"Practical, professional problem solving for primary teachers" is how Rising Stars Essentials: ICT, written by Ian Addison and published by Rising Stars in association with the Guardian Teachers Network, describes itself. And it lives up to the promise.
As well as Ian's writing, the paperback publication also contains contributions from a number of well-known UK bloggers and tweeters involved in ICT in education, including Tom Barrett, Miles Berry, David Rogers, Mark Warner and Julian Wood.
This is the closest technology to minority report that i have seen - worth a look if you have a few minutes. We have seen the data manipulation before but to the data manipulation combined with touch, Kinect, mobile and voice.
The most clever schools are already replacing projectors with LCD screens (and there are lots of advantages to that). It gets even more exciting for me when I think about what might be built into this type of technology in the future.
I’ve done a lot
of work over the years with small technology and education startups.
This is normally around vision, refining a product, market analysis and sales
strategy. I find this work valuable because I strongly believe that you can apply what we know works about 21st century business to contribute the efficient running of schools and other learning organisations.
Glogster is obviously more
than a start up because it is already so established in the education space
(particularly in North America). However, having visited the head office in the Prague,
Czech Republic and various meetings with some of the founders over the last 12
months I am now delighted to accept a position on their education advisory
board.
Oh, and thanks
for the certificate guys – it did make me chuckle!
Earlier in the week
some Sainsbury’s sponsored research was released which showed that over the last 50 years
‘pretend play’ / ‘make believe’ has been consistently the most popular childhood activity. The research, carried out among adults and
children from across the UK, examined the favourite childhood activities of
each generation from those born from 1940 onwards.
The table below shows UK
Children’s top three activities across the years:
Other key facts include:
While nearly a
third of adults (29%) think their children prefer spending time playing on a
computer, in fact kids are following in their parent’s traditional footsteps as
the majority (22%) say ‘make believe’ is their favourite past time, compared to
just 15% that preferred spending time at the computer.
Fresh air is
also key for the young people of today, with two thirds of children (64%)
saying they enjoy playing outside even in the rain.
Nearly half
(45%) of UK parents and grandparents spend more time playing with their
children compared to their own parents or grandparents. Yet despite this, 53%
of adults still feel their children spend less time getting active than they
did in their own childhood.
Over a fifth
(21%) of adults said they spent more than 20 hours playing each week when they
were children, but just 7% thought their own children invest the same amount of
time in play. According to adults, the majority of today’s children (29%) spend
between 1 and 5 hours on active play each week.
I love the fact
that ‘make believe’ has been at the
top of the list for the last years it just goes to prove that the power of
imagination and the creativity of young people is just as important now as it
always has been.
The challenge for us in schools is how do we continue to
nurture and develop this creative spark in young people as they get older
rather than suppress it as we often do at the moment?
Although many people
won’t realise it today is a critical day for Scottish Education. It’s a
time when more than ever before we need to be brave, really brave.
I believe the education
community, its teachers, its Local Authority employees and most importantly the
children that they support are relying on our Cabinet Secretary for Education
and Lifelong Learning, Michael Russell, MSP (@feorlean), to make the right decision. A decision
based on advice from people who really understand the scale of the problem,
people who understand the needs of the user and people who have the skills and
expertise to deliver real and tangible results.
Today the Cabinet
Secretary for Education will meet with the ICT Excellence Group to discuss the recommendations from their
recently published report and presumably use these discussions to
inform his decisions on the future of Glow.
For those of you not in
the know, Glow is Scotland’s
Schools National Intranet – a brilliant project that has unfortunately
failed to deliver. Now, before I get a barrage of abuse from ‘Glow-Fans’,
please remember that I am a Glow-Fan,and that there are lots of
parts of Glow that have worked really well. But, Glow has not transformed
our education culture or the learning and teaching of our children as it
had the potential to do.
Also, before all the ‘Anti-Glow’
people chip in… Glow’s failure is not really a result of legacy software,
clunkiness, the ‘walled garden’ or the inflexibility of the managed
service that it was required to operate within. Indeed, quite the opposite – the
failure of Glow (in my opinion) has been down to poor leadership (at
Scottish Government level), poor decision-making, blocking at a project
management and board level, risk aversion, and ultimately the greed of a
handful of people - who, quite frankly should be ashamed of themselves and
their hobby which seems to have become the burning of taxpayers’ money.
