Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Meeting the challenge of innovation in education Published by Rachel Jones

Published by Rachel Jones on April 15, 2014 | 3 Responses

Innovation in education is necessary for us all. Without it we run the risk of being out paced, not only by the very fast development of technology but also by the skills of our own learners. However, it is worth reflection on what innovation really looks like. For many schools, the use of ICT in the classroom amounts to little more than the use of PowerPoint and the occasional video. YouTube is blocked in many schools, and students mobile devices are banned rather than utilised as a source of great potential for unlocking learning. The use of ICT as a cross curricular teaching tool to enhance pedagogy has often tended to be relegated to the teaching of ICT or computing as a subject area, however as an non ICT specialist I would argue that using ICT can have a major impact in the attainment of your learners. My teaching practice has been fundamentally enhanced by embedding the use of ICT to enhance learning. In no way am I an expert in the area, but I am willing to experiment with the use of technology, and accept that not every tool will be successful. The openness to risk taking in your teaching practice is crucial here, and I would always advise that you have a plan B in place in case the technology does not suit the learners or the lesson. Fundamentally using technology is just like trying anything new in your classroom, you need to know that you are using it for the right reasons, and know you learners well so that it is appropriate to motivate, inspire and engage them in a way that can be measured in terms of progress.

Here are my top five tools for you to try in your classroom, that I have found have real impact:

1 – NearPod. This is a free we based tool, that allows you to import existing PowerPoints and interweave assessment for Learning Opportunities, for example to answer multi- choice questions, draw a response or write a longer answer. Students are given a PIN number which gives them access to presentation, once they have logged on the teacher controls their device or screen. I have found this tool particularly effective in the BYOD classroom, as it works across all smart phone devices. This ensures that all students participating in a lesson, and involved in every single assessment for learning opportunity possible. I love NearPod as it allows you to recycle PowerPoints and make them a student entered learning opportunity. It is also really easy to use, and can be adapted across subjects and age ranges.

2 – Canva. This is a website which allows students to make very high quality graphic resources. These could be posters, infographics, the only limitation is your imagination whilst planning! My Classical Civilisation students used it to create memes of key quotes from Homer’s Iliad, which helped them to memorise this key information for the exam in a pictorial form. We then had the images printed, and created a wall display of their representation of that book. Not only did this allow them to be creative, but it was also an excellent memory technique to learn what is relatively difficult language. Canva has an in – built tutorial, and is easy to use to create very polished end products. This is Brilliant for building the self esteem of learners as they create some beautiful knowledge based work.

3 – Memrise. This is a revision tool on which learners can complete memory exercises to learn key information. However, it is much more powerful as a tool which students can use to create their own memory activities. My students have made them to learn key theorists and dates, and it has been very successful in assisting their recall of facts. What makes this website more useful in my opinion, is that it uses the visual metaphor of ‘growing learning,’ so that as learners get questions right their grow their learning and this makes visual flowers grow. Obviously learning is invisible, but my learners really enjoyed growing their learning garden, they found it very satisfying and actually spurred them on to work harder and get more work done. This is a teaching win!

4 – ThingLink. This website allows you to embed multimedia into a JPEG image. I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but actually this is a brilliant tool for engagement in a lesson. For example, my Sociologists have to study Post Modernism for their exam. As part of a lesson I asked them to each contribute to a ThingLink about digital realities using their mobile devices, and that no contributions could be the same. They could add YouTube videos, links to a twitter feed or other websites. The work they produced was brilliant, some were scholarly degree level articles, and some were links to TED talks, it really pushed them to be creative in the information that they curated. Alongside this the ThingLink resource can then be reused as a revision or starter activity, and it excellent for recognising the contributions of the class towards their own learning.

5 – Credly. I have started using digital badges to reward my students, not for producing good work, but for displaying positive learner characteristics. Credly allows you to create very stylised digital badges, and them award them to learners. I use this to reward displays of resilience, or independent working. Students self assess and evidence if they have met the criteria for receiving a badge within a lesson, and I use this to award the badge. I was surprised how eager they were to win the badge, and went out of their way to develop and demonstrate positive learner characterises and habits for learning. A few learners even took screen shots of their Tumblr accounts and sent them to me, so that they could show me they are publicly displaying their awarded badge. It is lovely to be able to award students for trying, and developing the skills that they will need for later life.

These five tools can be used to enhance the teaching of many subjects and many different age levels. they certainly require no ICT specialist skills to use them effectively, and they have had massive impact in my own classroom. Innovation for many teachers may be trying one new thing, and that is what I would encourage you to do. Grow your own confidence, just like you grow the confidence of those in your classroom. Making small changes in your teaching practice, can make big footprint of difference in the learning that you students do, and this can only be positive. Innovation is not doing something new for its own sake, or putting gimmicky ICT into lessons that will not benefit the learning of students. Innovation in the classroom is taking calculated risks, because in the long run we want better lessons for our learning and to enhance our own teaching practice. Ask yourself this, in ten years is it more of less likely we will be using ICT in schools? I believe the answer is a clear yes, and that we owe it to our learners and ourselves to be the best practitioners we can be, not in ten years, but today.

