These are my notes from a fascinating day at the Essa Academy, courtesy of Apple. We were treated to a tour and talks by a number of staff including the Principal - Showk Badat, Abdul Chohan & Jeff Ellis.

I was fascinated by not just the integration of mobile technologies (they are famous for giving every pupil an iPod Touch, and now, every teacher an iPad), but also their innovative New Basics Year 7 curriculum and their elective personalised curriculum for years 8-11. I was also impressed by the fantastic pupils and the excellent learning that we saw.

Below are basically my notes as I took them, I hope they’re of interest to some people and I will reflect on them further in relation to my IT Provision Plans.

Essa Academy – http://www.essaacademy.org/

Story over past 3 years:

- Stop doing the wrong things well. Start doing the right things better. e.g. running a 3 Year KS3 when no need – one year costs £1m+ and adds what?

- Abandon ‘nonsense & rubbish’!

- Remove barriers to creativity

- Translate or transform learning & pedagogy – especially with tech – focussed on transforming, not just translating the old way of doing things to the new tools.

- Motto: All Will Succeed

Built on 3 pillars, all supported by a bedrock of Technology For Creativity:

- Personalised Learning

- Professional Practice

- Social Capital

Technology breaks down the barriers to learning. Massively increases the creativity of staff and students. Improves communications and efficiencies. e.g. students in habit of emailing staff questions as and when they come up wherever they may be. Students ‘notes’ app is a thing to behold – completely embraced as their number one knowledge storage place!

Year 7: New Basics Curriculum

- Much like our Project 7

- Based upon Queensland’s New Basics Project, but tailored for Essa.

- Eng & Maths separate (25%)

- Everything else in New Basics projects (75%)

New Basics Structure - from http://education.qld.gov.au/

- 4 Rich Tasks per year. e.g. Being British, Science & Ethics.

- Classes of 50! with 2 staff. One stays with, one project specialist who rotates through all groups through the year doing the same project.

- Big room with smaller break-off space

- FANTASTIC learning, enthusiasm, confidence – really impressive!

- Staff only teach this and have the 25% time for planning

- Built on key questions:

- Who am I? Where am I going?

- How do I make sense of and communicate with the World?

- What are my rights and my responsibilities

- All work is assessed against ‘Repertoires of Practice’ – a list of learning outcomes

- These are not dumbed down – impressive language for learning used – pupils understand it perfectly well!

- All planned and matched against ECM & Functional Skills competencies

Personalisation:

- Year 8-11 all choose 2 ‘electives’ from a bank of 4. From: WEB (work, enterprise, business); Arts; The World; Social

- Electives last 6 months

- Taught in mixed year group classes.

- Every 6 months pupils choose to continue & deepen knowledge or change and broaden

- Timetable is 9 ‘sessions’ (as opposed to 25 lessons!)

- All learning built on 5 core pedagogies.

- All learning is on Level 2 qualifications.

- Examined when ready e.g. 500 pupils sat Maths last year, 25% of Y8 got C+

Essa Curriculum Structure

- E&M will be timetabled in 3 hour blocks – up to subject leaders how that time shared out

- Allows personalisation to individual pupils needs.

- Each child has Personal Vision Plan

- Supported by Significant Adult (tutor)

- Significant Adults everyone from Teacher to Head’s PA to Site Staff

- 5-12 pupils per staff member

- ‘Tutor groups’ chosen carefully and matched to staff e.g. small challenging boys group have caretaker – and have been brilliantly behaved ever since!

- Assessment recorded every 4 weeks in every subject.

- 5 target review days each year with parents and significant adults

Student Voice:

- Students integral part of leading school

- School Senate made up of 53 pupils – one per tutor group – elected

- School Ambassadors sit above this group

- All meet every week

- Behaviour Panel run by students – restorative justice doled out by the pupils

- Technology is the common denominator that breaks down the barrier between staff and students.

- Relationships have never been stronger, learning has never been more mutual. Student will sit and check all facts and figures on iPods and feed straight back to staff if they aren’t right!

iPod Each:

Creativity – a new literacy. Everyone has one. Parents pay 12.50 a year for insurance. All other costs covered by Academy.

Children will try and fail and try again. Staff less so. Students run iPod clinics. Creativity ideas come from the students and are sent back towards the staff.

Sims accessible. Info direct to staff pockets. Massive efficiency savings. This leads to more time with pupils. No notices etc in form time – quality conversations instead. Form time can be outside – just email form to let them know – instant communication.  Streamlined, productive, gives everyone a voice – (dinner ladies even have one!). Massive impact on quality of work of caretakers etc. Caretaker input to learning – first to tell everyone about iplayer app. Food better as catering team email menus and kids feedback what they don’t like!

GCSEPod (http://www.gcsepod.co.uk/subjects/#) – podcasts, subscription based resource. Searchable by exam board, download straight to iPods. Don’t need wifi at home then. E.g. Listen to podcast for homework, tap answers into notes, email back to staff. 900 downloads last year.

VLE – was Frog. But why? Email on iPod more powerful. All dept resources now on Dropbox (http://dropbox.com) so shared between staff and students and available anywhere. Each dept has a 50Gb account. The device is the vle. Frog no longer used.

Edmodo (http://edmodo.com)- used across the school. Excellent communication tool for each class and free. Anne Marie Duffy joined the GCSE English group’s Edmodo and helps them with their homework and revision!

Ipads for teachers: Each teacher given one this year.  Massive impact on creativity. Freedom to teacher. No technicians etc needed. Finance director gifts the app to staff and students. Reviews help assess quality. Direct communication to the developer – most happy to help.

Costs: Textbook outlays slashed. Financing has to change. Less money to depts. Printing costs halved in first year with no efforts to reduce – happened naturally and continues to fall.

Policies etc handed out on podcasts. Done in multiple languages for parents.  Audio is massively increasing as a resource.

Macs bringing massive increase in the quality of digital production. Slowly replacing PCs with Macs – especially for staff.