I think we also need to
reflect on the profession at the time and its readiness and ability to
accommodate the change in methodology that the use of Glow’s learning tools
offered. Were we ready for them? were we really ready to change our practice?
Also, could it be argued that a culture of dependency on the need to be
‘trained’ inadvertently became the norm with ICT initiatives with the
result being that the relevance, purpose and opportunities to enhance learning
with Glow were lost even as the Glow mentors left their training sessions? Make
no mistake, there was some really effective practice with Glow beginning to
emerge but as it did it found itself struggling to be heard against the growing
criticism of the ‘clunky’ interface and the experience of those using
tools that were newer and ‘easier to use’.
I think (and this is
again all personal opinion and not that of my employer!) that out of just
about anyone in Scottish Education I am one of the most qualified to say the
above. After all, I worked on the latter stages of the original Glow project as
part of the Glow Team and as part of the small team which was responsible for
putting together a proposal for the Next Generation of Glow, after Glow Futures
was quite rightly scrapped
by the Education Minister in 2012.
I was part of the team
who shaped the Scottish ICT in Education Objectives, contributed to speeches
and blog posts at the highest level, evangelised about Glow internationally and
throughout Scotland and also made recommendations to the Scottish Government
and Education Scotland on what the next generation of Glow should be. Let me be
clear, I believe in ICT in Education and I believe in Glow, I also have
every faith in Scotland's young people, after all, they are a remarkable bunch
as their input at the ICT Summit in October
2011 illustrates.
The ICT Excellence Group
was formed by the Cabinet Secretary after a series of events led to Google pulling out of
bidding for the Next Generation of Glow and RM’s contract being
extended.
I was in hospital at the time for some serious surgery on my shoulder (
information that was kept well out of the public domain). When I returned
to work the small team that I had been working in had been disbanded – which to
be honest fitted in well with the end of my secondment to Education Scotland.
In what seemed to me to
be a very short space of time some people had made (in my opinion) some
awful decisions and then the rumours started flying. Which of course played
directly into the hands of the 'Anti-Glow mob' and exposed further incompetency
of those who now seemed to be in charge of the project and thus reinforcing
that they really didn’t seem to understand what the whole thing was actually
about and how important it was for our economic future. There was also a rumor
at the time (around July 2012) that I had been sent back to school – but this was complete nonsense as well!
My only gripe with
Education Scotland is that after nearly four years working for them I left
without a ‘thank you’ and no one even thought to ask me what I had been
working on, or if there was any information I needed to pass over. It is no
secret that I have always thought that the knowledge management within our
education agency was shocking and I guess my transition back to Local
Authority provided further evidence for this. I’ve contacted Education Scotland
on at least five occasions since the end of my secondment offering to help if I
can (particularly around Glow issues); sometimes I get a polite reply –
but no one is yet to take me up on my offer. Which is why I feel even more
frustrated that from a distance they seem to be making a number of predictable
and avoidable mistakes (eg: not utilising past expertise, poor communication
strategy, under resourced team, lack of proper testing and poor roll out model
etc...).
Anyway, why am I talking
about this now? Well, I mention it (and I have a lot more to say) because
I feel that the Minister for Education
needs the support of the
education community and to be really brave with his future decision-making.
Otherwise we are again going to fail to learn from our past experience. The Digital Scotland 2020:
Achieving World-Class digital infrastructure report released on the
26th February talks about ‘leveraging digital solutions in education’. The
right decision now about the future of Glow could indeed be part of the digital
solution that we need and the wrong decision is unlikely to help us move
forward at all. As the
report states,
‘The world of education in 2020 will inherently be
'on-line-centric' engaging with those in education will be relatively easy but
for those of school age the biggest challenge will be engaging with parents or
carers. We must ensure that those in education have access to the
technology to engage in education beyond the walls and time boundary of the
school day; and that those who care for and support them have at least the
basic skills to follow what their children are doing’
The Past: A Potted
History…
Let me give you a (very
abbreviated) potted history…
On 15th October 2010 a group of people were
invited to
talk about ICT in Education at the International Futures Forum.
