Evidence Based Practice – the Goldacre paper

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Many of you will have come across Dr. Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre) before, whether through his journalism in the Grauniad or perhaps one of his books. He has a very engaging writing style and successfully makes esoteric academic issues seem not just accessible but actually interesting. In short, he’s the Brian Cox of the research methodology world, though measurably (P<0.001) less annoying.

 

Image: wikimedia.org

Image: wikimedia.org

If his output can be generalised, it would be fair to say that Dr. Goldacre is all about Evidence Based Practice. Someone at the DfE had the inspired idea (I’m guessing they didn’t follow him on twitter) to ask him to write a paper on EBL in education. What resulted was a gloves-off call to arms challenging the rank and file in schools to seize the initiative from policy makers and, without fear of Academic nay-sayers, start playing a more active role in steering the sector’s future by providing evidence of what actually works.

 

He is ambitious to play a role in helping education make the kind of progress achieved in medicine in recent decades, which saw a shift away from believing the assertions of prominent, charismatic ‘experts’ towards practice purely based on evidence. If you’re reading this, your health has almost certainly been materially effected by this shift. But to paraphrase Bill Shankly, education isn’t a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that.

 

paper

 

Please take the time (30 minutes?) to read it, I promise you that you will come away feeling inspired and empowered. Go on, click here and download the PDF.

 

On the very first page Dr. Goldacre demurs from the opportunity to ‘tell teachers what to do’ (give him time, he’s new to the sector), and moves on to acknowledge the issue of ‘confounding factors’ in this type of social research, before slaying the paper tiger of Randomised Control Trials being unethical in education. My professors repeatedly cautioned me not to use RCTs in my research and in retrospect seemed to slightly cherish the inherent immeasurability of educational interventions: “The classroom is not a laboratory, and children are not rats: it is not ethical to deny a control group a ‘treatment’ in order to demonstrate an effect”.

 

Dr. Goldacre simplifies and deflates this position, pointing out “there is arbitrary variation, across the country, across a town, in what strategies and methods are used, and nobody worries that there is an ethical problem with this” (p12) and that “the real challenge is in identifying what works the best, because when people are deprived of the best, they are harmed too”. How is it ‘ethical’ to continue to invest huge resources on things which we only suspect work?

 

This isn’t to dismiss the ongoing relevance of qualitative approaches, such as the stalwart of educational research, the Case Study. These have their place in explaining how something works. What we’re really struggling with, especially in ed tech, is “showing that something works” (p13) at all. There is some evidence of technology’s impact on learning, but it’s embarrassingly slight and specific and is a miserable shadow of thousands of teachers’ daily experience of the difference it makes for their students.

 

We can all do more to base our practice on evidence, whether it’s becoming better informed or carrying out research ourselves. The scale of my role affords me the opportunity to make a decent contribution, so here’s what I’m planning to do;

  • Ensure every teacher within my organisation has simplified access to summaries of research showing what works (in the field of ed tech)
  • Help the various innovation projects we have running in multiple schools to utilise research methods that generate replicable positive findings about technology’s impact on learning. We have the pieces (multiple contexts, large populations, internal statisticians, plenty of Masters degrees) needed to create a research network of some scale
  • Foster a culture of critical engagement with research through our online professional community

What could you do in your school?

Steps to consider when planning a 1-to-1 solution (part 3)

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This series of posts looks at the steps I’ve taken in the planning and implementation of our 1:1 project over the past year.

3. This third post considers eSafety. I know I said that it would be about Cost Modelling, but  that’s so exciting that I’ve decided to save that topic for next time. I’ve called this one, in homage to Marathon Man;

‘Is it safe? Is it safe?’

marathon man

Parents ask a lot of questions on this topic whenever I speak to them about 1-to-1. They are nervous, and quite rightly, about the potential of a tablet computer to bring the worst of the Internet and online behaviour into their child’s bedroom. It’s our duty as school leaders to mitigate these very real risks so that the amplificatory benefits of 1-to-1 computing can be realised by all our students.

There are several strands to addressing these concerns;

1. Make eSafety a heavily weighted criteria in your selection of platform

Bold statement #1: No 1-to-1 programme will survive in the wild for long if it doesn’t address eSafety fully, and early. Parents will not sign up, plain and simple. The most effective strategy you can employ is to make sure the OS platform your device will use already has eSafety provisions built in. For example;

  • Does it have the ability to restrict access to content/ features built in to the OS? Apple devices are now pretty good at this.
  • Can you implement policy at a group level, using native or third party tools? Microsoft devices do this very well, the other platforms are catching up.
  • Does the platform’s app store effectively gatekeep inappropriate content (e.g. hacking apps, adult themes, viruses) or is it a free-for-all? This was the decisive factor in my schools’ decisions.