Do we need to rescue our kids from the digital world? (BBC)

Do we need to rescue our kids from the digital world?

By Jane WakefieldTechnology reporter

Do Lily and Archie think they spend too much time on their devices? "Yes," says Lily. "Definitely not," thinks Archie

My children live in the digital world as much as they live in the real one.

Whether they are chatting to their friends on Xbox Live or FaceTime or viewing their profiles on Instagram, these days it seems that there is always a virtual guest in our house.

Their expectations of life are fundamentally different to mine at their ages - eight and 10. They were among the first generation to swipe a dumb screen and wonder why nothing happened; the first to say when a toy was broken: "Don't worry, we can just download a new one"; and the first to be aware that the real world runs seamlessly into the digital one.

These digital natives understand the etiquette of the digital world - how to text, how to email, how to get wi-fi and how to watch whatever they want, whenever they want. And homework is a whole lot easier now that they have the virtual font of all knowledge at the their fingertips - Google.

As the author of the book Growing Up Digital, Don Tapscott has spent a lot of time looking at how the generation born in the age of computing will differ from those before.

"Generation M [mobile] are growing up bathed in bits," he says. "Their brains are actually different."

For him, the way the brain is wired is dictated by how you spend your time.

"My generation grew up watching TV - we were passive recipients. Today children come home and turn on their mobile devices, they are listening to MP3s, chatting to their friends, playing video games - managing all these things at the same time."

Privacy dead?

All the data our children are creating and uploading, coupled with their casual ability to bring their friends into the house via a tablet screen, makes parents question whether they are growing up in a world where privacy just won't mean anything.

"At a time when our lives are recorded and analysed by countless services, organisations and the state, educating young people about the importance of privacy and considering what information they share should be high on the agenda," the deputy director of Big Brother Watch, Emma Carr, says.

Boy with hundreds of digital images going around his head

Our children are creating a very large digital footprint, but will they have more control over data than us?

"We are seeing the first cases of people being forced to hand over social media passwords before they are offered employment, cyberbullying has become a clear issue, and stories about commercial companies and the government snooping on our communications are now commonplace.

"It is imperative that we teach our children about how our communications are now accessed and the ramifications that that may bring."

Mr Tapscott is not convinced.

"The idea that privacy is dead is deeply unfounded but the way we protect privacy is going through a fundamental change," he says.

"Kids are quite aware of the whole privacy question and intuitively understand idea of using data responsibly."

That resonates with me - I can barely take a picture these days without one of my children asking suspiciously: "Are you going to post it on Facebook?"

Even taking a picture for this article created a stream of questions: "What are you writing about me?" "Why can't you just get a picture of a kid on an iPad from Google?"

As well as making me realise that my kids have little respect for copyright, it also made me see that they are pretty sophisticated consumers.

"Actually they are scrutinisers," said Mr Tapscott. "When I was young if I saw a picture, it was just a photo, these days kids look at pictures and ask whether it has been photoshopped."

As for data privacy, there is evidence that companies are beginning to understand that individuals want to wrest back control of what could be their greatest asset, their data. Companies are now developing apps and dashboards that allow people to store all the information that they share online in one place.

Some think eventually we will even sell our data as a commodity to the advertisers so desperate to throw it back at us in a personalised form. Respect Network is setting up a platform that will allow peole to choose who they share their data with.

Meanwhile, the amount of control individuals have over the information that exists online about them is also being challenged.

Last month the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in favour of the "right-to-be-forgotten" principle, ordering Google to remove links to sites with information about an individual's financial history that he had deemed out-of-date.

Such rules may be welcomed by our children as they seek to wipe out the profiles they created when they were teenagers or younger to replace with a more sober, grown-up digital CV.

And there could be a lot of data to wipe - according to the Pew Internet Centre, up to half of US children have a mobile phone by the time they are six and increasingly parents are creating email accounts and social media profiles for their new-born babies.

Anecdotal evidence suggests many parents these days are more likely to buy their toddler a tablet than a cuddly toy.

Porn filters

Having such an early interaction with technology has led to a glut of studies questioning whether our children spend too much time immersed in the addictive digital world and too little time crossing roads, playing in mud and chasing butterflies.

Can we get the balance right between life online and life outdoors?

A lot of it comes down to sensible parenting, thinks Mr Tapscott.

"Parents need to make choices. Say no devices at dinner, in restaurants. Draw up a social contract about when technology can be used," he says.

He is not a fan of the trend towards net filters, where ISPs around the world, including the biggest four in the UK, increasingly offer parents the option to block out pornography.

"The best way to deal with pornography is not to prevent access but talk to our kids about it," he insists.

The really important question for the optimists such as Mr Tapscott is how schools deal with our tech-savvy youngsters.

"For the first time in history, children are an authority on something really important - how the digital world is changing our institutions."

He is not convinced schools have understood the enormity of that change:

"Children don't learn the way we learnt, but the classroom hasn't changed since the industrial revolution."