These discussions helped inform the initial stages of Scotland’s
Technologies for Learning Strategy and this post
from Feargal Kelly is a good summary of the day as it links to
all the other posts that were written. Many people left the event feeling
very enthused and positive about the future. The Scottish Government’s
Technologies for Learning Strategy Project went on until July 2011 when it
was merged with the Next Generation Glow Project. A lot of recommendations
were made as part of the Technologies for Learning Strategy Report which
to my knowledge have never seen the light of day.
Then Next Generation Glow came along and Mr Russell
made all the right noises in his speeches and blog posts about the
future. We had an ICT Summit on 17th October 2011 organised
by the Scottish Government where recommendations were made and everyone (apart
from the people who were at the event almost exactly a year before!) left
the day feeling enthusiastic and positive about the future. Lots of
recommendations and ideas were collected from the event which went on to
inform the ICT in Education Project Team, led by the Scottish Government.
One of the projects within this workstream was to develop and make
recommendations on the Next Generation of Glow.
The solution to what quickly became unessessy widespread
panic was the formation of the ICT Excellence Group.
Their job, amongst other things was to advise on the future direction of
Glow. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed not to be asked to join this
group not because I see myself as being an expert, but because I have
so much locked up in my head and background information from the years
before June 2012 that I think I could have saved the group a lot of time
and money. But, maybe the purpose of the group was to reinvent the wheel.
The ICT Excellence
Report
Now let me get onto the
ICT Excellence Report Itself…
In a nutshell, it is
awful and embarrassing. Don’t misread me here much of the content is
good, actually it is very good, in fact it is not a million miles
away from where the team I was working within got to over a year ago (back
to that in a minute...).
So what is bad about it?
Well, the formatting, the spelling, the grammar (I know I can talk!), the
presentation, its inconsistency, the lack of authorship, the accessibility, how
it was distributed to key stakeholders and the lack of formal consultation
following its publication. All of these little things make a mockery of
potentially a pretty good piece of work from Professor Calder and her team.
A piece of work that has already been discredited by many in the IT profession
(both corporate and education users).
Now let me be clear
about this again -
the content of the ICT Excellence Report is good (there are obviously some
bits I don’t agree with but most parts are good and very worthwhile). BUT
the poor presentation is an embarrassment and whoever within the Scottish
Government let such an important report like this be published in the way that
it has been should be very embarrassed and offer an apology to the education
community. This might sound a little bit petty but it makes the Education
Minister look bad as once again, it seems to me, he has been let down not by
the people (the experts) whom he entrusted to the job but by the civil servants
who had a duty to support them. This has been an annoying recurrence throughout
the Glow saga.
The Report’s Contents
Again, let me emphasise
that the findings and recommendations of the ICT Excellence Report are really
not very different to the findings and recommendations of the team I was
working in over a year ago.
We even code named our
project Glow Plus!
I suspect that most of the ICT Excellence Group didn’t know this and that it
would have caused a great deal of amusement to the people who did! (And there
were definitely a few!).
Take this diagram of the
structure of Glow Plus from the report as an example...
...how different is that
from the diagram that has been previously shown to ADES ICT Advisory Board, the
people who attended the Google Apps / Office 365 User Testing (in November
2011) and Local Authority Key Contacts, Directors of Education (or their
representatives) and Local Authority Corporate IT personnel in (in February
2012).
Then there is the
recommendation on the training model…
… and how different is
that exactly to the model I described at the Next Generation Glow Local
Authority Meeting in March 2012?
At the same meeting
Stuart Campbell (now the Acting Head of Glow) and part of the Next Generation
Glow Team talked about the need for National Filtering....
...the ICT Excellence
Report recommends the same thing…
I could go on and on,
and please don’t get me wrong, all of these things are hard to do. But my
point is many of the things have been recommended before and what we need now
is action.
If I was the Cabinet
Secretary for Education (and I’m not) I would accept all the
recommendations in the ICT Excellence Report(apart from one – and I’ll come
to that in a minute). But I would particularly endorse the recommendation
to form a small agile team to develop the next generation of Glow and this team
has to have credibility.
This team needs to
obviously operate inside the laws of procurement where appropriate, but without
the bureaucracy of the civil service and Education Scotland (at least until
it is built and implemented). To be honest much of the vision for the
future of Glow has already been encapsulated in Charlie Love’s Glew Project. What I think is great about this project
is that Charlie openly says – ‘it’s not perfect’ and ‘there is a lot
of work to do’ but what he does beautifully is show what is possible.Never before has there been a time in Scottish Education when we’ve so
needed to show teachers and learners what is possible – they deserve the
very best and no less.
