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Lets Make Things! - Using Technology to Innovate in STEM (Introduction)

 

I’ve been having some conversations recently around how do we use technology to encourage innovation? Some of the conversations have been rich, rewarding and inspiring while others have just gone over old ground and centered on putting kit into classrooms rather than actually thinking about what types of technology can support innovation.

STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math’s) Education is a big thing for me and also needs to be a big thing for Scotland (and the rest of the UK) if we are actually serious about being competitive in a future knowledge economy.

Putting children in front of computers or tablets doesn’t in itself encourage innovation. Recently I have been advising schools to think differently about how they spend their precious ICT budget a little more creatively when it comes to a hardware re-fresh. This advice runs parallel to the advice that I always give schools about needing to make education fresh and exciting.

Let me explain… When I was at Primary School I loved going to school because there were things there that we didn’t have at home. They had a big colour television (in the TV room!), A BBC Micro Computer (that each class had a day a week with), a small swimming pool and our own nature reserve (with a bird hide). All of these things (and more) combined with good teaching and seeing my friends every day made school an exciting place to be.

I was speaking to a group of headteachers (over video conference) last week and I asked them what was exciting about going to their schools? What was it that the children would look forward to the most that made them rush towards the school gates desperate to get to school in the mornings?

For some it was a surprising difficult question and for others although the answers came quickly - on refection many of the things they listed weren’t that exciting at all. In all cases the technology experiences that children have at home are far more rich, challenging and free than those that exist within the school walls.

Over the next series of post I’ll list a few tools that have got real potential in STEM Education and actually aren’t that expensive and could attract some one-off funding from a school local authority or a parent council. Also the next time you do a re-fresh consider swapping out a couple of laptops or desktops for some other hardware that isn’t a Windows PC or a Mac. You can always make up your hardware shortfall by introducing ideas such as BYOD (bring your own device).

In particular I’ll be talking about Robots, 3D Printing and Game Making. All the sorts of things that aren’t commonly done in home (although they could be) and have the potential not only to make a real impact in terms of STEM Education but also help make schools fun, exciting and desirable places to be. 

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Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning (1 of 5) - The Big Picture

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MacAskill's Imaginate - Riding Film

Two years in the making, street trials rider Danny MacAskill releases his brand new riding film. Whilst previous projects have focused on locations and journeys, MacAskill's Imaginate sees Danny take a completely different approach to riding. Enter Danny's mind and enjoy.

Brillent, just brillent! - Video on the RedBull Site

 

Teach Primary Magazine – Teaching Digital Literacy [Article]

I normally write one or two articles a year for Teach Primary Magazine. It is a publication that has improved considerably over the years and has become a must read for both primary (and secondary) practitioners.

My article of Teaching Digital Literacy was published in the last edition and if your quick you can read the electronic version for free over on the Teach Primary Website.

In the article I talk about how you can use this photo with a class to develop critical thinking and questioning.

 

You will also find out about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (and how you can save them). Plus a bit about reverse image search (and verification) using Tin Eye.

 Other stuff that I’ve written for Teach Primary here.

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[up-dated] - Literacy, ICT and CfE: Larbert and Currie High School

“In China, every student learns computer programming” - [code.org]

“In China, every student learns computer programming”. 

Source: code.org

This is the quote that appears at the end of the teaser trailer for code.org.

Code.org is a non-profit foundation dedicated to growing computer programming education.

Their vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code.  They believe that computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics and chemistry.

Their goals include:

• Spreading the word that there is a worldwide shortage of computer programmers, and that it's much easier to learn to program than you think.

• Building an authoritative database of all programming schools, whether they are online courses, brick+mortar schools or summer camps. 

The code.org website is certainly worth checking out and it aggregates some popular resources such as Code Academy, CodeHS and Khan Academy. It also has a very impressive page of links to other free resources (tools and online learning materials) such as Code Avengers, Hackety Hack and App Inventor. 

Check out the code.org promotional video below:

 

BTW: If your interested how the UK compares internationally when it comes to teaching computer science in schools this Computing at School: International Comparisons Paper is worth a read.

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£400,000 Funding for computing teacher CPD in Scotland (but what if you don't have a teacher?)

Last week, Dr Alasdair Allan, Minister for Learning, Science and Scotland’s Languages, announced funding for a programme of professional learning for Scottish computing teachers, amounting to £200,000 a year for the next two years.