Interactive whiteboards all removed. Artificial ‘interactivity for one or two’ replaced with truly interactive learning.

Results:

2007: 37% 2008: 58% 2009: 67% 2010 99% 5A*-C.

28-55% 5A*-C E&M in same period.

Costs 7p a day over 5 years. 18p over 2 years. Going to run own insurance.

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Another what’s the best way forward? blog post where I try and dissect my own thinking on what IT provision should look like in a Secondary School in 2011.  Continue the current mix of laptop trolleys and IT suites or move towards a 1 to 1 environment of tablets or laptops?

Are tablets the answer?

Financial Planning

This year so far has been all about planning ahead for me. We’ve started the process of planning two completely new courses to deliver to our students in ICT, and I’m delighted that both GCSE Computing & Creative iMedia have enough students interested for me to run both courses next year.

Next on my hit-list is managing & planning our IT provision across the whole site for the next few years. Our school has always been relatively cash-rich for a variety of reasons. This is not the case going forward.  Despite Michael Gove & the Conservatives’ claims that they would not cut school budgets we are receiving less money this year than we have previously. This is after we take into account the pupil premium (and being situated in Central Manchester we have an above average percentage of Free School Meals). All of this at the same time as costs are increasing thanks to the Government’s removal of the Harnessing Technology Grant. Historically the IT Support team has been given a fairly modest budget with which they maintain the existing equipment and add some provision each year.  Replacement of entire suites / trolleys etc have then been funded by ‘Summer Projects’ funded from surplus school cash. I am acutely aware that the surplus school cash may well not be here next Summer and it is time we plan and budget ahead carefully for the next 2-5 years.  And so I come to my current position where I am left impressed at the cost of continuing as we are, yet thinking there must be a better way….

The Status Quo

We have 750 students aged 11-16, in total we have approximately 300 desktop PCs and 250 laptops within the school. Pupil facing IT is mainly provided by:

• 4 Computer Labs with between 20-30 desktop PCs.
• 2 Trolleys of Macbooks bought last year primarily for use with Art & Media.
• 6 Trolleys of (aging) laptops spread around other departments.
• Some desktops in the Library.
• 2 other mixed use rooms with approximately 12 PCs around the perimeter of the room.
• 16 iMacs in the Music room.

This is an impressive list for such a small school, but it has been built on repeatedly in prosperous times with little thought for the total cost of ownership (TCOO).

This is also an impressive appearing ratio of Devices:Students of over 1:2. Or it is on paper. In reality the computer rooms are almost fully timetabled to ICT, Tech & Science. The laptops have batteries that often barely last an hour and where they are good then only one trolley to share between 6 concurrent classes. At best that’s an IT ratio of 1 in 6 for students in the Maths department for example.

And then there is the reality of a lesson using IT.  Which begins with either moving your class to the IT suite and logging on (10mins gone at least) or wheeling the trolley in, handing out machines and signing the sheet for each pupil, logging on (slowly).  Again at least 10 minutes gone.  Logins take too long.  We have a wireless G network that strains to cope as we really need double the number of access points, it works great for a few devices but struggles when 30 laptops are logging on.  We also have an aging core network.  I wanted to replace both this Summer but funds won’t allow.  We will be replacing the core network though, a new fibre ring and CAT 6 cabling to each room.  Spare points put into every room too.  It seems strange in this wireless world to still be spending on cables like this but it does need doing and should see us through for many years.  A wireless-N network will have to wait until next Summer if I’m lucky.

These practicalities mean that the pedagogical uses of all this equipment are fairly ‘traditional’. Primary uses are Office needs and Internet research. Maths heavily use online resources from MyMaths & MangaHigh. Some departments have been increasingly using video and audio with Flip Cams, Audacity etc.. We have recently invested in RealSmartCloud as our VLE. This combines the excellent RealSmart suite of online learning tools along with Google Apps. This will be increasingly used by all departments next year.

From my experience I would suggest that this is a fairly standard situation compared to many secondary schools within the UK and elsewhere in the World.

Option 1 then would be to continue the status quo – planning ahead financially replacing the current machines as they reach their end of life.  I have been using the incredibly useful Becta (God rest their soul!) ICT Investment Planner to help with this.  This spreadsheet accounts for all of your current IT provision, factors in lifespan and replacement costs alogn with other annual costs to give you the total value of equipment, the annual cost to ‘stand-still’ and the ability to plan large scale replacements / improvements in future years.  It’s a really useful tool and I’ve embedded a copy of it below as I’m not sure if it’s easily available following Becta’s demise.

ICT Investment Planner v.1.04

Class sets of Desktops & Laptops in 2011

Desktop PCs in 2011 are becoming cheaper and cheaper. For the last few years the average PC has been more than capable of coping with the demands of the average user, and it’s only when you get into heavy video editing and gaming that more expensive machines are required. It’s perfectly possible to use something as cheap as an Acer Revo for Web/Office needs.  We’ve been getting them for under £180.

Acer Revo PC

Better spec’d machines based on the new Intel Core i3/i5 processors can be had for £250-400 with machines at the latter end of that bracket more than capable of performing any tasks we throw at them right up to editing in Adobe Premier Pro. LCD monitors last from one machine to the next (although some good do with a bump in resolution) so the upgrade costs are not too bad.

Laptops on the other hand don’t seem to be getting much cheaper. There are two over-riding requirements for laptops that make up class-sets and they are build quality and battery life.  If they need charging 2-3 times a day or if you are constantly replacing keyboards, screens & hinges then they become increasingly costly and increasingly unavailable. We have a set of 30 Toshiba NB200 netbooks and whilst they have been a cheap class set the compromises in screen size, keyboard size and speed make them less than ideal for class sets.  Prices have increased on netbooks recently as well.