2. Put really robust safeguards in place

Filtering the school’s internet connection is a given, but how easily can this be circumvented? Too often, filters provided by your RBC can be susceptible to the use of proxies, as any network manager will tell you. It’s probably time to look at moving a step beyond this provision, if you want to be able to confidently tell parents that you’ve got this locked down. Some schools supplement upstream filtering with a local instance, a ‘belt-and-braces’ approach.

We’ve decided to use Lightspeed, as it not only alleviates the proxy issue but, most critically, allows our 1-to-1 devices to use the school’s filters even when they are away from our network, thus providing parents with strong reassurance that their child’s use of the device is safeguarded at home too.

3. Help families to put their own safeguards in place too

There are lots of free tools that parents can be informed about and trained/ supported with – OpenDNS is one of the better known and will give families control over the Internet traffic passing over their home network.

We will be offering parents training sessions to help them set up this sort of tool, plus show them how to implement the parental restrictions that are built into our device’s OS. Part of the hidden curriculum in these sessions will also be to help parents get to grips with the devices themselves, to give them confidence and an understanding of how they work and to dispel some eSafety myths.

4. Highlight eSafe behaviours in your AUP and link to your wider behaviour policy

Beyond the technical things you can put in place, probably the most effective eSafey measure a school can take is to come up with a set of rules which govern how 1-to-1 devices are allowed to be used. Ideally, these will be arrived at collaboratively with staff and students. It’s essential that they link to wider school behaviour systems, just as it’s essential that these ‘rules’ are taught and debated, probably through the ICT curriculum. They’re not there to justify punishment, they’re there to help users make good choices.

There are plenty of AUP examples out there, but some important eSafety areas to consider are;

  • use of the device’s camera and microphone
  • access to social networking sites/ apps during school hours
  • privacy, identity theft and data protection
  • attempts to circumvent filters

5. Remind parents of their responsibilities. Thought I’d end with the trickiest one, a message which requires some tact to deliver but still needs to be firmly made. Yes, the school is providing this device. Yes, the Internet is a scary place and we’ve put safeguards in place. But yes, you are still your child’s parent and, ultimately, responsible for keeping them safe when out of school. It is you who can and should decide how and when the device should be used in your home, in conversation with your child. Experience suggests that trust between parent and child is important, but needs to be based on an agreed set of ground rules and consequences. Some people thought this American mother’s approach was hilarious. I thought it was pretty astute and, at the root, caring.

My next post is about Cost Modelling. Probably.

Steps to consider when planning a 1-to-1 solution (part 2)

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This series of posts looks at the steps I’ve taken in the planning and implementation of our 1:1 project over the past year.

2. This second post considers application choice. I’ve called it;

A weak pun related to the abbreviation ‘app’ which I’m too lazy to think up

The iPad (our weapon of choice for 1:1 – see earlier post) is a very pretty slice of silicon, glass and steel but is not in and of itself educationally effective – its ability to make students want to learn and to help them achieve success through creativity and plain old-fashioned constructivism is almost entirely down to the applications (apps) that you put on it.

We’ve spent a long time considering which apps we’d like every student and every teacher to have from day one and have therefore built an app budget into our cost modelling (I’ll be going through this in a later post).

The reason I’ve jumped the gun – from Visioning in post #1 straight to app choice without so much as buying the reader dinner – is because I’d like people’s feedback on our choices before they are finalised.

app set

There are (literally) hundreds of lists of educational apps, and personally I find them unhelpful, mostly because whilst there’s so much choice, it’s a little overwhelming. Apps emerging from our own contextualised use seem to be the ones which have stuck. My principles in creating our ‘app sets’ were fairly obvious;

  • consult with teachers and students – treat them as a small army of researchers who are far more likely to find useful apps thant you are
  • trial them at length, especially where there are other ‘close competitor’ apps
  • find out what others are doing in other schools
  • make sure I’ve used them myself (vital for someone in a strategic role like mine)

The result of passing the 500m+ apps out there through these various filters? A set of ‘must-haves’ which will provide our staff and students with a highly-functional armoury of tools to be adapted to whatever learning challenge is set.