While there are plenty of schools doing innovative stuff with technology, there is also evidence that many teachers remain scared of its potential.

Just this month, a report from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for government guidelines on the amount of time children should spend on net-connected devices.

Director Mark Langhammer said: "We're hearing reports of very young children who are arriving into school quite unable to concentrate or socialise properly because they're spending so much time on digital games or social media."

But far from restricting access, Mr Tapscott thinks we need to stop seeing online as bad and offline as good.

"There is a lot of cynicism about net addiction, losing social skills, being an army of narcissists only interested in Facebook and selfies. I found that none of that is true.

"They are the smartest generation ever."

Thursday, 5 June 2014

How Teachers Are Learning: An in-depth report on the tools advancing teacher training

PD-Remix-EdSurge-Report-2014

Tuesday, 3 June 2014

How two minutes of mindfulness can calm a class and boost attainment

Mindfulness helps students cope with academic stress and the pressures of life outside the school gates. Matthew Jenkin examines the benefits of silent reflection in education

- Matthew Jenkin
- Guardian Professional, Tuesday 3 June 2014 07.00 BST
- Jump to comments (0)

Mindfulness is a useful life skill, and can boost academic achievement. Photograph: Alamy

Buddhists have practised mindfulness for more than 2,000 years, but the technique of focusing on the present moment has long been dismissed by scientists as new age mumbo jumbo. Now, though, the West is finally waking up to the benefits of Eastern meditation and schools are discovering a daily dose of silent reflection can not only calm a classroom but may improve academic performance.

In recent years, medical science has discovered the extent to which mindfulness can help treat a range of mental conditions, from stress to depression. While most studies have focused on adults, new research shows mindfulness can improve the mental, emotional, social and physical health and wellbeing of young people. Incredibly, neuroscientists have found that long-term practice alters the structure and function of the brain to improve the quality of both thought and feeling.

It's no surprise, therefore, that teachers are becoming increasingly interested in the potential benefits of mindfulness for students.

Caroline Woods teaches year one and two at The Dharma primary school in Brighton and starts her class every day with a few minutes of silent mindfulness practice. She says getting the children to sit still and in silence isn't the struggle you might imagine. Students actually look forward to a time when all they have to do is stop, be calm and listen.

Although teaching at the school is based on Buddhist values, Woods insists the practice is not about religion or philosophy, it's about gaining control of your negative thoughts and emotions. These skills not only help young people cope with academic stress, but also enable them to deal better with the pains of growing up and day-to-day pressures of life outside the school gates.

"The whole process of mindfulness has the knock-on effect of making people more receptive and open," Woods explains. "What we are trying to do is help them become more aware of themselves in a non-judgemental way. By the time the students leave in year six, they have an emotional intelligence and a set of skills that really equip them to cope with everyday life."

While the most common form of mindfulness practice involves sitting and following the breath, it can be adapted to focus on eating, listening to music or walking. The key is to find a technique which appeals most to the students.

According to Katherine Weare, emeritus professor at the universities ofExeter and Southampton's mood disorder centre, one of the most useful ways of practising mindfulness is to take a very short pause in the middle of whatever you're doing. This can be done at school by inviting students to stop what they are doing, close their eyes and recognise what is happening in their mind and body right now. Then focus on the breath and really feel a sense of contact with the floor. It can take just two minutes, but once done, students are often ready to carry on in a much calmer way.

Weare, who is working with staff from the University of Exeter and elsewhere in the UK to develop mindfulness in schools, describes the practice as "the WD40 of education", helping students find the focus needed to achieve their academic goals. The evidence, she says, is that kids' tests improve as a result and children who can sit and breathe for a few minutes before they start an exam will do better compared with those who don't.

Any mindfulness programme in school must, however, start with the teachers. Former teacher Claire Kelly is operations director for theMindfulness in Schools project which offers training and resources for teachers. She says it is vital the teacher embodies the practice if the students are to follow suit.

"If you are not living the mindfulness principles yourself, the kids will know, they will be very cynical and you will probably put them off," she says. "Likewise, if you teach them a lovely mindfulness lesson and then go out and kick the photocopier in the corridor, they will notice."

Making sure the school leadership is on board is also essential. If they are supporting you, you're halfway there.

Kelly warns, however, not to expect immediate results. In her experience the impact of mindfulness varies from student to student and it is difficult to know whether the practice is really sinking in. Some of the students will immediately get it, though, and she advises starting a lunchtime club for those who are really keen. And while others in the class often appear to be daydreaming and some may even fall asleep, that doesn't mean that they will never use the techniques.

"There was a year group I was teaching and only a third of them at the time looked like they were really engaging with the practice," she remembers. "But then about three years later, I had a phone call from an external invigilator who asked me to come down to the exam hall immediately. When I went down there I was surprised to see the same students doing a meditation practice in preparation for the paper they were about to sit.

"You are giving them a toolkit. Whether they use those skills is up to them, but the chances are they will draw on them at some stage."