Toshiba Netbook

There’s a wealth of cheap 15″ laptops, but they often have poor build quality and awful batteries that then need upgrading to 6 or preferably 9 cell variants – that’s £80 on the base price immediately. A decent laptop with battery life to last a day seems to cost close to £500. And don’t forget to add £1-3k on top of that for a trolley.  We’re yet to find trolleys that do everything that’s expected of them, we have supposedly top of the line Lapsafe trolleys at the moment and they have a terrible habit of overheating machines and destroying their batteries.  Support is also expensive.

As you can tell I’m no great fan of laptop trolleys! From a cost, practicality and ease of use point of view they’re not a great solution.

Using the aforementioned budget planner rough estimates for the cost of continuing our provision along similar lines are £50,000 per year. Software costs don’t have much of an impact as the new Microsoft agreements based upon the number of Full Time Staff has reduced costs considerably to schools and the number of machines no longer affects these costs.

1 to 1 Options

I’m convinced that an effective and affordable one to one solution must be out their somewhere. Logically we’re edging closer to that ratio in school as things stand, and yet as I’ve discussed the pupil use ratios are way below the actual machine ratios.

I’m also convinced that a 1 to 1 programme would transform teaching and learning within our school.  Staff would be able to plan confidently to use ICT effectively within their lessons. Pupils could access the web whenever they saw fit, using it to support their learning just like we all do in our lives. As we increasingly move towards the cloud pupils and staff would have access to all of their electronic lives wherever they happen to be learning. It would also transform the amount and quality of home learning that could take place, not only for the students themselves but also the rest of their families – a real positive impact throughout our community.

There are a few options to investigate here.  And again there are priorities:

• Cost
• Battery life
• Time-to-online
• Durability
• Weight
• Compatability
• Management demands

Battery life and time-to-online are crucial, if these are to be embedded in every aspect of our pupil’s learning then they need to be able to pull out their device whenever they choose, know it will work and be online within seconds. It has to be affordable and the software needs to be right.

In an ideal world the perfect current solution would be this:

MacBook Air 11″

But of course the first priority of cost ruins this option. That aside I love my Macbook Air. The SSD hard drive makes it much more powerful than you would imagine, the battery is amazing, it weighs next to nothing, it’s incredibly well built and it turns on in about a second. Going back to something like the netbooks I discussed earlier seems like a trip to the dark ages.

Netbooks could work, but I’m just not convinced they are durable enough, they take an age to log on and they really don’t have much of a ‘wow’ factor now. They obviously have an advantage over the current generation of tablets in that they will run Windows based software. Friends and colleagues that I have spoken to who have run 1 to 1 projects with netbooks have struggled to get buy in from all parties, often not actually reaching that 1 to 1 ratio.

Netbook advantages: Cost, compatibility, battery life.

Netbook disadvantages: Power & speed, durability, screen & keyboard size, time to online, weight.

Tablets have seemingly sprung from nowhere to be the darlings of the computing world. The iPad has been an incredible success and the iPad 2 has built upon this. I love mine and think it’s a device packed with potential.

iPad 2 – A ‘Magical’ Device

Some pioneering schools have started 1 to 1 deployments of iPads.  Frasier Spier’s exploits at Cedar’s School in Scotland is perhaps one of the most well documented. He is a great advocate for the differences in teaching and learning opportunities that his students have enjoyed since the deployment. A few salient points from Frasier’s writing:

“I can tell you some long-term big trends that I’ll bet on right now:

• Pupils and teachers will never wish they had fewer computers.
• Pupils and teachers will never wish their devices had shorter battery life than the iPad.
• Pupils and teachers will never wish that they had to queue up to get access to computers.
• Pupils and teachers will never wish that their internet access was slower.
• Pupils and teachers will never want a device that’s harder to use than the iPad.
• Teachers will never want to have to go to a special classroom to use The Computers.
• Nobody will want a device that’s more expensive and less capable than the iPad.
• Nobody will want to carry around a device that’s significantly heavier than the iPad all day.
• Pupils will not want to use a special “education device” when the market is going elsewhere.
• Schools will not want to deploy a device that requires more tech support than an iPad.”

And on things like voting systems & the effect of the App Store:

“Put simply, if you’re in the business of making discrete hardware for the classroom you are in very serious trouble. Your business is about to be replaced by a $5 download from the App Store and the rest of your company’s existence will be about trying to sell a refresh to your existing installed base.”

I genuinely believe that an iPad per pupil could transform pedagogy within our school. Yes the lack of Flash & Windows programs is a problem. But the pace of development in the App Store is amazing and the move to the cloud & HTML5 mean these are issues that will shrink over time. The ability to output the screen straight to your projector makes it a great teaching tool now.

I’ve had initial discussions with our local Apple supplier. Discounts are sorely lacking for schools other than the obvious VAT saving. Apple Financial Services have started to run a finance package called iStudent. This allows parental contributions which is something we would need to do to even approach affordability. Unfortunately when you start to add on Apple Care and insurance. This takes costs right back to around £400 minimum per machine spread over a 3 year lease.

Other issues to overcome are the management of 750+ iPads. Central management would become impossible at this scale. It would seem logical to allow students to manage their own device – they are intensely personal devices after-all. But what about ensuring certain apps are present – gift cards or app gifting would probably be required. And what about those students who don’t own a PC to sync their device to? Staff training and perception would also be a big challenge – but not insurmountable.

I’d love to be able to do this but initial funding calculations suggest I’d be coming up £40-50k a year short. Even factoring in the various savings we’d make elsewhere around the school such as on printing and paper planners. This also includes factoring in parental contributions of around £6 per month. I think this would be possible, and in a world where every pupil seems to have their own blackberry, not unreasonable.

iPad Advantages: Time-to-on, flexibility, weight, battery life, durability, wow-factor, App Store, other cost savings, hold value well, OS updates.

iPad Disadvantages: Cost, App & sync management, staff training / mind shift, Flash support, no keyboard, no USB/SD card options, theft & pupil safety off-site.