Obviously cost is a consideration, but with Apple’s recent Volume Licensing programme, this is cut by 50% in most cases. The process of getting signed up, getting Apple to white list you and – crucially – getting the person in charge of the school credit card on board (“You’re spending how much?!?) is not to be underestimated, however.

The space these apps take up also needs to be calculated. Our devices are going to be the most affordable models – 16Gb of storage only – so I’ve done the necessary sums and our app sets are just over 3Gb. Rolling them out via MDM (yep, you guessed it, this will be the subject of a later post) before the students fill their iPad with content and games is a must and will be part of the rules they sign up to.

I’ve also tried not to splurge our app budget in one go but am keeping roughly half of it back for Year 2 – I’d hate to be in the position where, twelve months down the line, several new killer apps are making even more incredible things possible in every lesson, only we can’t afford to give them to our students. Look at the amazing progress made in the last year; only a fool would bet against that being repeated.

For students we have it narrowed down to, in no particular order;

  • Pages
  • Keynote (but these first two may be overtaken by events, should Office for iOS come out in time)
  • iMovie (it’s huge at 1.2Gb but worth it)
  • GarageBand
  • Book Creator (so, so good)
  • Explain Everything (even better)
  • Socrative
  • Comic Life
  • Puppet Pals Directors Pass
  • iBooks
  • OneNote
  • Popplet
  • Find iPhone
  • Skitch
  • iMLS (this is our library system)
  • ClickView (and our video distribution system)
  • iTunesU (VLE killer? Perhaps)

and for staff, we’ll have all the above plus;

  • AirServer (for streaming iPad to projectors. Sits on their laptops – not an app, but relevant)
  • Splashtop2 (easily the most requested teacher tool)
  • Groupcall Emerge (SIMS on the go)

Now I’m certain you’ll have some thoughts on the above – and I’d be very pleased if you’d share them in a comment.

My next post is about Cost Modelling

Steps to consider when planning a 1-to-1 solution (part 1)

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This series of posts looks at the steps I’ve taken in the planning and implementation of our 1:1 project over the past year.

1. This first post considers the point of 1-to-1. I’ve called it;

Why? Seriously though, why?!?

Firstly, there’s somewhere between ‘little’ and ‘zero’ point in going 1:1 if your educational vision doesn’t call for it. This has to be your starting point; what is it that we’re trying to achieve, institutionally, in terms of outcomes for students? For us, it’s about creating empowered young people whose experience of ‘school’ is characterised by repeated and enjoyable success through learning.

Technology is a small part of making this a reality through the creativity and choice it affords – but these are affordances that only really become tangible in a 1:1 situation. Let’s face it, we’ve had astonishingly powerful tech in schools for decades, but it’s been too unevenly distributed to have the kind of impact we’re hoping for.

My second point is that deciding to run a 1:1 project is not for the faint hearted – it’s a really big deal! I’m pretty busy this year with lots of major projects – two schools being built and two new learning platforms being launched, to name a couple – but by far the scariest and most complex project I have going is our 1:1.

climb Photo: Petr Jan Juračka (n.b. it’s not a photo of me…)

It’s scale, risk-profile and sheer difficult-ness makes me very nervous. If it’s a success, it will be because of these things;

  • It’s not been rushed (more on that later)
  • I’ve got a lot of great teachers and support staff doing their bit, researching, trialling, experimenting
  • I’ve learned a lot from others who’ve gone before me, mostly via Twitter and blogs, but also face to face
  • The Academies’ leadership teams are signed up to making it work – this is probably the most important precondition for success

There’s simply no way one person could make it happen alone. Make sure you really, really have the capacity, technical support and financial and leadership capital to pull it off before you start. A project like this is so fragile and easily destroyed by the negativity that results from things not working properly, you really do need a lot of time and a lot of help to get it right.

My next post – and you’ll have to forgive the fact we’re jumping forward about a year – is about App selection

 

Identity Management in schools – Part 2

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In the last post I explained how and why we are using Identity Management (IDM) to improve a range of services that students and teachers use.

This time I’m looking at the different forms IDM that are available.

 

Something that you know

pin image: www.bbc.co.uk

The simplest, cheapest and least controversial, but also the least effective method; pin numbers. Everyone can remember 4 numbers, right?

Advantages: there’s nothing to be lost or, no media to purchase, it’s an understood, accepted and uncontroversial technology.

Disadvantages: inherently insecure and easily ‘stolen’ in a school environment, relatively slow throughput at point of sale for catering. Potential for it to be forgotten, creating a management overhead.

