change in the national profile of educational use of technology only ever inches forward. Will the pace of development be fast enough to meet the challenges of the next few years?

Purely looking at kit, the growth of desktop PC numbers has slowed (and fallen in Primaries), whilst the number of laptops that schools own continues to rise steadily (BESA report). This may indicate a shift to more mobile models of access and a gradual abandonment of the concept of ‘going to the ICT room to use computers’. It may simply be that laptop prices have fallen to a level where, compared with the associated infrastructural costs of putting in fixed machines, this approach makes financial sense first and foremost. Either way, I’m pretty sure that laptops will soon be regarded as the metaphorical ‘phone box’ between the ‘landline’ of ICT suites and the ‘iPhone’ of, er, students’ iPhones. None the less, if the growth of laptops is enabling schools to experiment with agile spaces and student agency over learning style and outcome, this can only be a good thing.

Combined with improving ratios of computers to pupils (now 1:4.2 in secondaries), the ‘average’ school is now not far away from achieving a theoretical ‘virtual 1:1’ ratio, where quantities/ mobility of devices mean that a computer is available whenever its use is appropriate for learning. The 12% of secondaries that don’t have a wireless network yet must also make this leap before personalisation through ICT can be equably extended to all.

An interesting side point from the BESA evidence; a decreasing number of schools are indicating that their Internet access is 'good' (dramatically down to 41% of secondaries, compared with 73% in 2008). This, in the face of ever-better infrastructure and RBC offerings, can only mean that practices are changing and contention is increasingly an issue. Now, the challenge is to ensure the shift in practice that has seen more kids with laptops accessing video/ Flash on the web is actually focussed on genuine learning activity, rather than edutainment.

BESA’s reported drop in teacher confidence (down by about 10% across the Primary and Secondary sectors) is worrying. What does this represent? Is it that the warm glow of NOF training has finally worn off and teachers now feel in need of further high quality ICT training? I guess that’s an extreme possibility, but I suspect this issue has more to do with a growing realisation of the scope and scale of the digital reality; once you’ve peeked over the cliff edge at Web 2.0, handheld learning and student-driven anywhere anytime access to learning experiences, the height can be truly dizzying. In the words of Douglas Adams, it scares the willies out of me, so it wouldn't surprise me if many teachers felt anxious about the rise of increasingly in-your-face technologies.

Workforce issues have been the consistent Number 1 barrier to change I’ve encountered in any of the schools I’ve worked in and alongside. If we are ambitious for the ‘creeping change’ mentioned in the first para to turn into transformational strides, teachers’ exposure to new technologies, their willingness to experiment with them and to take the risk of using them in anger will be critical. I wait to see the full offering from Vital, but I’m fairly sure that until each school takes a structured, colleague-led approach to both sharing best practice and coaching teachers in the use of ICT, this problem will persist. For some evidence to back up this assertion, have a look at Davis, Preston and Sahin’s article on an ‘ecological approach’ to developing technological pedagogies (British Journal of Educational Technologies, 2009 Vol. 40, No. 5 pp861-878) if you have access to a University library.

Moving on, the growing use of ePortfolios seen in Becta’s research is encouraging, with 1 in 5 respondents reporting that all learners are encouraged to use this type of technology to record their achievements and capabilities. To me, creating a culture across our schools where evidence is routinely gathered, commented on, used to explore next steps and shared between staff, learners and their families is an absolute precursor to the long-overdue overhaul of England’s assessment paradigm. If we are ever, as a nation, to move away from summative measurement of the regurgitation of hastily learned content towards a process by which capabilities and soft skills are evaluated and accredited, schools’ successful practice with ePortfolios will be one of the tipping points.

Less positively, Becta’s analysis of Web 2.0 type stuff is characterised, I think it’s fair to say, by cautious pessimism; “Web 2.0 technologies and learners’ own devices such as mobile phones are used only infrequently in classrooms – there may be scope to further develop their use” (p11), “It may be difficult to reach the target for all schools to be making full use of learning platforms by 2010” (p12) and, commenting on the fact that the majority of teachers do not encourage the use of social software (and that 12% did not know what a Wiki was) “These findings will be somewhat disappointing to those who advocate the importance of the learning potential of social software and social media” (p22). Considering that almost all discussion of innovative practice centres around the use of social media, this is indeed disappointing.

The standout ‘must try harder’ area in my opinion is around Parental Engagement. The broad range of respondents to Becta’s surveys identified this as improving but also as having the greatest potential to have a positive impact if fully embraced. I suspect, however, that additional levers will be required if schools are to make the most of the ambition summed up in the concept of ‘live reporting’, such are the challenges of policy, practice and technical integration required to put meaningful information (e.g. more than raw numbers straight out of the MIS) into the hands of parents in a way which they can easily, intuitively and securely access. On a related note, when you consider how powerfully communicative a relatively low-maintenance web presence can be, I’ll admit to being stunned at the statement that 86% of schools now “have a website”. So that’s just 1 in every 7 which need dragging into 1997 then...

A further (and possibly sunnier) analysis of Becta's numbers can be found in Bob Harrison's piece for the NCSL; well worth a read.

Dominic Norrish (follow me on Twitter: @domnorrish)

Can ICT help fight child obesity?

2009-11-03T10:56:00.003Z

It is said that obesity is one of the biggest health challenges we face. With millions of children and millions of adults in this weight category it is clear that the excess body fat that these people carry will increase their risks of poor health. Statistics from the National Heart Forum illuminate the trends in this area.

There are many school based initiatives too with one reported in the TES this week about the work of Shotton Hall School in Peterlee, who are using drama to educate students on how to eat healthily.

Discoveries originating in Cambridge have changed scientific thinking in thisfield which are far too complicated for me to blog about here, but covered cells, energy, heat generation and enzyme complexes over 20 years.