Setting The Record
Straight…
A few other things
before I start on a much needed cup of coffee…
This isn’t about Google Apps or Office 365 (and
it never has been). Glew can work with both (Apps and 365) indeed a future user or LA could
have both (I know this because I was there when the technical diagrams
were drawn over a year ago).
This isn’t about .gsx. You could easily have .gsx
as part of the Next Generation of Glow or as part of Glew. We just have to
host that part in a Scottish or UK Secure Data Centre. It is really not
that expensive or, to be honest that complicated. Again, preliminary
technical scoping of this was done well over a year ago – which is why it
was embarrassing for Education Scotland to say they didn’t realise .gsx
was a problem at the last Glow Key Contacts Meeting (February 2013).
Ignore the user scenarios/stories in the ICT
Excellence Report – they don’t capture what is possible and most
importantly don’t capture the international research of what is already
happening with some of our global competitors. In my opinion both Ewan
McIntosh and Professor Stephen Heppell (both
members of the Excellence Group) could have been more influential
here? I just hope they were widely consulted? For example, South Korea,
Lithuania and Sweden provide examples of success by embedding digital
access in education: South Korea provided free PCs to low income students
with good grades; Sweden set targets for digital literacy; and Lithuania
provides access to school diaries and reports online supporting students
and encouraging parents to engage.
I don't believe the rumours about ADES and RM and
I have every faith in ADES making the right decisions around Glow.
This aside, I think there is also a lot of truth
in what Jaye Richards Hill has researched and written over the last five years
(and not just about Glow). She has always been a ‘critical friend and informal adviser’ to the Glow project right from the early days and I hope that
she will continue to be in the future along with the other ‘teacher' members of
the ICT Excellence Group such as Ian Stuart, Neil Winton, Charlie Love, Fraser Speirs
and Hamish Budge.
Don’t Change The Name
Now I said there was one
recommendation within the ICT Excellence Report that I didn’t agree with. I
think the Scottish Government should keep the brand. There is nothing wrong
with Glow.
Lots of people will
disagree with me here. But to be frank, scrapping the brand is too easy an
objective to achieve. My challenge to the ICT Excellence Implementation
Group is to achieve all the other recommendations and then you won’t have
to change the brand. Believe it or not – the brand is not that bad and has
international credibility. It just needs to reinvent itself – if Skoda can do it, Glow can do it!
What Happens Next?
Mr Russell, it is time
to form the agile group to start moving things forward. The technologists within Scottish
Education are some of the most passionate practitioners you will ever meet with
international reputations and growing global experience. We will continue to
support and advise when we are asked – but you need to ask and we
will always be honest.
Unfortunately it is our
honesty that scares some of the bureaucrats who work within our system,
These are exciting times
for Scottish Education and Technology for Learning, but I hope we can now start
to move forward together and not in isolated silos of innovation.
Finally, Mr Russell, if
you need any more reassurance - listen to your own words... they united a
profession, and can do again...
Ollie Bray
27th February 2013
[Please note the comments are closed on this post]
Tim Scratcherd (the School House Partnership) and I were
recently asked to write a report for the Oxford Education School
Improvement Series on the use of Tablets and Apps. The
purpose of this report is to provide practical support and guidance for school
leadership teams who are considering the purchase of tablet devices. The report
is aimed at school leaders and teacher in England but the ideas within the
report are transferable to other parts of the world.
With permission from
Oxford I’ve be duplicating some of the report on olliebray.com over
the last week. You can download the full report or order a paper copy over at
the new Oxford School Improvement Tablet and App Help
Centre.
The final part of the report consists of
three primary school case studies. You can also download all three case studies
as a separate .pdf and the expectation is that we will add further case studies
over time. In particular we are conscious that we need to add some examples of
Android and Windows 8 in the classroom.