 

Something that you have

rfid

 

 

 

image: www.rfid-smartcard.com 

Probably the most interesting choice, from an educational innovator’s POV. Most schools opt for a smartcard but this won’t work in all contexts. Take the chip out of an Oyster card and it can be put anywhere; in wristbands, key rings, even integrated into uniform.

Advantages: relatively easily accepted by parents/ carers. Secure and easily blocked if lost/ stolen. Relatively cheap media (under £1, in bulk). Can double as library card, can carry photo of the user. Throughput – under 2 seconds.

Disadvantages: often lost or claimed to be, too easy to forget or subvert. Media and printing costs are low but not free. Can be traded/ misused, particularly where eRegistration or cashless catering are involved. We thought uniform integration was the answer, but the cost of this and what to do on non-uniform days were the sticking points.

 

Something that you are

biometric

 

 

 

image: hrindustries.co.uk

 

Advantages: Highly unlikely that it will be lost (you’ve got bigger problems than your IDM system if this does happen), free media, very, very secure, works regardless of a student’s attitude or memory.

Disadvantages: A hard sell, particularly with the law from Sept 2013 requiring informed consent from parents. Commonly perceived as biometric but in actuality nothing of the sort. Unless you can get 100% opt-in, an alternative needs to be provided. Some students may not have viable thumb/ finger prints (particularly those with specific genetic conditions).

 

So, which option have we gone for? As ever, it’s a context-based decision. For our students, the reliability and ease of a ‘biometric’ system makes the best sense and this was the conclusion they reached too. All of our hardware is capable of processing a PIN number too, which gives us an affordable alternative for those families who opt out.

Not that it will make a whole deal of sense without me talking over the top of it, but here’s the Prezi I’m using to explain this to students.

Identity Management in schools

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The management of identity (IDM), particularly where children are concerned, is always going to be a thorny issue, but one that’s worth engaging with as the benefits of a single-factor, joined up system are huge. As schools use more and more systems which require the user to be authenticated in order to assign them rights, it is essential that they consider how this can be integrated.

We’ve very deliberately chosen systems which interoperate and which, where possible, also integrate into our learning platform. We are pursuing the shimmering mirage of total, transparent integration, but hey, you’ve got to aim high, right?

So, what are we using an IDM system for?

Cashless catering

A no-brainer and a ‘quick win’ as far as winning support with parents. Allied with an online payment system such as ParentPay and minimal numbers of cash loaders (depending on your context), lunchtimes queuing is massively reduced, parents know that their money is actually being spent on a school dinner and FSM uptake is bolstered, due to the anonymity of the system.

Print

Sick of walking past printers at the end of the day which are full of unwanted/ misdirected print jobs? Or worse, confidential data printed to the wrong place? We’re moving to a centralised model, with high-volume multi-function devices in strategic locations and specialist printers where needed and nothing will print without the user present. This means that a student can, for example, hit print from their tablet in their form room and decide when and where to print out, pulling the job to the appropriate printer when they get there. And if they forget, or change their mind, nothing happens.

With the help of print management software (we’re using Pcounter), our estate of 200 printers is being reduced to about 40 and the paper volume will hopefully decline by a similar margin. The human change management piece is significant, but worth it.

Device storage

In support of our 1-to-1 programme, we’re introducing iPad lockers which will recognise users’ identity and rights. There will be two types of locker – ones filled with Academy-owned devices for hour-long loan and ones which are empty charging stations for students to use as secure storage, e.g. during PE.

Library

An easy addition to system as school library systems have been using IDM since the year dot. Our users will benefit from MLS, which is closer to Amazon than it is to the library system they have at the moment, and will integrate with their iPads nicely, letting them borrow eBooks as well as physical ones.

What aren’t we using IDM for?

Access Control

Partly (well, mostly, TBH) because it was ‘value-engineered out’ of both projects and partly because it doesn’t really work with the way schools operate, we won’t be controlling doors based on identity.

eRegistration

1. I’ve never seen this working satisfactorily from a technical standpoint

2. I’m not convinced of the benefits

3. The risks of false registration (e.g. by friends, while the student nicks off down the park) are potentially tragic

4. Registration by the teacher is an opportunity to meet every eye, engage every student and start the lesson with a positive ‘hello’

 

So, a single, coherent IDM system that lets us do all this good stuff is the easy part of the decision; next time – what have we chosen as the form of identification?