Studies in the context of ‘inherent disorders of the human metabolism’ illustrate that some people who are in the obesity category are there through no conscious behaviour of their own. Researchers have found that a lack of a protein called leptin or the way the body uses leptin in the brain can lead to uncontrollable appetite. (p238 The University of Cambridge and 800th Anniversary Portrait). So, it’s clear that some people need as much help as possible to control their appetite.

We can’t begin to use ICT in schools to monitor effects at this level or indeed recommend treatments for students, that is down to parent and carers interactions with the medical profession. What we can do though is use to ICT to understand the relationship between the child we are caring for and their consumption of food in school.

Early cashless catering systems did only what their name suggested; catered cashlessly. What we are now seeing within the Electronic Point of Sale arena is more and more information processing and more and more integration.

More visibility is being granted, because parents and carers can set preferences regarding the quantities and items that a youngster selects for their school lunch. For example, schools, parents, even the student can also restrict certain items –where a child has a nut allergy or a maximum weekly portion number of ‘unhealthy’ food types

More integration is helpful, because systems will allow parents and carers to log in from home to add money to their child’s account and at the same time modify the selection preferences. We are also seeing card and biometric systems that are not only being used for catering but used for registration, access control and also at community kiosks for account creation, and to refresh passwords when they have been forgotten.

We should also remember that many of these systems are competing to evolve into a market leading position, so if you have an idea and the system doesn’t do it now, many companies will develop a functionality if it really adds value. Examples might be if you want to tie eating habits of youngsters to a particular sport to ensure they have the right type of nourishment ,or if you want to reward students with school merits for healthy eating automatically.

Clearly these systems are only one part of a bigger picture but they can certainly help to fight obesity when combined with other school initiatives.

Brendan Geoghegan

How Sustainable is ICT in Further Education?

2009-10-27T15:21:00.004Z

A question I am often asked what difference in terms of environmental impact can we make when designing our ICT solution. This is something to consider for refurbishments as well as new builds. It is estimated that Further and Higher education has approximately 1.5 million laptops and PCs, 250,000 printers and about the same number of servers. Along with the couple of bob that costs for leasing/ purchasing comes an electricity bill estimated at over £100 million per annum.

Most Principals I talk to have an expectation that ICT will grow – and why shouldn’t they? After all, a well designed ICT system has the potential to deliver real gains and efficiencies for learners. With many future FE learners already enjoying the benefits of BSF investment in ICT, expectations are rising daily and FE is a prime area for augmenting learning and delivering flexible programmes through the use of online learning packages.

With these imperatives we may be expecting (or investing in) a level of growth that is unsustainable (both environmentally and economically). So how might this be mitigated? To some extent we can look to improvements in the technology over time but more importantly we need to make the right choices in system design and utilisation. This, however, assumes that a College is capable and engaged with taking a medium to long term view in implementing their ICT strategy. History teaches us this is has not always been the case, with systems developed using sporadic bursts of funding. The BCF programme offered a real chance to for a College to take a strategic view and design an ICT solution from first principles. Yes, I know ‘strategic’ is one of the most over used words in ‘management speak’, but how many colleges look to five years ahead and identify the goal and put together the plan/ steps/ funding stages to achieve that goal? The following are key areas for consideration:

* Conduct an audit of computing needs for each department
* Establish a percentage of needs that could be met by energy efficient thin client applications (which are rapidly gaining in efficiency and effectiveness and can significantly reduce the refresh cycle)
* Review storage requirements, both current and projected, and consider alternatives to high energy ‘always on and spinning’ in-house storage (a space saving measure that may lead to regaining floor space)
* Assume some servers need to remain on site but move also towards virtualisation of servers
* Prepare to blend these with Cloud-computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) hosting.
* Consider ways to automatically ‘turn off’ the ICT infrastructure when not in use
* Be rigorous in monitoring energy use and balance this with system capacity
* Reduce printing by moving to strategically placed high efficiency multi function printers and print release tracking systems
* Move further to paperless systems using document handling systems that effectively copy and file existing paper documents (and consider how much floor space that would release!)
* Make an informed estimate that within very few years, all learners will bring a WiFi enabled device to college for personal use, and build a system that will allow them access to learning materials whilst protecting your systems
* Make another informed decision that learners like to access materials remotely and at time that suit them. 24/7 learning offers colleges real opportunities.
* Save petrol. Explore the role of Skype-style video for small group tutorials. Lecturers can deliver this from college or home. Also a great support for distance learning and extended hours.

So if that is some of the meat in the sandwich (there is more and much can be done without buying lots of kit) then how would it be achieved?

Well, it’s not news that it has to be a top down and bottom up approach. Whilst that sounds just like the posture one might have to adopt to connect a device to the back on your PC, it really means that there is often an imbalance between the management agenda and that of other staff. An ICT strategy has to be shared and owned by all before implementation. It is relatively simple to set this up but it requires a targeted effort that includes all staff and particularly departmental champions.

Ultimately all parties need to accept that ICT is ‘mission critical’. There can be no 21st Century education without ICT. If this premise is accepted then management, departments and individuals can begin to fully engage in driving that agenda in positive and sustainable steps that all parties can buy into.

Stephen Norris

Why do some educationalists not recognise the benefits of ICT?

2009-10-14T22:18:00.003+01:00

I don’t for one minute believe I can answer this question in a few short sentences and I will not set out to. I do hope to illustrate some benefits recognised by those outside education yet supporting it.
Who wants to sit at a computer all day? Certainly not me!
Who wants to take longer than necessary to do a task or activity? Certainly not me!
Who wants to expose themselves to physical danger through a lack of knowledge or preparation? Certainly not me!

Although it is unpleasant to sit at a computer all day it has to be recognised in life, in business and in education that sitting at the computer is not only necessary to communicate but it is necessary for the production of many business outcomes. It is also necessary to improve the speed of production and the quality of these business outcomes. Very often the nature of the outcome is vastly enhanced too by the use of the computer.