Apple of course do not have a monopoly on the tablet market, and the other manufacturers have been playing catch-up ever since the release of the original iPad a year ago. Largely based around Google’s Android operating system it’s fair to say that comparison reviews have not rated the first generation of alternatives. My limited experience of them has reinforced this view. However the latest version of Android has been written with tablets in mind and some machines are starting to look more competitive. Although it also has to be said that Apple’s dominance has allowed them to beat almost everyone on price as well as quality.

One new device that looks like it has real potential is the Asus EeePad Transformer along with it’s keyboard & battery dock:

Initial reviews seem positive and this could be a great option going forward. Android tablets don’t require a base PC to sync with, but then again their software and App Store don’t offer the breadth and quality of the Apple alternative yet. But you could buy a tablet each and then have a stock of keyboards available to use within school when extended writing is required. They also offer USB & SD Card compatibility.

Android Tablet Advantages: Time-to-on, flexibility, weight, battery life, durability?, wow-factor?, keyboards, SD & USB.

Android Tablet Disadvantages: Cost, market fragmentation & OS update lifespan (many older tablets can’t update to the latest version of Android for example), values drop more rapidly, staff training / mind shift.

Of course a more modest device could be used. The Essa Academy in Bolton have had great success using iPod Touches as their 1 to 1 device under the expert guidance of Abdul Chohan. Whilst it lacks the power and extra flexibility of a full tablet, it still has the App Store and is of course half the price.

iPod Touch

iPod Touch Advantages: Cost, Time-to-on, flexibility, weight, battery life, durability, App Store, other cost savings, OS updates, camera.

iPad Disadvantages: App & sync management, staff training / mind shift, Flash support, theft & pupil safety off-site, smaller impact on need for traditional PC & laptop provision.

The final possibility that is on the horizon is the new generation of netbooks from Google based on their upcoming Chrome Operating System. These devices have no hard drive, just a small SSD for the OS. They are cloud based machines that really need to be online to be much use. They will come with integrated 3G connections. The simplest way to think of them is a laptop that runs Google Chrome and nothing much else. Traditional storage can be used via USB or SD cards. We use Google Apps so they would actually integrate nicely with much of our current work. There would obviously be full support for flash. Issues would include what happens in student’s homes without wifi. Could we get them with phone contracts? They should be available some time this Summer. There has been a pilot programme but it was only available in the US unfortunately.

Until production models are available for us to play with it is hard to judge if these notebooks offer a real alternative.

Conclusions:

It looks like, unless I can source funding for an iPad project the costs for a full tablet deployment in our school are just too prohibitive. We don’t work in an area where we can ask for significant parental contributions, some maybe, but not to cover the full costs. Another issue that springs to mind with this or any device is the lifespan of the device and what you do at the end of it. We could start by buying all of our Year 7′s a device this year. But then in 3 years time they’d probably need replacing. And we’d be up to 4 year groups worth of leases and serious issues continuing the funding.

I’m not wholly convinced that the current crop of netbooks are up to task, the investment required wouldn’t transform our classrooms as I’d like.

Android devices are expensive and just don’t have the accomplished finish of an iOS device.

iPod Touches would be do-able right now, but I fear they would seem outdated in just a year or two’s time.

Chrome OS isn’t here yet.

So perhaps a cost and learning effective 1 to 1 solution isn’t here right now. But it feels very close. I am tempted to make do and mend a little this year, the forever downward trend of IT costs and upwards trend of power and portability mean that by September 2012 there could be a good solution. I’d rathe not invest heavily in old tech until then.

I’ll also talk to my friends and colleagues at Toshiba and see what they have up their sleeves.

And cheeky as this is, if you work for Asus, Google or a supplier and would like to provide me with an Android tablet or Chrome OS notebook that you believe could fill our 750 device shaped hole then please do get in contact with me.

Do you work in a school that has a successful (or not!) 1 to 1 programme? Or do you have a traditional provision like we do now? Have you invested in iPads? I’d be fascinated to hear other educators views on this whole topic – I can’t imagine we’re the only school going through these thought processes in 2011.

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Disclaimer: I would consider Dawn a friend, thanks to many interactions via Twitter & Teachmeets etc even though we’ve only met a handful of times..  I won’t go into great detail about the work she has done as her blog has details of it all. LWF Bio.

Dawn discussed using Nintendo DS & Wii with the pupils are so engaged in their learning that Dawn doesn’t really need to be greatly involved for large parts of the lessons.  Writing and learning underpins the gaming experience.

Sharing via Twitter and Teachmeet have been great inspirations for Dawn.  Redbridge game network has allowed them to share their knowledge and their resources.

They have developed great cross-currciular learning projects, with games based learning as a small inspirational part of it.  Kids enjoy their ‘secret learning’

Dawn’s school and the Redbridge network have began to look at evidence.  There are clear signs that Maths & English are improving, very clear signs that engagement, attendance and punctuality are improved considerably.

Again this is an example of fantastic innovation in Primary classrooms, this innovation needs to spread into the Secondary classroom.  How can we do this?  Costs are higher and timetables don’t make things easy.  I think we need strong leaders who can remove these traditional constraints.  And again, as Dawn said it;s about sharing the good practice that has gone one already.  Borrowing the great work that has happened via the Consolarium in Scotland that Derek Robertson spoke about earlier.  One school in the research group is Secondary.

Inspirational as ever – well done Dawn!

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Inspired by Sugata Mitra at the SSAT National Conference I decided to try and ape his ‘minimally invasive education‘ within my own Maths classroom.

In a really tough December week this two hours shone out as a great teaching and learning experience.

Before going any further, please head over to my previous post to read about the inspiration for this lesson.

In a nutshell, Sugata discovered that children can teach themselves with the aid of the Internet.  His hole-in-the-wall experiment inspired the book that inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire.  He has since been investigating how to apply these findings in Western school systems.

I followed some basic rules that Sugata has developed.  I split the students into groups, each with a computer and then gave them a problem to solve.

The rules are simple:

• Students were told to get into groups of their choice of around 4 children.
• They had one laptop per group.
• They could walk around and cheat, looking at what the other groups were doing.
• They could move groups if they wanted to.
• No input from me other than some encouragement and praise.