This will come as welcome reassurance to computing teachers and provide the profession with some much needed support. It also follows the lead of similar support being offered in England and was a recommendation of the ‘Shut down or restart: a way forward for computing in UK schools’ - a report published by the Royal Society in January 2012.

But this investment won’t solve the real problem of computing in education or the digital literacy crisis that is already going on in many Scottish Schools.

Why? Because you can have the best CPD programmes in the world but then these teachers need to get in front of children to teach, guide, mentor and coach them. In many schools this won’t happen because they simply don’t have a computing teacher!

This picture has been well painted by the current Chair of Computing at School (CAS) Scotland, Katie Farrell in a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Local Authorities in 2012.

From the data it is very clear that very few average sized schools have more than one computing teacher. Worrying, there are a lot of schools who do not seem to have a computing department at all? And I expect this information has not improved significantly since the data was collected over a year ago.

With increasingly tight budgets it also seems to be an emerging trend that as computing teachers retire they are not being replaced. Departments are winding down rather than being built up and expanded, as they should be.

What’s worse is that it’s in the rural areas where computing seems to be in real crisis – the areas which could support a vibrant digital economy if the right infrastructure and skills were in place.

All of the above comes at a time when Scotland is increasingly betting its future on a digital one.

One solution might be share a computing teacher across a learning community / associated school group / cluster of schools. This would have the advantage of ensuring that children in the primary school also received specialist tuition in the same way that they do at the moment for things like PE and Music. It would also ensure that children received a progression of skills as they progressed through our 3 - 18 curriculum. 

Lets hope that someone, somewhere is giving this some thought...

Challenges and opportunities for schools and teachers in a digital word – Lessons learned from the 2012 SMILE action research project

One of the most rewarding projects I worked on in recent years has got to be SMILE (Social Media in Learning and Education). The SMILE project was funded by the European School Net and Facebook.

We ran an on-line learning lab for over 100 teachers from across Europe looking at how social media could be used more in schools (rather than being blocked, as it often is).

As part of the lab we tackled the following topics:

1.What is social media?

2.Using social media in schools - whole-school approach;

3.Using social media for learning and teaching - pedagogical principles;

4.Using social media for professional development;

5.Using social media responsibly;

6.Social media policy and the challenges of social media adoption in schools?

 

After the lab had ended participants went away to work on their own social media projects and most of them eventually graduated as part of the SMILE Course.

Overall the course seemed to go pretty well and one review from participant Donal O' Mahony can be read on his blog e-learning island.

Anyway, the final SMILE report was published last week over on the European School Net (EUN) SMILE Website and it makes and interesting read for anyone interested in this sort of thing.

The report is titled -  Challenges and opportunities for schools and teachers in a digital word – Lessons learned from the 2012 SMILE action research project – and can be downloaded as a .pdf

Lets hope that the EUN (and Facebook) continue to develop and evolve this project over time.

I’ve also up-dated my Social Media in Education Resource / Handout Page to reflect the publication of the new report.

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Social Media in Learning and Education (SMILE) - Introduction

Innovating Together: IT13 Exhibition and Conference (#IT13)

It was an absolute pleasure to be invited to Kent recently to do the opening keynote presentation and run two break out sessions at their annual IT Conference (this year #IT13).

As promised, I said I would post some of the notes and links about each of my presentations.

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Keynote: Taking Risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching

Access the on-line handout here.

 

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Workshop One: Playful Learning: Computer Games in Schools

 

Download my free eBook (sponsored by Microsoft) on Playful Learning here.

Here is a video of me talking about Games at a different conference.

   

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Workshop Two: Google Earth for Learning, Teaching and Assessment

Get everything (well almost everything) that you need to know from here.

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A huge thank you to colleagues in Kent for making me feel so welcome and helping me with my laptop (after I had dropped it!).

Finally, it was also great to sit in a couple of workshops and have the opportunity to learn from others. I particularly enjoyed the Lego Education workshop… quack, quack…

 Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or leave any feedback below. 

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Minimum Technology Requirements for Classrooms

 

What is the minimum Technology Requirement for a classroom / learning space? is a question that I have been asked a lot – particularly back in the back in the days of Building School for the Future (BSF).