At one time the computer associated with my work was a luxury for doing critical path analysis in new product development instead of working on paper. The computer beautifully and automatically identified key moments in development to make sure the right thing was being done to enable the new product to hit the market smoothly.
The computer then became an important device to support me at the end of the day whilst processing my evidence from classroom observations and interviews whilst inspecting schools.

It has now become an integrated part of my working life with ongoing connectivity for communication throughout the day for discussion and document sharing, a way into online documentation and national guidance, a tool for creating documents and presentations, a tool for capturing the views of staff and youngsters in schools and a storage device for the many agendas and meeting minutes.

There are some within education that do not value the contribution that the computer can bring; why is that? Do these people have a good understanding of the computer’s capability? Do these people appreciate the importance of the individual to effectively integrate with a computer when they leave school or college to operate productively in a business, scientific, technological or other employed or self employed environment?

If a student is not fully exposed to the wide range of functionalities of the computer they will not be ready and they will be disadvantaged. Students need to be able to engage effectively with the computer environment and in some cases be comfortable to learn using the technology in self motivated and self directed way. This doesn’t happen on its own!

Developments are ongoing to improve the technology available and also to improve the way technology is used. Within the last 10 years we have seen an incredible shift from the point where complex modelling software needed to run on a local PC, to the point where modelling can quite happily take place on the internet with real time cause and effect displayed well.

The Royal Society of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Company Pfizer have teamed up to create the ‘Discover Chemistry Programme’. They are concerned about the future of the chemical industry and wish to promote skills in this area. One area of focus in this respect is an initiative linked to Bristol University to distribute Labskills software. This software allows students to experiment ‘virtually’ in the first instance and become familiar with the experimental environment and safety issues. The idea being that students are more confident when they enter the lab, and engage with the chemistry in a more meaningful and safe way.

Some in education would think it a surprise that the Royal Society of Chemistry would promote such virtual working. However, the educational environment is not ideal for all students and time constraints can inhibit the effective progress of many. It is seen very much as a supplement to real practical work.

I hope those in education that fail to see the benefit of ICT will recognise the benefits seen by the Royal Society of Chemistry and also be thankful to the commercial organisation Pfizer for their investment and similarly thankful to Bristol University for recognising the need and developing a virtual environment to make this happen.

I hope that the software is used in the spirit for which it is intended, is used appropriately and supplements the ‘real’ practical work of students. It would be a shame for students not to be able to use the software; it would be a disaster if it replaced real experiments through financial or curriculum constraints.

To read more about the Discover Chemistry Programme visit;

http://www.rsc.org/Education/DiscoverChemistry/index.asp

Brendan Geoghegan

Naace's Autumn conference 2009

2009-10-12T15:24:00.009+01:00

This year's Autumn Naace conference took place last Friday and Saturday and, as it was my first experience of this, I thought I'd share a couple of things I learned.

1. The Home Access programme, for all its potential pitfalls and doubtless negative future press ("Barmy Becta's mobile devices sold for glue" etc) looks like it could be a truly transformational initiative, making a real difference to disadvantaged families. This is, after all, what central government should be all about. Becta's Steve Goodman gave details of the offer (device + support + connectivity + software + assistive kit if required), who was eligible (Free School Meals families, essentially, starting with those in KS2 + 3) and the news that they plan to get 270,000 households safely across the Digital Divide by late 2011, regardless of the looming spectre of Gove et al. My opinion is that if these devices are to most effective (most will be mobile), they need to integrate successfully with any Managed Service being offered by BSF projects. This is partly a challenge for MSPs but it would be reassuring to know that Becta had thought about it too (perhaps through a basic set of standards all devices would comply with?). In summary though; looks exciting!

2. Vital Skills (a DCSF-funded regionally-delivered project from eSkills UK and the OU) is positioning itself as the antidote to NOF, which is good because I'm still suffering recurrent symptoms. I was hoping to leave this session with a clear understanding of what Vital's concrete offering would be, but I'm still a little hazy about this. Here's what I hope will be the cornerstones; school-based, colleague-led, practice-driven initiatives which go far beyond 'training'. Debbie Forster and Peter Twining raised this very interesting question however; why we as teachers spend so long developing brilliant practice for helping others learn, but revert to the simplest and least effective of didactic methods when engaging in professional development ourselves...

3. Twitter at conferences; It's a good thing if contributions are evenly spread across a diverse audience. I liked Chris Gerry's suggestion that people offer live criticism of his section, so that he could rebut it there and then!

4. New Line Learning. I already know a fair bit about this project (these two Kent Academies are clients of Novatia) but I was blown away by the clarity and scope of Dr. Chris Gerry's vision for how ICT should be impacting on students' lives. The Business Intelligence model he described (essentially getting to grips with as much knowledge about learners as is possible, from a range of sources, and using similar historical data to see which interventions work best with these groups of young people) has the potential to fundamentally change how the education sector uses data; honestly, it's an information revolution in the making. Talking to a fellow delegate on the way out, we wondered why the big MIS players hadn't addressed this before and concluded that it must have been down to the market's appetite for such a product. But if New Line Learning can get it to work as described on the tin, I can't think of a school in the world that wouldn't want to buy it, such is the ability to intervene and change lives it will afford.

Congratulations to Naace and all the contributors for two very illuminating days.

Dominic Norrish

Smart phones to overtake PCs by 2011... School use to follow?

2009-09-24T11:57:00.009+01:00

Becta's TechNews service (which is excellent by the way; digestible and just technical enough) recently commented that recent trend analyses indicate that more smart phones than PCs will by sold in 2011.

This is staggering, but quite believeable once you consider all the people you know who have iPhones* who, to be fair, aren't exactly members of the technorati. OK, so my mum may still be clinging onto her Nokia 3210 ("It makes phone calls, why would I change it?"), but in every meeting I attend there are at least 3 iPhone-toting ladies and gentlemen of *ahem* advancing years whose interest in technology seemingly plataued with Pong, happily sharing photos of various grandchildren.