Only Connect

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only connect

In the last week, I can say in all honesty that I have learned more from 3 short conversations with people who have ‘been there before me’ than I’ve managed in 3 months of trials, Googling and unending meetings with suppliers;

@kristianstill , a school leader I’ve never met, volunteered his experience of 3 years of running a 1:1 programme, following my request on twitter. This led to an after-hours phone call giving open answers to every question I had and an offer of ongoing support. Wow – only in education!

A colleague at an academy just along the coast who, in 5 minutes, answered 2 key worries we have about managing and projecting tablets, sharing his experience of using Lightspeed and Airserver in a comparable context. So much more credible than 100 sales calls from the suppliers, and happening next door.

@syded06 who I met f2f at an Apple event and whose knowledge and example of launching an iPad scheme was not only inspirational but also freely offered and without a trace of the self-satisfaction I’d probably fail to hide if I’d achieved what he has.

The lesson? Talk, listen, ask, follow, reach out, connect in any way you can because ‘we’ know more than ‘I’ even if it’s easier and more tempting to try and do it on your own.

The die (was) cast… now not so sure

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In the Summer I wrote this about the Microsoft tablet.

It’s not that long ago, but it seems hopelessly over-confident now.

Having assumed our 1:1 programme would naturally be iPad-flavoured (we’re an Apple RTC, we have 200 iPads in daily use, lots of great practice developing), the landscape has shifted significantly in the last few weeks with the emergence of an affordable Windows 8 Pro tablet in the shape of the Acer W510

Acer iconia W510

image: acer.co.uk

We’re obviously consulting with students and teachers internally but would really value input from anyone reading this.

Context is critical with any decision of this magnitude; thinking in some depth about the students and the communities we serve, my schools need to get the balance perfectly right to provide a device that is both desirable (so that take up is high), useful & well understood (so that adoption by staff and students is successful), robust (so that they stay useful beyond the first term), empowering (to transform learning experiences), enabling (capitalising on existing structures and skills)… the list could go on for ever

Here’s our summary of the advantages/ disadvantages of the two devices:

Advantages and disadvantages

Please comment/ pass this on to anyone who might be able to contribute a view. Any wisdom and experience would be very gratefully received.

Tips for successfully launching a Learning Platform. Part 3: Keeping the ball bouncing

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Once you’ve got your LP up and running, trained your staff and students and filled it with content, the next challenge is probably the hardest part; maintaining momentum and ensuring it’s doesn’t become a ‘Seven Day Wonder’. Here are some of the methods I’ve found useful;

Regular trawls of department pages

An hour spent looking at every page on the LP once a month or so is a great way to uncover examples of good practice and to spot departments/ individuals who need more help (or who need reminding to update content). For me, this activity shows me where to push things forwards, leading to conversations with page owners and – usually – a slew of requests for new pages/ features.

 

Continuing to offer support;

Our launch involved 2 evenings of teacher training, but I quickly learned that providing ongoing support is the most powerful aid to momentum we have. Voluntary ‘drop-in’ sessions have been popular, if hectic, with teachers bringing a diverse range of problems and requests for training/ page development. This tended to cater for the lower end of the skill level.

For more detailed training, it’s necessary to work 1:1. We utilise a number of staff (technical, teacher champions, me) to spend up to an hour with an individual, working on more complex workflows, such as how to shoot video on an iPad, compress it and upload it to the platform. Time consuming, true, but very powerful for the staff who take part.

Screencasts are also very useful; I make a short (6-7 mins max) demo of a process and upload it to the LP. This saves me having to explain it multiple times to different people and prevents me & my team from becoming a bottleneck to progress as links to video are easily shared.

 

Communicating success; sharing events, bulletins, email?

Nothing succeeds like success. Celebrating the good things that people are doing with the LP at every opportunity keeps it on everyone’s radar, heightens perceptions of its role in school life and encourages others to catch up. Most importantly, good ideas are spread by credible colleagues in recognisable contexts. Finding time in the training schedule to dedicate to this requires buy-in from leadership but affords people head space to consider how the LP can improve learning, away from the melee of day to day work. Email is generally less successful, I find. In the sender’s mind, they’ve told everyone how to do something/ shared a link/ et cetera. To everyone else, it’s probably more like an intrusion into their busy-ness. However, a shout-out to highlight a colleague’s work in a staff briefing can be very powerful.