My Year 7 class (11-12 year olds) are an able group who I have done a little group work earlier this year.  I gave them a simple question:

Who was Pythagoras?

And with it, the text (but not diagram) of a typical GCSE question:

A ladder is leaning against a wall.  It is 5 meters long, the base of the ladder is 3.5 meters away from the wall.  How far up the wall does it reach?

At that point, I pretty much put my feet up and left them to it for the next two hours.  The maths involved is traditionally not taught to pupils of this ability for at least another 2 1/2 years.  It would be considered as being about 2-3 National Curriculum levels above their current ability.

To say I was surprised and delighted with the next 90 minutes would be an understatement!

Two groups in particular shone at this task and took very different approaches to reaching the correct solution:

Mathematical Logic: An enthusiastic group of girls split into two pairs, one pair hit Google and quickly found Pythagoras’ Theorem, a diagram of a right angle triangle and the formula a²+b²=c².  The other pair started drawing a scale drawing of the problem and within minutes had a fairly close estimate of the ladder problem.  These girls had done little algebra before, they had certainly not substituted into equations, let alone rearranged them.  However I watched them equate the ladder and wall to the example right angle triangle, substitute in the values I had given them in the problem, and begin a discussion about how to find b².  They correctly deduced that to find the missing value “if they are added together, then we need to subtract the 3.5² from the 5² to find b²”.  Perfect mathematical logic!  They then got a little stuck as they had never come across the concept of a square root before.  Halving their value was the first attempt, but they quickly saw that this was nowhere near the value they had got from their scale drawing.  Dividing by 3 was the next logical step for them (a triangle has 3 sides afterall they declared!), again this didn’t work out close enough to their estimate.  At this point they went back to the Internet and found some examples of solving problems of this nature.  Here they stumbled across the square root sign, quickly understood the concept of a square root and then found the button on their calculators, and next the correct solution to the problem.  Quite amazing!  They produced a poster to show their learning:

Other than a little confusion with square and square root symbols, an impressive effort.

Search and yee shall find: A group of three boys attacked this problem by searching for information using both the laptop and also the resources in the room.  They found out who Pythagoras was thanks to Wikipedia.  But they also started looking through the GCSE Maths books in the room and even found a revision guide.  They found an example question in one of the books that was another leaning ladder question.  They used this to quickly find the answer to the problem that I had set them.  This might not have involved the mathematical deduction that I had watched the girls use, but it was an impressively efficient effort, and is just how I learn things these days.  Search on the Internet, find some examples of what I want to do and adapt these methods.  I put another question on the board, this time finding the hypotenuse of the triangle.  The boys found a great ’3 quick steps to solving Pythagoras’ from the revision guide and applied this to the problem in no time at all.  They produced this presentation of their learning:

Of all the groups, these two groups developed a good understanding of Pythagoras’ Theorem with no help at all.  Two other groups got there after a little bit of peeking at the work of the first two groups (well within the rules), and two groups did not get very far.  This was down to a lack of teamwork, something we can work on in coming weeks, these pupils are only 11 years old after all.  Overall in the two hours we managed to learn: Pythagoras’ Theorem – done!  Square roots – done!  Substituting & rearranging algebraic equations – well on the way!

I will be interested to see how well this learning is retained.  Sugata Mitra’s work seems to show that months later retention from this form of learning is impressive.  I’ll be delighted if the class can solve a problem next week, and even more so if it’s still there after the Christmas break.

This was such a success I will try it out with all my classes this week.  It’s the last full week of term, always a tricky time to keep the pupils engaged, it seems an ideal time to try out a different way of learning.  I’ll be intrigued to see how this works, particularly with my lower ability Year 8s.  I think the success I had with this trial was in part due to the excellent learning habits that class already had and in the pitch of the question.  It offered just the right amount of challenge, and was relatively easy to search for online.

With that in mind, this week I will try the following:

• Year 7 (NC Level 5-6):  Independent Probability: How do you find the probability of two independent events happening? What is the probability of winning the lottery?  What is the problem of getting 5 out of 6 balls in the lottery?

• Year 8 (NC Level 3-4):  nth Term of Sequences: How do you find the 100th number in a sequence?  Present with a sequence problem from diagrams e.g. matchsticks and ask for the 100th term.

• Year 10 (GCSE Grades E-D):  Sine Rule: How do you find the area of a scalene triangle? Present with triangle to find area of.

• Year 11 (GCSE Grades D-C): Transforming Graphs: What is the equation of this graph? (Transformed sine wave – pupils have not come across sine waves before)

What do you think?  Are these suitable questions?  Have you tried anything similar in your classroom?  Will you try this method of enquiry based learning now?  I’d be really interested to here your views and experiences.

As this is a fairly hands-off form of teaching I may try and live-tweet the lessons – we’ll see how things go.

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Bio

Sugata Mitra is currently Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University.  He has spent many years in a huge number of research posts.  With regards to education he is most famous for his Hole In The Wall Experiment whereby he put an Internet enabled PC in the wall of an Indian slum in 1999 and left it there for anyone to use.

You can see the talk here, or watch his similar TED talk here.

Reflections

Sugata was charming and engaging.  The driving message that he had was that given some time and an Internet connection, children are quite proficient at teaching themselves.

He first discovered this in his now famous Hole In The Wall experiment.  I won’t go over the details of that here as you can watch the videos above or read about it in detail on Wikipedia or it’s own dedicated website.  Sugata explained that he did not go looking for this effect, however his experiments demonstrated that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Sugata calls this minimally invasive education.

Part of the original thoughts behind this experiment and Sugata’s subsequent work was that there are areas of the World where for a variety of reasons young people cannot access good schools or good teachers.  These reasons are more obvious in places like rural India, but Sugata argued that this was the case also in some of our inner city areas of the UK.  Sugata went on to describe the work he has been doing in and around Gateshead.  He has taken his ideas of minimally invasive education and developed a model for use in the UK school system.