Smart Phones are probably best understood as miniature computers with the additional capacity to make telephone calls. Mine has wi-fi for the internet (and has thus become the weapon of choice in settling arguments over obscure TV actors) as well as 3.5g access to mobile data when I'm out and about. It checks my emails and synchronises with my calendar and tasks. I runs downloaded programmes (it comes with Word and Excel already). It's got a bunch of videos from BBC iPlayer of Charlie Brooker getting angry about stuff for when I'm stuck on the tube. It plays music and could replace my iPod touch if I could be bothered. The GPS is fantastic too - I was in Paris this Summer and it enabled me to navigate my way around, checking Wikipedia entries wherever I went (Coco Chanel was a collaborator? Zut alors!) and see photos of the street view to help me recognise things I was looking for. In short, it's a thing of beauty and joy and just 2 years ago, did not exist.

Education would be mad to ignore this. Once virtually every learner has in their pocket a device which can access the internet at high speed, run programmes, display video and audio, the posibilities for how this could impact in schools are incredible. I'm working with several new build schools at the moment and it's amazing to think that the laptops they are planning to purchase are really just an interim solution to bridge the gap between the ICT suites of yesteryear and tomorrow's student-owned device promise.

The challenges are considerable however. Inappropriate use of phones is a real and constant issue for schools now and technical solutions are needed to help mitigate this risk before schools can be realistically expected to embrace the technology. This can be partially addressed at the policy/ sanctions level but it would be interesting to see if management software for phones could be created to automate this, just as exists to control the use of the school's PCs currently.

For me, the real hurdle to overcome is that of input; yes, the iPhone has a touch-interface keyboard, but you really wouldn't want to have to enter your rambling blog entries using it. Equally, my E71 has an ultra small form-factor querty keyboard. It's my normal form-factor fingers which are the problem. Unless this issue can be solved (projected keyboards?), Smart phone use will probably remain nomadic and ad hoc, but useful none the less.

I'd give my E71 to my mum when I next upgrade if it wasn't for her response to my request to upgrade the family TV to colour in 1986; "I'm just waiting to see if they've got it right before I try it out".

*other smart phones are available

The National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services –Formerly the National College for School Leadership

2009-09-24T11:53:00.000+01:00

The National College for School Leadership has an expanded remit and has become the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services.
This evolution of the responsibilities of the college should provide a really useful catalyst to continue the evolution of thinking and action around the Every Child Matters agenda.

Joined up thinking and services are a key aspiration to ensure that each young person gets the support they need, when they need it. Some youngsters require more from support services than others, some for short periods and some for long periods of time.

Advances in ICT integration and infrastructure provides the opportunity for up to date key information to be available 24/7 to the professionals involved with each child. But how joined up are systems and how joined up are the decisions made by professionals when dealing with youngsters and their very individual issues?

Within the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, consideration of the Wider Children’s Services is a key strand of the new Partnership for School’s ICT Output Specification. School priorities and Local Authority Priorities for this strand require articulation to ensure that a prospective ICT Partner who will be providing the ICT services, will deliver a system to do exactly what is required.

Why wait for BSF though? Our engagements require clear Strategic Thinking around the use of ICT in schools and its integration with the Wider Children’s services. Much of this thinking can take place early within existing organisational reporting structures on policy and practice. A well thought out Educational ICT Strategy will ease the path to progress through the BSF programme and help to ensure that the right support gets to young people when they need it.

To learn about the work of the National College visit;
http://www.nationalcollege.org.uk/about-us

Brendan Geoghegan

iPod Touch - enhancing learning for all

2009-09-18T09:56:00.001+01:00

Following on from my post about the latest iPod Touch’s screen reading capability, the very size of this device offers a lot to schools. We often talk about the affordability and functionality of devices when selecting technology to enhance learning. What about the ergonomics of the device or the size and bulkiness of devices in particular in relation to portability?

I think about this in relation to the use of technology in a crowded classroom setting and all youngsters wanting to use devices at the same time and in many cases wanting to use them as they move around the classroom or around the school.

Youngsters grow at different rates and it could be rather challenging for a slightly built secondary school student to carry their personal device around all day and en route to and from school. Even more challenging for youngsters in the primary phase!
It is great to see the smaller devices extend and improve their offering in relation the technological functionality and also in relation to educational software that supports youngsters in their learning.

A school has recently used the iPod touch with a full class of youngsters in the primary phase and they have been really impressed by the way they were used.
The devices were configured to run through the school wireless system with appropriate filtering in place and pupils confidently and independently learned about elements of History and the demise of the wives of Henry VIII. Not only do the youngsters use the devices as instructed, they intuitively explore additional functionality and learn to select content from the internet and edit it in a word processing application.

The use of these devices would help all discussions with architects regarding heat generation and power consumption if they can accommodate the required educational needs in the many learning contexts.

The iPods have certainly captured the imagination of the youngsters, they learned to use them quickly and they clearly enjoyed their learning. Don’t take my word for it, have a look for yourself on the Learn 4 Life website.

Brendan Geoghegan

Latest iPods help the visually impared to access learning

2009-09-14T21:33:00.008+01:00

Access to technology requires very careful consideration for many users and for many reasons. For some the reason may be a physical difficulty or a physical attribute that they as an individual do not possess.

I remember doing my Masters Degree in the late 90’s and feeling challenged myself when it came to using the keyboard quickly enough to get the 20,000 words of my thesis into the machine. I looked at voice recognition at this time and found it so ‘clunky’ that I realised my keyboard skills were perhaps more developed than I realised, even if some way short of a press correspondent or company secretary competence.

For many, Access considerations will require the purchase of additional hardware or additional software but for some, support can be provided through the configuration of the device in its standard form.

