When I first read about it, the 31day Comment Challenge was one of those things I skipped over. I think if it were running over the summer I’d be more likely to get involved, but at this time of year I don’t have the time to commit to changing my online behaviour in a fairly major way.

What got me thinking about it again was a post over on Doug Johnson’s blog about his views on Twitter. His fears about the politics of Twitter chime with my worries about commenting on blogs. What if I say the ‘wrong thing’? What if I offend the person who wrote the post? What could I possibly have to say that could be of any benefit here?

The rational part of my brain tells me I’m being daft. As a blogger I love getting comments, even the ones from people who disagree with me (sometimes I like those the best, it forces me to either rethink my ideas or engage further and explain better - and I do enjoy a good argument!). But I can’t shake the worry enough to be as prolific a commentator as I would like.

But the comment challenge and Doug’s post coming into my thinking  at more or less the same time makes me think that I’m going to try and do something about it over the next few weeks. My biggest obstacle at the moment is that as great a tool as CoComment is, it rather assumes that people read and comment on blogs from one computer, and for me it more usually one of about five. As such, I haven’t got a much use out of it as I hope when I joined it. In the short term I’m finding blogs that offer email updates of comments the most useful (Now added here thanks to this plug in). In the longer term I’d love to see the option to subscribe to comments from a specific post included with Google Reader.

As an aside both Clay and Arthus dismiss the challenge as contrived and schooly. On this occasion I think they’re wrong. One of the jobs of school (or in this case our online learning community) should be to expose people to new ideas, through contrived means if necessary. The range of experiences is more important than making each one authentic.

 There’s a saying in the UK that it’s not what you know that gets you places, it’s who you know.

This was a reflection of the fact that in a Britain divided by class lines as it certainly was until the 1950’s ¹ the people who were successful were (by and large) the product of a public school ² education. Through school and family connections, young people made the contacts that would get them jobs, incomes and political power in their futures

In post-war Britain, with the introduction of a welfare state and extension of compulsory education, academic qualifications were supposed to become the new currency. Qualifications showed what you could do, and in theory at least what you were capable of doing, and have been a large part of the growth of social mobility in this country in the last 70 years. Every educational reform (the introduction of GCSEs and the 2000 reform of the A’Level system) has been designed to maintain the integrity of this idea - qualifications give people the keys to their futures.

The problem is, just as the old system failed to keep it’s currency in the new post-war world, so the system of qualifications is failing to keep it’s currency in this new connected world.

The idea that the skills young people will need can be delivered through subjects tested by formal qualifications is flawed. And even more so when schools are forced to justify their existence on the results of their pupils. Academic qualifications as they exist today are designed to test recall of knowledge, and to a limited extend the degree to which students can come to decisions based on that knowledge. To make the system fair, mark schemes are developed, patterns of answers developed and before you know where you are teachers are teaching students how to pass the exam, rather than focussing on the learning. Any incentive for schools or teachers to try new things are removed from the system by league tables and results analysis which, however well intentioned, reduces learners to statistics and forces teachers to explain why students aren’t doing better than last year.

Learners themselves don’t protest at this because they (and their parents) have been sold the lie that this is what is needed to advance in the world. Meanwhile businesses complain that new workers don’t have the skills they need, and a further tweak is made to the system. Nothing big ever changes, because we’ve all bought into the model as the best thing for our young people.

Rubbish. If this genuinely is the best system we can come with then that shows us as professional educators in a very bad light indeed. The system remains horribly biased towards those young people who have strong linguistic intelligence. Other groups of students are either able to coast through, hopefully learning some valuable life lessons through the hidden curriculum, or find themselves systematically told they are no use and churned out on to the scrap heap at 16. Some lucky ones may find alternative methods of learning (the growth of apprenticeships is one of the best thing to happen to education in the UK in the last ten years). You’ll find the rest at the bottom of our society. The poor (and getting poorer) who are becoming increasingly disconnected from the rest of society and who have very restricted access to opportunities to do anything about that. ³

There are some glimmers of hope. In England, if the proposed diploma system can break free of the political mess it finds itself in, and if actual teachers become involved in the process then it will show that other systems are viable. In Wales the Welsh Bacc looks like it is going to take off in a big way over the next few years and offers another alternative model.

But maybe those of us with one eye to the future should use the other to glance behind us. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ may offer us another glimpse at what the connected schools of the future will need to be - a place where students make contacts with people around the world who will help them shape their futures.

Why is it that all our pupils do the same courses at the same time, with people who happen to have been born between the same two Septembers as them?

Why is it that school starts and finishes at the same time for everyone?

Why is it that lessons last an hour, and then we all move round again?

Why is it that for all our talk about understanding multiple intelligences, 95% of learning and assessment is written?

Why is it that we try to manage the complicated business of learning by increasing the number of ever tiny boxes to be ticked?