In Gateshead he has been working in a number of schools.  In each he has been working with teachers to give groups of 4 pupils extended periods to investigate questions as a group with the aid of one laptop per group.  Sugata was convinced that pupils worked better in this model in groups, with 4 being the optimum.  He also said that they quickly found that 1 laptop per group was more efficient and becoming of group interactions than one each.  Groups are allowed, almost encouraged to steal findings from other teams and pass them off as their own!

Groups of young pupils (Year 7 – 11years old) have been given a number of GCSE questions to solve, many (5) years before they would normally encounter them.  They have been tested on them immediately after working on them, and 6 months later in rows of individual desks.  Results show that this knowledge is retained exceptionally well.

Interestingly, this at first seemed to fly in the face of the Government White Paper, and indeed much of Dylan Wiliam’s evidence that the most important factor in a child’s education is the teacher in front of them.  I was fortunate to have coffee with Sugata after his speech and put this to him.  He was quite clear that he was not advocating the removal of the teacher, although I did love his quote from Arthur C Clarke: “A teacher who can be replaced by a machine, should be“.  Sugata explained to me that in his opinion the key to successful minimally invasive education is to pose the right question in the first place.  I’d be interested to learn more about exactly what kind of questioning / modeling was most effective in setting up successful learning.

Sugata also talked of his ‘grandmother effect’.  First investigated during one of his hole in the wall experiments, Sugata used older volunteers to do little more than encourage and regularly praise the young learners.  In the Kalikuppam experiment Sugata found that  scores improved from 30% to 50% with the aid of a ‘grandmother’, also dubbed a ‘mediator’.  This idea was developed later with the use of real grandmothers and retired teachers in NW England Skyping in to the classrooms of India to encourage the learners there.  This seems to fly in the face of some of Dylan Wiliam’s assertions that praise only feedback has little or no effect on learning.  Perhaps this is down to the contrasting learning environments?  Dylan’s research will have been based mainly in traditional classrooms with traditional teaching models whereas Sugata’s classrooms were many miles away from them in geography and teaching styles.

So would you use the ideas behind minimally invasive education within your own classroom?  Would your timetable allow you the chance to do so?  Have you worked like this before?  It’s certainly a fascinating and beguiling idea that students can do so much on their own.  Is this the ultimate example of the (worn out) adage of the ‘guide on the side’ taking over from the ‘sage on the stage’?

My Notes

Sugata Mitra – the future of learning.

“When I need to know something I can find it out in 5 minutes”

We have problems of relevance and aspiration.

Weak negative correlation of council house % vs results – ‘rough’ teacher recruitment?

Hole in the wall pc in a slum.

Children taught themselves English to use machine! Groups of children can learn to use computers themselves irrespective of who or where they are.

Hyderabad, left pupils with speech to text software and left them to be understood! They downloaded Oxford English dictionary, listened and spoke back in BBC English accent. One now works in call centre!

Children invented pedagogy. Arthur C Clarke “a teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be”

9 months in, English language had improved and deep learning increased. Pupils had found Google!

Groups of children can navigate the Internet to achieve educational objectives on their own. Hypothesis.

Kalikuppam experiment – teach improper DNA replication to themselves? 30% in test. Up to 50% with grandmother technique of standing behind and praising! In line with best schools in deli.

Gateshead experiment. 30 kids, groups of 4, one laptop per group. Allowed to steal from groups and claim as their own! 6 gcse qs solved in 20mins – y7. Sat in rows 6 months later, in rows, scores the same!

Grandmothers – 40 retired teachers skyped into Hyderabad.

Group children, investigate questions, teacher frames questions right, use group rules, pupils investigate as far as they can.

Self organising system where learning takes place on its own.

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The first of a series of notes / reflections on sessions at the 2010 SSAT National Conference.

Bio

Dylan Wiliam has the grand title of ‘Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment‘ at the Institute of Education in London.  He is a former Maths teacher and co-author of the book “Inside the Black Box“.  He is a world renowned expert on assessment for learning, and was recently to be seen on BBC television in The Classroom Experiment.

My Notes

On learning environments & the role of the teacher: Teachers do not create learning.  Learners create learning.  Teaching is engineering of effective learning environments. Teachers should create engagement.  Learning environments should be regulated. Teachers should know when students are learning.  We should develop habits of mind.

On intelligence & environment: Intelligence is partly inherited.  IQ is the best predictor of GCSE performance. Predicts job placement/selection as you get older as people choose cognitive niches.  Environments create intelligence.  Intelligence creates environment.  We must create environments that challenge, foster high cognitive demand and are inclusive. We create amplifiers of success. E.g. January ice hockey players, picked young due to size, get the coaching & time – gaps increase.

On flow: Flow = match between challenge and capability. Csikszentmihalyi.  Children don’t learn what we teach, this is why assessment is core.

On assessment: Pre tests. Diagnosis and remediation.  Manage flow of learning, goals vs horizons. Sometimes ok to move off the planned track. Don’t test on the exact skill, generalise and test on application of that knowledge. Differentiate in terms of context and generalisation of knowledge.

5 key strategies in teaching:

• Clarifying, Understanding and sharing intentions.
• Engineering effective discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
• Provide feedback to move forward.
• Activate students as learning resources for one another
• Best teachers clear about start, route, readings along way, change course where needed.

On feedback & questioning: Middle class kids ‘get the code’, working class are no less intelligent just don’t get what we want. Nodding, smiling, giving positive feedback to teacher when they know it is wanted.  Make the rules of the game clear to stop the game of ‘guess what’s in the teachers head’. Posters of key words and rules of learning. Make own tests. Write tests for class next door. Pseudonyms mean they can mark as well.  Don’t give pupils a choice of being picked. No hands-up rule.   Keep them all on their toes and engaged.

Plan questions carefully to elicit understanding, not incorrect methods that are resulting in right answers. Old adage of giving pupils enough time to respond, average time by UK teachers is less than a second.  Cause thinking. Good questions depend upon the knowledge base of the students. Open/closed not bad. Cause thinking. Questions should be designed to provide data to inform teaching.  Marking is the penance for bad planning of learning!