One such example is the iPod touch (3^rd Generation) Voice Over. This device has a set up function that enables a blind person to hear about the part of the screen and the functionality they are engaging with. This feature, combined with additional user gestures, enables a blind person to access the device and its functionality. It does it in a way that enables the user to understand the context of their engagement rather than in a bland list of functions or commands enabling the blind person to build up a good mental picture of the electronic environment.

This feature is incredibly available in 21 languages currently too and the speed of the voice is adjustable to suit the listening capability of each individual.

So, when carrying out user assessments to improve accessibility, don’t forget to consider all of the functions that many providers include within products as standard features.

Brendan Geoghegan

Nokia Booklet 3g - a breakthrough for anywhere anytime learning in (and out of) schools

2009-09-03T10:00:00.004+01:00

‘Anytime Anywhere’ learning permeates many documents related to the visions of new Academies, within School Strategy for Changes and local Authority Strategy for Change 2 documents within the BSF programme but providing the technology to support this aspiration has always been a challenge.

Affordability and device functionality are key compromises within the battle to meet this ‘Anytime Anywhere’ aspiration and also to support sustainability through maintaining refresh levels in the ICT Managed Service provision.

Learners will use many types of device in their learning. In some contexts a small handheld device is sufficient to provide the information or functionality required. In other contexts, large screens and significant processing power is required and provided through a large desktop device.

Mobile phone functionality has increased significantly in recent years and I personally have got on really well with Mobile devices that run Windows Mobile Software (Versions 5 and 6) with synchronisation to Web based email and Outlook services a real asset.

My laptop use in the field is enhanced by the use of a 3G ‘Dongle’ to provide connectivity to web based services and resources. I have also had to enhance my laptop by adding a supplementary battery which replaces the CD/DVD drive when in use. This helps me to be productive for longer in the many situations where I am unable to plug into mains power.

Youngsters have these same difficulties and frustrations where technology is short of the mark in terms of connectivity and battery power. Functional Specifications go some way to ensuring that the right performance is provided during the procurement stages and it is good to see the many framework providers offering a comprehensive product range.

So it is combinations of technology that help us to be successful as a Professional and as a Student.

Other products developed to help us to select ‘fit for purpose’ devices included the netbook. Original designs offered cheap methods of browsing the internet, but less functionality than that offered by a laptop computer.

This product range is now developing further and will require additional decisions about the most appropriate combinations of technology to be selected. Personal preferences will play a big part along with functionality here.

A recent development soon to hit the market place is the new NOKIA BOOKLET 3G. The specifications have not been revealed to us yet but we do know that it is of notebook size and has some additional attractive features to influence our thinking and decisions.

One feature is integrated connectivity functionality to avoid the need for external dongles that I mentioned I used earlier. Another feature is significantly longer battery life reported to be in the order of 12 hours. Both of these features go a significant way to supporting the ‘Anytime Anywhere’ aspirations for learners in 21^st Century Schools and I look forward to hearing more about this product when it arrives in the market place.

Follow the link to have a look at the promotional video but please note the small print that *specifications are subject to change.

http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/mini-laptop

Brendan Geoghegan

802.11n: pushing wired networks to the edge?

2009-08-18T13:52:00.012+01:00

Draft 11 of the 802.11n Wireless LAN specification was published on the 23^rd of June 2009 and looks set to be ratified in September. What does this mean for schools implementing wired and wireless networks? Does the promise of faster wireless signal the demise of wired networks and cost savings for school construction? This is a more technical post …

I’ve been reflecting on the wired vs. wireless debates we regularly encounter in BSF and Academies and recalled the battle for market supremacy between Token Ring and Ethernet in the early days of LAN technology. Back then, in the blue corner was IBM (and a company called Proteon) and in the red corner was everyone else. Ethernet was a descendant of a radio technology called ALOHAnet where users would ‘shout-out’ and compete for access to the network whilst Token Ring used a ‘pass-the-parcel’ technique more suited to IBM’s sense of order.

Token Ring was a superior technology; its ‘token-passing’ approach yielded 80% effective throughput under load compared with Ethernet’s measly 40%, and it used star-wired hubs with self-healing trunks. But Token Ring’s cleverness and IBM’s near-monopoly came at a price and that, ultimately, was its downfall. Ethernet chipsets were cheaper to produce and vendors then addressed Ethernet’s other shortcomings using smarter hubs and switches as transmission speeds over UTP cabling increased from 10BASE-T to 100BASE-T to 1000BASE-T and now 10GBASE-T. The rest, as they say is history.

So what does this jaunt down memory lane have to do with the wired vs. wireless debate? Ironically, 20 years on Ethernet might appear to be under threat from another contention-based radio technology; more specifically the ‘soon-to-be-ratified’ 802.11n which WLAN vendors would have you believe – citing transmission speeds of 600Mbit/s - will do away with wires for good. If you’re involved in a school capital rebuild or refurbishment you could also be on the receiving end of pressure from builders to install the minimum of UTP cabling to slash their M&E budget and hub room sizes. “Everyone has a home wireless network, so why can’t a school?”. No-one would argue that wireless LANs are incredibly convenient for home and mobile use but they simply can’t match wired network performance for ICT-rich learning so be prepared to stand firm!

The two fundamental constraints of WLAN technology which still exist in 802.11n are the contention for use of the Access Point radio and the propagation behaviour of RF transmissions. Both factors mean that effective throughput drops with increasing users and distance. 802.11n draft 2 products are already deployed, certified by the Wi-Fi alliance, which suggest that 100-120Mbit/s is the likely real-world throughput for a single 802.11n Access Point. Admittedly more access points and clever proprietary features can improve this capacity and resolve cell design constraints.