Why is it that at the end of the day, it’s the teachers who leave exhausted?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘because we’ve always done it like that’ then you’re missing the point

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘that’s how it works’ then you’re not seeing the bigger picture.

We (you and me) are failing thousands of people every single day we perpetuate the myth that is the education system.

I don’t have the answers. But I have some questions, and I think that’s a good start.

Two things led to this next event. The first is the work that Mr H has been doing with his maths Unprojects. The second was a growing awareness that for all my talk of moving learning on to real enquiry based studies that made the best use of ICT, I still wasn’t walking the walk.

My year 8 History classes were due to study the Spanish Armada as the next topic, but it fell across the Easter Holidays. So I decided to rethink how I taught it. In the last lesson of term I explained that

• they were free to work with whoever they wanted, in group sizes that were up to them, but everyone had to participate
• they could research into any aspect of the Armada they wanted
• they could present their research in any way they wanted (and we talked through some options)

I then handed out all the books, sheets and booklets I could find on the subject and put the excellent ‘Battlefield Britain’ documentary on in one side of the room and let them get on with it. They had one hour to plan what they were going to do, and the finished results had to be shown on the first lesson back after Easter.

I should point out that our year 8 students were the first to come through our SMART programme, and so compared to previous years students are much better equipped to research independently, work as a team and problem solve, but some of the work I had back blew me away. It included

• A replica Spanish Galleon, built with Papier Mache
• A video of the main events leading up to the Armada being acted out
• Several reconstructions of the main events
• As well as various posters and word documents.

But I think my favourite thing about the whole process was when one group said, on handing over the memory stick with their video on…

‘Here it is sir. But don’t worry if it doesn’t work, we’ve put it on You-Tube’!!!

I’ve been meaning to blog about this pretty much since I did it, but other things got in the way. As you’ll already know if you read Damian’s blog, back in February I Skyped in to his Brit Hons class for an hour to talk about Wales and the Welsh language.

For me it was a fantastic experience, both in terms of putting what had been, until that point, a theoretical idea into practice, and in dealing with the excellent questions that the students came up with.

Damian had set up a ‘scratch pad‘ on a page on the course wiki for students to add their questions, and I actually added my first answers to that. This meant that by the time our Skype chat came about the students (and one of the other passing teachers!) were digging into the things that particularly interested them, and asking me to elaborate on the points I’d already made on the wiki. This helped keep the session on focus, and also meant their level of background knowledge before the call was pretty good.

We tested the connection the day before and everything worked really well. Needless to say, things didn’t run quite so smoothly on the day - I booted up the laptop in my room after school, and two of the school bands began practicing in the surrounding rooms! So I grabbed the laptop and ran to our office / cupboard for SMART and did the Skype from there.

I was impressed both with how easily the thing came together, and the impact it had on everyone involved. I’d like to publicly thank Damian for letting me be part of the class, and the students for their excellent questions, both on the wiki and in person. I also really appreciated the card and photo which arrived in the mail a few days later, along with a couple of items for my son, which I’m sure he’ll grow into ;0)

Back in June of last year I reflected on the idea that there must be a better way of reporting student progress to parents than the current system of annual reports and parents evenings, in which parents from pupils in one year group are encouraged to make 5 minute appointments with their son/daughters teachers to discuss their progress.

I’ve also been looking recently at ways in which we as a school start to embed key skills and reflective practice in our pupils, so this piece by Mr H set a few bells off in my head. I love the way in which pupils are being encouraged here to use a wiki to both record and reflect on their work from across the curriculum, and then that is used as the basis for a student led conference.

The challenge for us I suspect is no longer a technical one. It’s now both political and pedagogical -  how do you add something like this into the curriculum in a way which is both meaningful and valid to students (which requires it to be embedded in the heart of the curriculum, with the involvement of many staff) and manageable, both in terms of time and space to complete it and in not placing inappropriate burdens on subject teachers (which calls for a separate space on the timetable)?

I suspect the solution will come in what the Assembly described in the 14-19 reform document as ‘learning coaches’. But as of yet, I’m yet to hear a good answer on the question of who they’ll be and how the system will change to fit them.

As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, next Thursday I have to give a presentation to a group of Headteachers from mid Wales on skills based learning, and in particular the work we’ve been doing with SMART. So far, so normal, but I was also asked to provide a ‘pen portrait’ to go in the course pack.

Having never written one before I wasn’t quite sure of the tone. I wanted to be breif and focussed, but also without sounding overly pompous. In the end, this is what I came up with…

After graduating from Aberystwyth University in 2000, Dave spent four years working in Higher Education in a range of jobs focussed around skills training and widening access. Having realised he preferred working with young people to dealing with admin and paperwork in moved to Swansea in 2004 to do his PGCE and join the teaching profession. The irony of this has not escaped him.