Wait time for questioning. Think pair share if needed. Move locus of question around a classroom, answer, elaboration, evaluation. Back to original kid if needed to repeat answer and stay engaged – no opt-out no-hands up. Random pupil selection often less random than you’d think. Otherwise you are making the achievement gap worse.

Most teachers ask questions where you learn nothing from answers unless you hear the explanations. Right wrong questions no use for checking understanding. Have two correct answers out of six to choose from, if they all pick the right two then MOVE ON! Create questions with answers that highlight the common misconceptions, with enough possible answers that guessing is factored out. Drill down into the wrong answers. Hinge question based on important concept that future learning based on. Design questions with all right or all wrong answers. More than one right answer. Questions must be designed so that kids with the wrong thinking get a different answer. Right thinking must be the only way to the right answer.

Forget AfL in terms of record keeping, make teaching more agile and reflective. Mini whiteboards, use 1-5 fingers held up for abcde optional answers to questions posed.

On written feedback: Crucial to give comment and a chance to effect change within the classroom. Avoid grades, no benefit at all, and negates comments if two given together. Sometimes useful to delay feedback, can be too quick, e.g. Computer based feedback leads to trial and improvement techniques. Oliver & DeNisi 1996 meta-research showed effect sizes highly variable, 40% made progress WORSE. Hard!

Key points:

• Cause thinking. Response needed is to change behaviour or change goal.
• Should be more work for the recipient than the donor. (maths, ’5 are wrong – you find them’)
• Tell them what they can do to move forward.
• Comment only marking.
• Focussed marking, numbered responses/questions from their work. Not what’s wrong, “what’s next?” All pupils get same volume of work to do.
• Refining assessment. 3/4 way through test. Read not mark, plan final 1/4 based on those tests.
• Same roles and methods used for individuals and peers as to teacher based assessment.
• Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. Best assessment leaves no mark in a book but leads to more learning.
• 100 AfL techniques in a box available from the SSAT

Reflections

This is the second time I have had the fortune of hearing Dylan speak in person.  However I have been aware of his work since writing an essay based on his book “Inside the Black Box” whilst completing my PGCE back at the dawn of my teaching career.  The first reflection is that Dylan’s reliance on evidence based practice is admirable, each piece of advice is backed up with evidence from a myriad of university studies.  Whilst I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise for such a respected Professor, it is so often not the case in education.

Dylan went to great lengths to model his methods with the room of 400+ people.  Encouraging group discussion with clear signals (hands up for everyone) when he needed our attention., along with asking random people in the audience (including those at the back!) for their answers.

The message at the heart of this session was that assessment is at the heart of good teaching.  Dylan reflected that pupils often don’t learn what we teach them, sometimes they learn things that we hadn’t even planned.  It is our role as educators to create environments within which they can learn together and then to use assessment as a means of focussing the learning onto the next steps.  Kristian and I had a discussion about pre-tests, and how little these seem to be used within schools.  How often are pupils taught things that they already know?  How much time is wasted in our classrooms due to only completing assessments at the end of a unit of work.

There was much to take from Dylan seminar.  I will be making a renewed effort to think carefully about the questions that I pose in my lessons.  Questioning is one of the most difficult and poorly practiced parts of teaching. Dylan had many tips on phrasing verbal and designing written questions that I will be taking back to my teaching and to my department.  I will continue to promote Dylan’s words that effective AfL is not to be found as ticks in books or as marks in grade books.  As a school we are having a renewed push on the quality of written feedback, I have designed some marking stickers for whole school use and will share these here when they are ready.  I will take the ideas about the learning environment back to our school and see if we can improve this whole school, promoting no hands up rules and also clear signage in classrooms.  I love the idea of pupils writing exam questions and will be using this extensively, particularly with my Y10 & 11 classes.

Key Questions

The conference was based around 3 key questions, I’ll attempt to reflect on how each seminar helped answer these questions.

What should students learn? New things!  Using assessment before teaching to avoid wasting time covering old ground.

How should students learn? Collaboratively, in an environment that engages and stimulates them. By being given the time and opportunity to respond to feedback and questioning that has been designed to move learning on to the next level.

How do we remove the barriers to learning? Do not allow the enthusiastic to grow in confidence and skill whilst the weaker and disengaged hide on the fringes and watch the gap grow wider.  Make classroom learning rules clear to all.

Resources

Dylan’s presentation slides are available on his website.

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I’ve been trying to use my iPad in the classroom as much as possible, as a device for use in schools it is close to being perfect.  One of the drawbacks has been working out how to get what’s on the iPad to be projected onto my classroom wall.  You can connect it with the iPad VGA connector to a computer and project that way, but only a handful of apps support this.  This can apparently be expanded somewhat by jail-breaking , but I don’t really want to go there.

Then last week Wes Frier alerted me to an App called Air Sketch.  Air Sketch is a fairly simple drawing application with a killer feature, it will broadcast whatever is on the screen across your network to a webpage.  If you open that webpage in a HTML 5 browser from any machine attached to the same network you will see the iPad screen.  Any updates made on the iPad appear almost instantly on your PC or Mac.  Air Sketch was £1.79 but there is also a free option to try.

So I can walk around my classroom with my iPad and write on it with my Pogo Sketch Pen.  Everything appears as if I was stood at the Interactive Whiteboard using SMART Notebook.  Just being able to do this from anywhere in the room is a great help, I can get pupils to demonstrate work quickly without getting them to the front of the classroom.  We have GCSE exams next week, so spent a lot of Friday working through old exam papers, this meant as soon as I spotted a common problem in the class I could demonstrate a solution from sitting next to whichever child had the issue, but for the whole class to see, or better still get one of the pupils who did understand the answer to demonstrate it to their colleagues.