With plenty of ifs, buts, and some careful network design a single Access Point can give a ‘class’ of 15 laptops a learning experience broadly similar (at 8Mbit/s) to a decent home broadband service. Is it educationally beneficial though to impose this constraint within a 21^st Century school? Probably not. Should schools be aspiring to serving up media-rich content up to 100 times quicker; the difference between a human runner and a jumbo jet taking off? Well, probably, yes. Especially when they’re investing a large portion of the ICT budget in user devices which can exploit Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

For now wired networks still have the edge in other areas too including traffic control and end-point management. WLAN security is a moot point where WPA2 AES encryption is in use - but still a concern in poorly-controlled environments - and there’s an increasingly vocal lobby pressing for removal of wireless from schools altogether on health grounds.

Fortunately wired and wireless networks aren’t mutually exclusive so the best new school designs have hybrid networks that do both; horses for courses; wireless for convenience and wired for performance. Clarity about the function of learning spaces is the key to getting this balance right; avoiding over-reliance on wireless and over-engineering of wiring. A broad principle is to provide robust ‘blanket’ wireless coverage throughout the building environs and also wire every structured learning and admin space according to expected device occupancy. Additional ceiling cabling allows wireless capacity to be added later as more densely populated spaces mature. Less structured learning zones and open plazas also need wiring precisely because of their intended flexibility and often the best way to provide this is using floorboxes (cue sharp intake of builder’s breath and words like ‘slab’ and ‘screed’).

Will wireless LANs ever kill off wired Ethernet in the way Ethernet did with Token Ring? Well certainly not within the lifetime of the current round of capital investment in schools, especially with Ethernet heading for 10Gbit/s speeds, and not if we have to unplug wireless networks as a result of a Health & Safety scare. I’ll post more on 802.11n deployment, 10G Ethernet and WAN bottlenecks in a later post. My advice for now? Stay wired.

Rich Torr

Becta comes under fire as a Schools Quango too far

2009-08-14T10:19:00.006+01:00

I usually save feelings of worldweariness for stories I read in a copy of the Daily Mail picked up in error from the tube seat next to mine, thinking it was a Metro. However, the BBC's coverage of a thinktank report on educational quangos yesterday made me just as depressed. And anyone who knows what an irrepressible optimist I usually am will be shocked by that revelation.

The innocent-sounding Centre for Policies Studies (front page of website: video of Dave Cameron) has written a report calling for 11 educational quangos to be culled, amongst them Becta and PfS. I won't even start on the logic behind getting rid of bodies such as the NCSL and QCDA (after all, who needs skilled school leaders or an appropriate curriculum?) but will instead focus my attention on the technology-facing bodies. Ray Fleming's Microsoft UK Schools blog also talked about this topic - go and have a look if you don't already subscribe.

First up, let me declare an interest; I've worked with several people from both bodies on new build school projects and have even freelanced on some research for Becta back in the mists of time when I was an ICT teacher. However, what follows is offered in the spirit of common sense.

Becta first: the job of this body is to develop the use of technology in schools and colleges and through things like their Self Review Framework, ICT Mark and the targets set for the take up of Learning Platforms, things are (slowly) changing. Schools must bear some of the weight of responsibility to engage in these processes too, though. It is recognised by all the teachers I know that to meet the needs of the '21st Century learner' schools' offerings need to be much more engaging and relevant. ICT is a powerful too to achieve this, and Becta is doing a pretty good job of pushing schools on this front.

The criticism always levelled at Becta is that despite all their work, little effect on exam results due to better use of technology is evident. Despite this being not (quite) true (see here), this argument is akin to criticising Usain Bolt for not winning gold in the mixed Dressage - effective use of ICT is only ever going to have a tiny impact on something as structured as the formal summative assessment of what 16 year olds can remember about the Agricultural Revolution... If our assessment system measured creativity, problem solving, the ability to work with others, or working to a deadline and to high standards, I imagine Becta's work would be seen in quite another light. Curiously enough, these kind of 'soft skills' are exactly the type of thing most employers value over a C in GCSE History. Becta's response to the CPS report can be seen here by the way.

Anyway, moving on: Partnerships for Schools. I won't go into detail, I think brevity will aid the point here - my informed and personally-experienced opinion is that without PfS, it's structures, processes and the very talented people behind them, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that any Building Schools for the Future project would every be transformational or amount to an effective use of public money. Newly built schools would be architecturally splendid but educationally vapid and within them, the teachers further disillusioned and the children robbed of an appropriate preparation for life in the modern world. Now there's something the Daily Mail would really get hot under the collar about...

eAssessment for schools - millstone or life ring?

2009-07-28T09:04:00.007+01:00

Gerald Haigh's '5 Things To Think About' is an excellent blog from the NCSL covering all things BSF. Sign up to the RSS feed if you don't already.

His most recent blog details some very interesting developments in the field of eAssessment, particularly the pioneering approach a region of Norway is taking.

This made me think about the problem, and the opportunity of assessment. In my experience of consulting on multiple BSF and single school capital build projects, getting heads and teachers enthused about the transformational potential of ICT is an exciting process, but almost always stumbles against the, er, mixed metaphor of assessment hiding in the long grass.

"This is all very well," the Head of English/ Curriculum Deputy/ Chair of Governors will say "but I've got 190 year 11s who need to be able to write a coherent exam essay within 45 minutes or our GCSE results will suffer". They're right to be concerned as this is high-stakes stuff - schools live and die by their exam results and the league tables they produce. And this is the sticking point - one arm of government is promoting innovation and transformation of pedagogies, whilst another is forcing schools to continue orthodox practices, because of the requirement to be able to measure schools' performance. Summative exam results provide easily comparable data to do just this.

A similar mixed message can be seen in the Harnessing Technology strategy, which promotes the development of ePortfolios as the ongoing, slowly-growing, holistic record of everything a learner has achieved and is capable of. As a method of demonstrating a lifetime of learning, transferable ePortfolios are surely a more accurate description of students' ability and experience than a summative test (often of learned facts) at the end of a Key Stage. However, currently very few qualifications make use of this type of evidence of learning and therefore progress at a school level in the use of ePortfolios is unlikely to reach any meaningful level.