During this post I don’t want to get into the discussion of whether we should still have classrooms or not. At this point in time I think we just need to accept that whether we like them or not classrooms will be part of our schooling in the UK for the foreseeable future.

Over the years my thoughts on minimum technology requirement for classrooms haven’t really changed. Back in 2005 a group of us got together in East Lothian to tease this question out. The result of our discussion was that each classroom should be equipped with… 

• A reasonable PC / Laptop that can be connected to the Internet and is of a good specification (graphics card, memory etc…) At the time we recommended that the PCs should have DVD Players (it is going back a long way!) even though this worked out a little more expensive per unit it removed the need for classrooms to have DVD players as well.

• A projector - so that the computer can be projected onto wall or screen (the bigger the better).

• Speakers so that you could hear what was being projected (also remember at the time that many projectors didn’t have speakers in them and neither did PCs!). In the end we went for a slightly more expensive model of projector because it has speakers in it.

 

Eight years on in 2013 I don’t think I would change this recommendation very much at all.

Obviously we all need and want more kit, but I would still conclude that the minimum specification for a classroom should be…

• A computer of a good specification – It doesn’t matter if its Mac, PC or Chrome. It doesn’t matter if it is PC or a laptop (there are advantages and disadvantages of both). Obviously it should be able to connect to the Internet and the DVD question is still a valid one if your school doesn’t have good bandwidth or allow streaming video (eg: YouTube);

• You still need something to show your computer on (it’s not got to be a projector); and

• A sound system (normally decent speakers unless you go down the LCD TV Route).

I don’t believe that Interactive whiteboards necessarily represent good value for money.

Saying that if the money and resource was available I might consider putting one in each nursery and primary classroom. In the secondary school I would pick and choose across departments eg: all the math’s department might get them or all the science department BUT I wouldn’t deploy them across the whole school. Budget and resource can be spent better places and more creative ways elsewhere.

Across the whole school I would invest heavily in a robust wireless network (that included access in outdoor spaces). Battery life is good enough now that across the primary school I would invest in banks of laptops rather than a computer lab. In the secondary school, I might keep some labs for specific tasks but I would expect to see an increasing amount of desktops replaced by the flexibility of laptops where appropriate. I wouldn’t consider replacing all desktops/laptops in schools at this stage in time with only tablet devices.

One-to-one access should be on the horizon and part of the succession planning of all schools. With the exception of the bandwidth needed to support a one-to-one learning environment funding is the other main issue here. Leasing and BYOD / BYOB / BYOT provide two models to improve your ratios of computers to students.

Anyone else got any thoughts – remember I’m talking minimum here and we obvioulsy need good software and good 'peopleware' as well.

I still know of some schools in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK where there are classrooms without computers and even more where there is still no ability to project the Internet. 

Magic Moments #24 - Meeting the President of Iceland

This time last year I was asked to speak at a conference organized by the Icelandic Dyslexia Association at the University of Reykjavík.

I was quite surprised to be sharing the stage with the President of Iceland – whose wife happens to be Dyslexic. Anyway, he was a very nice chap and it was a pretty nice venue for a conference as well.

I’ve got two other trips to Iceland planned for 2013 – a cycle expedition in the summer and then I’m heading back out to speak to their Headteachers Association in October about Social Media and some other bits & bobs…

I love Iceland – it’s a fascinating and beautiful place with some great people.

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Word of Classcraft [BBC Technology Article]

World of Classcraft is a role playing game that is played in the classroom. The goal of the game is to transform the classroom into an adventure and the brains behind the project is Shawn Young, a grade 11 physics teacher at a High School in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.

In World of Classcraft (WoC) players team up against the class, defeating monsters (homework) and bosses (exams). In WoC, players have a class, experience points (XP), hit points (HP), action points (AP) and power points (PP).

The use of this type of methodology is not particularly new and I first came across is after reading The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game written by Prof. Lee Sheldon. But what I love about Sean’s project is that he is not just taking the methodology of playful learning in the classroom forward he is also working hard in the background to build a platform that will support this type of pedagogy in multiple subject areas.

Certainly a project to watch overt the next few months / years.

There was also an article on World of Classcraft on the BBC Technology Pages yesterday morning with some comments from Shawn, Dr Ladan Cockshut and myself.

Read the full article over on the BBC Website.

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