For the time being though have a look to
see how tablets and Apps are being used in the following schools:
Also, don’t forget that our report makes up
a small part of the larger OUP Tablet and Apps Help Centre. Were you can also
find a range of other great resources including:
Tim Scratcherd (the School House Partnership) and I were
recently asked to write a report for the Oxford Education School
Improvement Series on the use of Tablets and Apps. The
purpose of this report is to provide practical support and guidance for school
leadership teams who are considering the purchase of tablet devices. The report
is aimed at school leaders and teacher in England but the ideas within the
report are transferable to other parts of the world.
With permission from
Oxford I’ll be duplicating some of the report on olliebray.com over
the next week. You can download the full report or order a paper copy over at
the new Oxford School Improvement Tablet and App Help
Centre.
_____________________________________________
Part
Five - Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning – Policy
Considerations
However you decide to integrate tablet
technology into your school you will have a number of policy considerations to
take into account to ensure consistent whole school practice.
Responsible
Use
Your school should already have a policy on
acceptable and responsible ICT use. However, with the introduction of tablets
it is very likely that you will need to update or adapt your policy. You need
to be clear about what is and what is not acceptable on a school’s network,
along with any sanctions that you will use if the rules are broken.
As well as formal procedures it is also
useful to work directly with children so that they can create their own rules
around tablet and ICT use. Teachers who have worked with children to co-create
ICT rules have found that they are more likely to be adhered to in the long
term.
The important thing to remember is that
there is absolutely no right or wrong way to write such a policy. Your policy
needs to reflect your school, who you wish to communicate with and what you
feel comfortable doing. Responsible use policies should be dynamic and
regularly reviewed.
As well as including your proposed use of
tablets in your schools’ ICT policy, you should also make sure that this is
covered in your Learning and Teaching policy.
Equality
of access
Equality of access is important in any
school but it is particularly important if you choose this is covered a 1:1
learning deployment. Equality becomes even more important if you choose to
develop a model where pupils are expected to bring in their own device (BYOD).
Although this is not yet common in state primary schools, it is a growing
trend.
In this situation you need to make sure
that you have put systems in place to ensure pupils and families who do not
have their own device can be provided with one or are provided with some
capital funding make a purchase. It is important that you have clear guidance
to ensure that children are not deprived of their digital entitlement, and that
the model you are proposing for your school is financially sustainable in the
long term.
Network
access policy
Most primary schools have some sort of
network and network support service, whether it is an external company or an
expert in school (ICT Service Manager, ICT Co-ordinator). The role is often not
full time.
You will need to speak to your network
support service to make sure that the type of tablet devices you decide to
purchase have the correct security certificates to be able to connect to your
school network – this will often depend on how your school network is built as
well as the type of device that you choose to adopt.
Check if your school has Wi-Fi or
traditional Ethernet ports (this may limit the types of device you can actually
buy and will certainly limit their portability).
Finally, if you are considering a large
tablet deployment (such as a 1:1 deployment) you need to be realistic as to how
this will impact on your bandwidth usage within your school. This will
particularly be the case if you plan to use a lot of browser based cloud
applications.
Put simply, you could have the best tablets
in the world but if you don’t have the network and infrastructure to support
them they will be limited in their functionality.
Teacher
and school leader professional development
Appropriate professional development is
often overlooked during many tablet projects, but it is the most important
aspect of any large technology deployment. By creating a policy related to this
professional development you will formalise the need for training within your
staff team.
Professional development should include
both technical and pedagogical training. Schools should also consider a blend
of face-to-face (expert and/or peer led) and online learning which is cost
effective, and can occur at the learner’s choice of time and place. Staff
should be given as many opportunities as possible to share ideas and learn from
each other’s practice. It is also important that staff understand the decisions
that you have had to make in order to choose your technology solution. In
particular, emphasis should be placed on why you think tablet technology will
improve teaching and learning (e.g. culturally relevant, fast boot up time,
availability of apps, highly accessible, etc.).
In my next post I’ll point you in the
direction of some tablet and apps case studies? – you can download the full “Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on
teaching and learning” report now for free over on the Oxford School
Improvement Site.
He
uses a mobile projector to project onto the floor when he is teaching French.
He told me he likes to be able to get the children to stand up and ‘gather round’ as they
discuss what they see. He told me he often uses it as part of a ‘station’ or
‘cluster’ based approach to learning and teaching.
Its the little ideas like this that can have such a massive impact in the classroom if they are shared.
As well as being a learner who is committed to their own professional and personal learning I am very lucky to be able to work with a variety of other learners from around the world.