Even more fundamentally, we as a nation need to consider summative assessment in the digital age. When the entire cannon of human knowledge is accessible via your mobile phone's internet browser, should the measuring of one's retention of facts have such a dramatic influence on your future life chances? Surely post-Google, it's how you judge the reliability of information and then what you do with it which is more important?

It seems clear (to me at least) that the solution to the Assessment conundrum needs tackling at a policy level. Examination boards are eager to progress eAssessment; schools are gradually implementing the infrastructure to support it; students are keen to utilise powerful, familiar tools and wider evidence of their ability; but direction and impetus is needed from the different layers of government in Whitehall but also it's agencies and organisations such as Becta and Ofsted. Until a clear and unambiguous direction is set, the potential of technology to transform assessment will be hobbled.

So, let's imagine a future education system with a mature eAssessment model;
*ePortfolios and online 'stage not age' access to examinations provide the means to accurately measure (as I don't think we're going to get away from this requirement) the success of schools in helping students to make progress.
*The nature of these tools offer a genuine picture of learning, not only exam technique or memorised facts.
*Schools are freer to concentrate purely on learning, not the evidencing of this, and feel the confidence to innovate and explore different ways of doing things.
*Models of learning and of teaching are challenged and transformed, without the fear of a 2% drop in GCSE results hanging over practitioners...
*...and learners benefit from a system which concentrates on their learning, not the measurement of it

Online Schooling in the UK?

2009-07-27T10:18:00.008+01:00

'Learning without Limits' by Christine Van Dusen. EsN April 2009

Whilst I was reading this interesting special report in-school News www.K-12.com/educators, I was struck by the notion that although there seems to be some evidence that the nature of schooling is beginning to change in the United States, with 44 states offering some kind of online schooling within their public school provision, very little seems to be happening in the UK.

Online schooling is still seen to be very much as the domain of the sick, disabled or celebrity pupils who can’t attend normal schooling . Online students are thought to be considerably worse off and less well socialised than normal school pupils. However, the US experience seems to contradict this with many normal schools using online schooling to address greater personalisation and augment their curriculum to allow students to raise their attainment levels and learn at their own pace. This would seem also to reduce stress on fixed resources, allow for more flexible use of time, respond to pupils' learning styles and encourage motivation and engagement. The responsibility for learning can be shared between the teacher and the pupil as the basis of online schooling is greater interaction between teachers and learners and between learner and learner and allows for just as much opportunity for group work and collaboration as the traditional school.

As many local authorities are looking at rebuilding their school estate, now might be the time to consider the potential contribution of online schooling to the transformation of learning in the future. Schools are already heavily engaged in tackling the problems of more flexible working required by the 14-19 curriculum and online schooling may well help in this respect. School buildings could be smaller or schools could be appreciably larger but with fewer students attending the physical school at any one time. The virtual school could tackle the problems that occur through bad weather (two weeks closure every time it snows?!?) or what to do when there is a swine flu pandemic and all the schools are closed and enable learner with special needs to be truly accommodated. Students can access learning at a time, place and pace that suits them and the development of fully integrated learning platforms in every school ought to be key to the delivery of online schooling in the future.

As it is, the Government in the UK is currently suggesting that should schools have to remain closed in September to contain the spread of swine flu, students will be able to attend virtually. It remains to be seen how many schools in this country have the infrastructure and resources in place to accomodate this.

David Meaton

Games based learning or games-based teaching?

2009-07-27T09:57:00.011+01:00

Paul Pivec July 2009 http://www.becta.org.uk 'Games based learning or games based teaching?'

Paul Pivec, an Australian academic who has a 20 year background in the IT and games industry, takes a critical look at current games-based learning and, in particular, examines the lack of rigorous research evidence whether cognitive training games actually increases the skills and knowledge of the players or simply teaches them the skills they need to play the games.

He makes an interesting re-assessment about the notion of “digital natives” and poses questions about whether learners brought up in a digital world learn in any different ways than those who are not, do they utilise technology in different ways than those of the teachers who are teaching them? Pivec suggests that it could be the technology itself and the way it is used that simply appeals to creative learners, and the digital native theory is simply a marketing ploy created focused around the game.

He claims that it is the teacher-led learning activity taking place around the game that has the real potential to make a difference and this is what he prefers to call games-based teaching. This article was commissioned by Becta as part of the 'Emerging technologies for Learning' series and can be found under Technology Research.

David Meaton

Growing evidence of ICT's impact

2009-07-22T10:28:00.007+01:00

I've just been reading Becta's interim report on the evidence on the impact of ICT on learning and was struck by a number of things;

*Impact2 (2003) really did damn ICT with faint praise didn't it?! However...

*The findings of the SWEEP study into Interactive Whiteboards in the Primary sector were interesting - it's very rare for girls (and high-achieving ones at that) to benefit from ICT significantly more than boys.

*Valentine et al's (2005) work looking at the impact of home access to computers and the internet should be heartening reading for the Right Honourable Jim Knight and his Home Access programme - the claims of a 10 point impact on GCSE results are significant. I assume this means spread across 7-12 actual GCSEs, so not perhaps transforming life chances from chip shop to Oxbridge, but positive nonetheless.

*The link between eMature schools and schools which achieve well in measured outcomes is strong - Butt and Cebulla's (2006) study makes a convincing case for this, as does Ofsted's evidence (not cited in this report) that schools with the ICT Mark are 4 times more likely to be graded 'Outstanding'.

*And finally, the elephant in the room: that the process of learning is massively complex - it may not be possible to extract a single strand and demonstrate a consistent effect through current social research methods. If we've learned anything about ICT's impact in education, it's that it is only a part of the fiendishly tricky jigsaw which goes to make up a successful school.