He has been teaching at Olchfa since 2005 and was lucky enough to be selected to be part of the team that developed the schools pioneering SMART programme. He now co-ordinates the programme which has so far equipped over 600 students with the skills to get the very best from their education.

He is interested in ways in which schools can provide a more relevant learning experience to their pupils, including focusses on skills and harnessing new technology. He blogs at teaching.mrstacey.org

Thanks to all those on Twitter who advised on the inclusion (or otherwise) of the blog reference. Much appreciated

We had the first meeting of our schools new strategic ICT group earlier today, which was very positive and seems to be heading in the right direction with a good mix of idealism and realism on board.

Of course, one hour is never enough, and going through the notes from the meetings (on Google Docs, naturally!) I started to think more about what the school needs to do to really get the most from the opportunities offered by ICT. I’ve copied and pasted those thoughts below, in the hope that they might chime with other people in a similar position, or might be useful to someone who finds themselves in the same position in the near future.

1. Perhaps we need to be clear that there are two distinct strands to what we need to do.

One is looking at the effective use of ICT as a teaching / learning tool quite distinct from e-learning. Questions such as do staff know how to make effective use of their projector? Can staff access the internet / printers / learning resources in their rooms? Are they adding an element of interactivity to their lessons using quizzes, games and ideally some kind of wireless device.

The second is to look at e-learning. We need to remember the lessons of Kaleidos - staff are not going to spend time they haven’t got moving resources to a new platform, tagging them, loading them into ‘virtual filing cabinets’ etc, when they can already access them perfectly well through our shared drives system. Need to look at either systems replacing the shared drives (in which case we need to be absolutely sure staff can access them when and where they need them) or focusing simply on the elements offered by Kaleidos / Moodle which aren’t offered by the shared drives. This may be a discussion that it would be pertinent to involve more people in than just this group.

2. As part of the auditing / PMF system, there should be an element of us going to people and asking what they would like to be able to do and then helping them make that happen. That will be a hundred times more powerful than another top down initiative. If we’re moving towards personalised learning for students, we can’t do that by treating all the staff the same.

3. How do we coordinate the ‘community building’ elements that are slowly emerging from the school website? This either needs to be the specific responsibly of one (or several people), or it has to be fitted in to what else is being developed. This would include communication with (not just to) parents, moving prospectuses etc online and would probably also require a change in school / parent culture

4. Student representation on the group?

Back here I pondered a possible future for a new ICT course at KS4 which attracted some interesting comments. I recently though had a thought about KS3 which I’d like to share.

There seems little argument to the idea that three years of mocked exercises intended to provide pupils with proficiency in using Microsoft Office isn’t sufficient given their often extensive, and sometimes inappropriate use of ICT outside the classroom. But what do you replace them with?

The solution I am proposing is both simple and radical. You let them decide. Platforms like Moodle allow the easy creation of e-learning resources. Parts that would have been delivered by the teacher in a traditional set up can be posted as video or a slideshow with embedded audio. You create a range of courses on a series of topics, both practical and theoretical. Off the top of my head I’d include:

• Typing skills
• Effective powerpoint for presentations
• Using powerpoint for online presentations
• How to digital images work? (inc, formats and compression)
• Effective online research
• HTML
• Hacking a theme for Bebo
• How does the internet work?
• Flash
• Scratch
• A 30 day version of the 366 day projects on Flickr

And for each these, I’m sure there’s another 5 that could be offered. Pupils could select the topics they wanted to study, in whatever order, with quizzes to test knowledge on the way through, and a final piece of work which could be used to demonstrate the learning from that unit.

ome of the courses could include built in differentiation, others could be offered at several levels. Higher ability pupils towards the end of the Key Stage could be offered the opportunity to work together and with a teacher to produce new courses on topic they feel were missing from the options, and schools could easily share courses between them, or post their backup zips online for sharing. Easily, in this context, obviously refers to technically. Politically would be another issue.

Some topics could be made compulsory. Staying safe online comes to mind straight away. The rest could be taken in any order by pupils and used to build up a portfolio of completed courses. Teachers would increasingly become learning mentors, discussing progress with students and setting targets, as the supporting role traditionally fulfilled moves into an online community.

Rethinking the curriculum this radically is now technically possible, and much better matches the needs of our learners. All that’s missing is the will to do it.

Additional Linkage

• CSUnplugged (Thanks to James Hart for the link) 

The blogging hiatus continued for longer than expected, partly because I’ve been really busy, but also because I really didn’t have the urge to say anything. I nearly waded in on a couple of debates that raged across the blogs I read, but in the end I was quite happy not to.

That seems to be fading, and over the next few days I’ll be publishing a series of posts, some practical and some reflective, some that have occurred to me today, others I’ve been meaning to post for several weeks.

I’m looking forward to getting back into the conversation