This includes Young People (mainly through my work at Grantown Grammar School and Leading Edge Expeditions) and adults (through a variety of consultancy and professional development opportunities that I offer to groups of staff).
Increasingly, I am working with more and more adults and young people online to deliver structured on-line opportunities. One of the courses that I enjoyed running the most last year was SMILE (Social Media in Learning and Education). This was a course funded by Facebook and run in partnership with the European SchoolNet.
I was the main tutor for the initial part of the course (the first eight weeks) but then course delegates went award to carry out their own Social Media Action Research Projects.
Last week some of the first students graduated!
Well done to all of you, you were a pleasure to work with!
Tim Scratcherd (the School House Partnership) and I were
recently asked to write a report for the Oxford Education School
Improvement Series on the use of Tablets and Apps. The
purpose of this report is to provide practical support and guidance for school
leadership teams who are considering the purchase of tablet devices. The report
is aimed at school leaders and teacher in England but the ideas within the
report are transferable to other parts of the world.
With permission from
Oxford I’ll be duplicating some of the report on olliebray.com over
the next week. You can download the full report or order a paper copy over at
the new Oxford School Improvement Tablet and App Help
Centre.
_____________________________________________
Part
Four - Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning – Choosing
and using tablets
Tablet technology moves very rapidly.
Before considering the current range of devices available, you will need some
general principles for choosing and using tablets. Moving to the use of tablets
is a development that requires the same sort of thinking as any other
development. So, a consideration of what you want to achieve, where you are
now, what it will cost, and how you will know it has worked, within some sort
of shared and agreed development plan, is a good idea. For tablets, you will
need to consider all the following questions.
What
will be the focus of use?
There are two main areas to think about
here: whether the tablets are to be tools for teacher use, to help them improve
teaching or make management and administration processes more effective, or
whether they are for use by pupils, to improve learning processes. In practice
it is possible to do both, but for effective planning it is essential to
separate these out, because they have different implementation requirements.
For example, if you were only to use a set of tablets for teachers to move to a
paperless environment, you would be less concerned about the quality of your
Internet access.
What
sort of learning are we looking for?
The case studies show that, while there are
significant benefits in developing teacher use, the real impact comes from a
well-implemented approach to pupil use. Therefore, for pupil use, what sort of
learning gains are we looking for? Exciting learning, described earlier, is
exactly the sort of learning which is possible with tablets. At the same time,
there are other ways to achieve learning gains. Do you want learning to take
place, where it was not happening before, or
not happening very much? Do you want to
engage parents through increasing learning at home and outside formal settings?
Or do you want to change the nature of some or all of the learning? This is
where Exciting
Learning comes in.
What
sort of development would we like? Is it top-down, or bottom-up?
There are many instances of schools buying
a small number of devices, not just tablets ‘to find out what they can do’,
with the implication that if it looks as though they might be useful, more will
be bought. This is, of course, an example of bottom-up, or piloting. An example
of a top-down development might be the decision to do without an ICT suite and
replace with tablets. Bottom- up approaches have the advantage that they are
less costly. Top-down approaches have the advantage of immediacy and equality.
In both cases, we need to learn from other schools’ experiences, and after
reading the case studies, this is the fastest way to find out what they can do.
Experience shows that, once a development has started, a mixture of both
top-down and bottom-up approaches start to surface. The beauty of tablets is
that there is a very wide range of uses which deliver different types of
benefit.
Are
we clear about the costs versus the benefits of tablets?
At the same time, there needs to be a
consistent way of judging benefit. A good method is simply to ask, ‘How
much more learning do we get? Is the learning better?’ The commonest
reasons for the adoption of top-down approaches to tablets are that they
improve motivation, and they increase parental engagement. In both of these,
the underlying reason is more and better learning. More learning can be
achieved in very simple ways. For example, the fact that tablets start up
immediately removes delays from the learning process, and thus progress in
lessons is improved at once. After the learning gains have been chosen it is
time to ask, is the learning worth the cost? For a rapidly growing number of
schools, the answer is a resounding yes.
What
is the impact on infrastructure?