The FE Capital Build Crisis

2009-07-22T09:06:00.008+01:00

Following the freezing of funding for the Capital Build programme in December 2009, a recent investigation by MP’s on the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee condemned the "catastrophic mismanagement" of the college building scheme which now could waste hundreds of millions of pounds. The chairman Phil Willis has been quoted as saying: "It really beggars belief that such an excellent programme which had showed real success in transforming the further education experience for students was mismanaged into virtual extinction” and that "warning signs were missed and even worse, ignored. LSC didn't notice as the total value of the projects it was considering began to overshoot the budget and a review which could have prompted action was shunted around committees and policy groups."

The problem has been that the LSC encouraged colleges to bid for funds and approved projects it did not have money for. By last November, 144 colleges had together invested tens of millions of pounds in preparing bids and getting approval from the LSC. Recently, it was announced only 13 of those projects would go ahead this year.

The term ‘beggars belief’ certainly reflected Novatia’s thinking as the story unravelled. We were working at the time with a number of colleges and their design teams on what promised to be ground breaking projects to provide learning environments and facilities in tune with their young learners. It must be noted that school leavers are increasingly expecting greater control over their learning in line with the ICT rich environments and flexible learning they are experiencing within both the Primary and Secondary sector, each of which have their own Capital Build projects.

Another key student group was that of local businesses and their employees. We know that many are pressed to get staff trained to a suitable standard whilst maintaining the business. They require the facilities and infrastructure sufficient to deliver flexible programmes both on and off site for both groups and individuals. Colleges have put a lot of time into planning for this but for most, the planned builds will never reach the chosen design.

Where do colleges go from here?

Well in the first instance, the committee of MPs have recommended that arrangements for compensation for colleges and possible solvency issues are addressed ASAP. No doubt the regional LSC teams will be working hard on this with the colleges. Also the committee MPs are keen that colleges which want to press ahead by finding alternative funding be offered government help to do so. This offers some light and some exciting possibilities but we await more details on this. We can expect that even with this, colleges' funds will need to be spread further.

What can be achieved with less funding?

Increasingly ICT is central to the any college’s strategy to reach out beyond its traditional parameters and engage with learners, business and the community on a 24/7 basis. These days’ students young and old are more likely to engage with learning through a media rich environment. For example using video, podcasts, blogs, subject based wikis, online assessment supporting all learning activity. Tutorials groups can be formed around the use of these tools augmented by the use of low-cost tele conference software such as Skype for remote tutorial support, offering both tutors to student and peer to peer support. Whether programmes are full time, part time or designed for remote learning, ICT offers the flexibility to scale programmes in a responsive and cost effective way.

As colleges consider their physical estate, ICT offers the possibility of running programmes from any location, whether that is a low-cost unit, a semi permanent base for some programmes or a local employer’s premises. With the exception of more specialist spaces, learning areas require flexibility of furniture and ease of access to a range of ICT to ensure timetabling opportunities are maximised.

Starting with a Total Cost of Ownership/ cost benefit exercise, colleges can make informed choices on use of ICT to extend their reach, maximise use of space and save on space per student. A robust and scalable ICT backbone is required and Capital/ Revenue options are increasingly worth consideration as ICT as a managed service becomes cost effective. Colleges require more ‘bang for their buck’; from experience this is only achieved by effective strategic planning and consensus building, where education and training drive a clearly designed ICT solution that meets needs both now and in a 5-10 year timeline. That is why Novatia have emailed a helpful thumbnail guide for planning, to all college Principals who may be considering their 5-10 year plan for the delivery of their 21^st century programmes, with or without help from the LSC. If you'd like a copy, email me at stephen.norris@novatia.plc.uk

Stephen Norris

The Home Access programme

2009-07-20T15:12:00.007+01:00

The government have recently announced that following successful trials in Suffolk and Oldham Council (a Novatia client), the Home Access programme is to be rolled out nationally before the end of 2009.

In case you don't know, this is an evolution from the Computers for Pupils scheme, whereby the neediest families will be provided with up to £600 eCredit with which to purchase computing and broadband services from a range of accredited suppliers.

The big idea is that by bridging the 'digital divide' between well-off and less well-off families, every child will have access to 'anywhere anytime' learning and schools will be able to extend eLearning - and particularly their use of Learning Platforms - beyond the school day. The programme is beginning by targetting students in Key Stages 2 and 3. Schools will undoubtedly have a large (if unresourced!) role to play in promoting this scheme to the families they serve.

Novatia's stakeholder data (carried out with thousands of students in schools across the country) indicates that while significant numbers have sole access to a computer and most households are connected to the internet, there remains an equally significant proportion who cannot access school eResources from home. Whilst this disconnected and under-equiped strata of learners persists, it is difficult for schools to really embed their Learning Platforms across all aspects of their business and the potentially transformational benefits of a really eMature Learning Platform are hobbled. Perhaps this funding will provide the impetus needed to get LPs to finally take off in England?

Windows 7 starts to sell

2009-07-15T13:57:00.004+01:00

Microsoft today released Windows 7 for pre-order in the UK and is reported to be selling 3x faster than Vista did in 2007.

The beta version has been widely regarded as a success and Windows 7 promises to be more stable than Vista, run older school software, run on lower spec machines such as netbooks and improve remote file access. '7' will be missing Internet Explorer (IE) however, since the EU ruled that bundling gave Microsoft an unfair advantage over other browser vendors.

The physical product will ship in October and is already being integrated into solutions offered by educational suppliers, such as RM and Ramesys.

Novatia Newswire Inaugural Blog

2009-07-15T12:34:00.003+01:00

Thanks to blogspot.com (aka Google) we can now bring you the Novatia Newswire as a live blog feed. In this blog you will find news and comment from Novatia's consultants working on ICT transformation and capital build projects in Education.