Air Sketch allows you to import both PDF files and images into the software ready for you to annotate over.  Air Sketch adds itself to your ‘Open In’ menu, so you can open a PDF straight from the Mail app, or Dropbox for example:

The PDF import is a useful feature and a good idea, but I had some issues with the clarity of the documents when they were imported.  Pogo Sketch works in landscape mode, and my PDFs were in portrait, zoomed out they were too small to annotate and too small to read on the projector:

Zoomed in they lacked clarity:

I found the easiest way to work around this was to open the PDF (or indeed Word, Powerpoint etc) document in the standard iPad viewer, zoom into the section I wanted to display then press the Home and Power buttons simultaneously to take a picture.  I could then open Air Sketch back up and open the image from the Picture menu:

The little toolbar along the bottom of that screen allows you to rotate the image and fill the screen with it ready for annotation:

Overall this is a great utility, it’s not perfect but is really exciting.  Surely it’s only a matter of time before other app developers build this technology into their own applications?  I hope Air Sketch itself gets an update soon to allow better importing of other files, more brush options, some hand-writing smoothing and other features that some of the other note-taking apps have been perfecting on the iPad.

Have you got any other apps you couldn’t live without in the classroom?  Do you think the iPad will soon offer a serious alternative to an Interactive Whiteboard?  When you consider the cost of this solution versus an interactive whiteboard or a tablet PC I think the market leaders in those areas must be running scared.

This works beautifully with the new iPad Software 4.2 – the ability to multi-task is a killer. More on that in my next post….

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Facebook recently updated their Groups feature.  Allowing finer control over groups which you set up, who can join, who can post, who can share etc..   Their are also improvements to how you are notified about group updates and a new feature called ‘docs’ that provides a Google Docs-esque shared notepad / document. Group chat is also built in allowing you to talk to everyone in that group at once. For a demonstration head over to Mashable or watch this video:

Our school has had some success in this area, the PE Department have a group for discussing after school teams and clubs and it is slowly growing, with news and sensible moderated discussion. I can see a Year 7 experiment here…..  Big VLE decisions are on the horizon at our school and part of me thinks a mix of free services like this and Google Docs and self hosted blogs may be the way forward.  Whatever decision is made, ease of use and extremely low barriers to entry are vital and Facebook ticks these boxes strongly. Opinions?

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Following yesterday’s use of Twitter in the classroom, I was walking to Period 5 (same class as yesterday) after lunch, when inspiration struck.  I remembered this post from @tombarrett .

Go and read it.

Go on!

I threw my lesson plan out of the window and did exactly what Tom did, here are the replies: (click through for them all)

This caused great excitement and interest in the topic, and really helped us look in to the language and mathematics of describing chance.

This class have really been inspired with the idea of my network, I had to stop them spending the rest of the lesson bombarding you all with further questions!  Bringing global connections into the classroom is a real attention grabber, and like it or not we are entertainers!

Nothing more to say – thanks Tom –  a great idea, and thanks to everyone who contributed to the lesson.

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I had an observation lesson today and decided to pull out all the technology tricks!  We happened to be at a point in the scheme of work looking at data handling and collecting data in particular.  I decided I’d develop the Questionnaires lesson which I used at interview last year.  60 minutes should be enough to do it more justice.

So here’s the plan:

• Discuss data quality based on previous lesson
• Tweet a link to my questionnaire and a Wallwisher for feedback on the questions
• Fill out my questionnaire full of deliberate mistakes in class
• Look at the live data spreadsheet
• Groups look at the data for one question, suggest problems with the data collected, and suggest improvements to the data.
• Discuss findings, looking at key points of: Leading Questions, Bias, Open/Closed Qs, Personal Qs, Options Boxes, Group boundaries etc.
• Look at Twitter feedback on Wallwisher, compare to our own thoughts
• Each team leaves one learning point on our own Wallwisher.
• Compile new Qs into anew Questionnaire

A lot to pack in to 60 minutes, but time for individual, group and whole class work and reflection.  My class have a high proportion of special educational needs, I feel there is a good mixture of learning styles catered for here and certainly not much time to get bored!

To complete the technological marvel, this was all wrapped up in a Prezi presentation:

As you can see I took charity as a theme – we had been collecting that morning for Haiti so it seemed appropriate.

Here’s my questionnaire – complete with deliberate mistakes galore:

I tweeted out a link to the form and my lovely personal learning network took care of the rest.

We completed the form individually in class while the live spreadsheet was up on the board:

Each group then worked through one of the questions, looking at data problems, and how to improve it.  This allowed me to differentiate the work, stronger groups could look at the tougher concepts and vice-versa.

Here’s the worksheets they worked on:

At this point we had some, lively, discussions about this and looked at the feedback from the Twitterverse on Wallwisher:

As you can see there was an awesome level of feedback here – I can’t thank everyone enough!  I was losing things a little by now, whole class discussion is hard work!

Finally we moved on and I asked each team to go to our own Wallwisher and put one point that they had learned today. This was tough, verbalising this level of Maths is not easy for them.  There were a few little nuggets in here, and although each pupil couldn’t put into words exactly what they had learned, I’m convinced each of them made good progress today.

My favourite (and it wasn’t me – a pupil using my logon) was:

“don’t ask the names cus the peepz won’t be honest”

Linking the fineries of English language questioning, with different data collection boxes through to the raw data that comes out of the other side is pretty complex stuff.

To blow my own trumpet, I think this is a pretty good way to teach Questionnaires & Data Quality.  Looking at the problems with the data produced from poor questioning makes it much clearer how to phrase and design them in the first place.  Has anyone else got any other novel ideas for this part of the curriculum?  I’d be fascinated to hear any ideas!

Finally, thanks to the fabulous TeachMeet BETT 2010.  The ideas of using Twitter in the classroom is one that I was reminded of at BETT, and particularly the use of Wallwisher.  I’ve seen it before and always forgotten to integrate it into the Maths classroom.  The ideas are fab, and the copy of Camtasia I won for emailing my use to tmbett2010@gmail.com will be really well used at school!  So a big thanks from me, and from the pupils for an entertaining lesson

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