Some things are essential for effective use
of tablets. The first is high quality broadband, with a robust high quality
wireless infrastructure, which all tablets can access seamlessly from anywhere
learning takes place. Specialist advice is recommended to review current
provision. It is also very important to consider display options for tablet
devices. They can be made to connect up to existing projectors, but often it is
advantageous to consider display specific to the device, such as Apple TV. This has the benefit of
being a local wireless connection for any Apple type device in the classroom. Intel’s classmate PC offers a similar
projection solution through its pre-installed software. Thereafter, there are
three main areas which require ongoing management.
The
first is the installation and use of apps. Here,
management issues are the same as for all software. All apps need educational
licences. It is important to check the cost of installing an app on many
devices. Schools will also want to control the number and types of app
available on tablets.
The
second is e-safety. The filtering of websites is an
issue schools already need to consider, but which also impacts specifically
upon tablets in a variety of ways. For example, tablets synchronise with other
devices, meaning that all information including any pupil information can be
copied onto devices not under the school’s control. It is essential that
schools have an up-to-date e-safety policy (see tomorrows post!).
Thirdly,
there is the storage of pupil work. Tablets are
designed as devices for individuals, whereas the work pupils produce needs to
be shared for a whole range of purposes; particularly for assessment including
marking and other feedback, and celebration through publishing. Typically this
has been done on PC based local area networks by having shared local folders
where all work is stored. There can be shared folders for tablets but these are
not local and carry with them security and copyright issues. Current solutions
are essentially work rounds involving pupils emailing work as attachments to
teachers or the use of a cloud based storage system such as Google
Drive or Microsoft Skydrive.
Have we
considered the total cost of ownership of tablets?
Schools are very familiar with the ideas of capital (start-up) and
revenue (running) costs, and these are easily identifiable from the above.
Don’t forget to include energy costs in calculations, particularly if you plan
to deploy a lot more devices in schools. One cost which can be often neglected
is the cost of professional development.
In summary, there are three forms of cost; purchase, maintenance, and
the time spent to use tablets correctly.
How are we
going to procure?
There will be a need not just to procure the devices, but also a review
of infrastructure in general, and possibly wireless connectivity upgrades and a
management service or tool for control over apps. This depends upon the nature
of the project and the availability of funding. It is tempting, when running a
pilot with a small number of devices simply to buy the devices. This leaves the
school open to all sorts of risk. Another option is for pupils to bring their
own devices (BYOD) which carries equal risk and also brings into question an
entitlement to learning for all. In the following case studies the devices
start off as being owned by the school, but pass into the property of the
parents after an agreed length of time. The two commonest routes taken by
schools are outright purchase, and leasing arrangements, whereby the devices
remain the property of the school, but parents pay a monthly sum until purchase
after a period of time for a nominal amount.
What device are
we going to procure?
There is a large range of devices to choose from, but there are only a
small number of operating systems used. These are Android, iOS and Windows. The
iOS operating system is used on Apple devices. A wide range of manufacturers
use the Android operating system to produce tablets of all sizes and
functionality. The vast majority of primary schools working with tablets are
using the iOS devices, and there are very good reasons for this: the huge and
growing range of apps available, covering practically all the ways both pupils
and teachers might wish to use the devices; the fact that the look and feel of
the device is the same for all of them; their comparative robustness; the
growing number of specialist support companies who understand the particular
needs of schools; the national network of consultants (Apple
Distinguished Educators) available to help with professional development; and
the wealth of practical experience available from schools and others.
There are also reasons for choosing devices with other operating
systems: Android devices tend to be cheaper, and Windows 8 offers the
opportunity of better integration with any existing PC based infrastructure.
There is a bewildering choice of Android based devices, and schools need to
spend the time comparing features and cost.
More about
cloud storage
There are many services offering to store files ‘in the cloud’, which use
remote storage through the web. Some of them are generic and some are for
specific files, such as photos. While there are many advantages to using these
services, all of them have different arrangements regarding copyright and
security, and many have other constraints, such as the age of those using them.
School leaders intending to use one of these services are recommended to
investigate thoroughly before committing pupil information and files to them.
Some
key things to consider when choosing a tablet
Have
a think about:
Battery life
Camera quality and direction
Build quality
Quality and range of apps
Methods for saving pupil work
In my next post I’ll discuss Policy
Considerations – you can download the full “Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning” report
now for free over on the Oxford School
Improvement Site.
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