Releasing new features – giving people a reason to keep coming back

We deliberately held back some of features of our Learning Platform at launch and are using them as vehicles for re-igniting interest in the tool. Our roadmap for the coming months includes integration of Vivos, student email & Office web apps (MS365), Micro Librarian Systems, Parent Pay as well as revamping the rather naff out-of-the-box approaches to ePortfolios and social networking. We’ve also just moved all info and systems (cover, site services, policies etc) which used to sit on the Intranet into the LP, meaning that people will use the platform habitually, increasingly the likelihood of engagement and development of the learning-focused bits.

 

It’s far to early to tell if our project will succeed. We’re working relentlessly at it and providing support, encouragement and opportunities for staff wherever we can, but ultimately long-term adoption and change will only come if we convince the majority of staff and students that there’s tangible benefit in working through the Learning Platform, which is a slow, drip-drip process.

 

 

Tips for successfully launching a Learning Platform. Part 2: Preparing for launch

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The first post in this series talked about the support structures that a school should consider if it wants its Learning Platform to succeed in having an impact on students. I can’t stress the importance of this enough; if you want it to fall flat on it’s face, you need do no more than unleash a Learning Platform on teachers as ‘an extra task’.

Anyway, let’s assume this is in place, how do you go about launching the thing? These are the things I learned from our recent experience;

1. Focus on engaging students first

We quickly realised that launching an ‘empty bucket’ would result in said bucket even more rapidly returning to Earth with a thump, probably smacking us on the head on the way down. If a LP is to succeed, students have got to want to use it. Our ultimate aim is to generate an appreciation among students for how the LP helps them learn, but back in the real world (!), we decided to settled for simple engagement at launch, and achieved this through buying in some fun content and I don’t mean Encyclopedia Brittannica. There’s lots out there, but I Am Learning is pretty hard to beat in my opinion. In this way, while our practice and internal content is at an immature stage, students already see the point of the platform. This in turn encourages staff to engage too.

Similarly, we made efforts with the visual design of every page to appeal to this audience. Too many Learning Platforms are uninspiring, poorly disguised content repositories. Our view was very much that the student visual experience should be akin to the quality that they are used to from the commercial sites they constantly interact with.

Screenshot of our Learning Platform

One of our Curriculum Area landing pages

When authoring content, we have adopted a jocular tone and have turned on all but one of the social networking tools that the Platform comes with. We’ve had to improve these to make them usable in a school context (adding the ability to report statuses and wall posts that you find offensive, for example) and to vigilantly squash misuse, pour encourager les autres. The experience so far has been very positive. Students like being able to personalise their LP experience and connect with friends and staff in a safe way.

We ran student competitions for iTunes vouchers, to design LP wallpaper and, less technologically, to create a poster advertising what it can do. A guerilla marketting campaign of coloured stickers appearing on radiators and banisters around the buildings, allied with digital signage and desktop backgrounds which started with just a date and slowly added more information helped create a buzz. We also paid the provider for a few hundred logo-ed badges, for which a gratifyingly inflationary black market has emerged…

 

2. Departmental ownership

Notwithstanding everything I said last time about providing a support structure for teachers, Departments have got to own their space if the LP is going to survive in the wild. For this reason, we took our Platform apart, abandoned the provider’s recommended training route (which would have seen teachers creating their own pages using a particularly frustrating What You See Is What You Are Never Going To Get tool) and opted instead to lock it down to the extent that the only things the ‘average’ teacher can do are the things that we want them to do, and I mean that much more positively than it reads.

Screenshot of the maths department page showing a blog and gallery

The mathematics department’s page, which is thriving on its own now

Every department has it’s own page and we pre-built it with galleries to display students and their exemplary work, blogs to discuss issues in the media or of relevance to the subject, and other content appropriate to the specialism (videos of science experiments, recordings of recitals, etc). We even went so far as to pre-populate these features with content, to show subject leaders and their teams what an engaging student blog looked like. I wrote about Brueghel, Kate Middleton, Apple and the number 73, to name but four topics. Happily, teachers have taken to subject blogging like ducks to water (once shown what the water looks like and put in a box which only has water in it). Students are responding fantastically well, commenting on staff posts and engaging in a living, breathing, educational debate which doesn’t revolve around a curriculum, qualification or test.

With the galleries we added buttons (visible in the screenshot above) to allow staff to upload an image in a couple of clicks without having to learn how to navigate the arcane methodologies of the platform’s backend. They can now celebrate and publicise their students’ successes in seconds. This has also proved an instant hit with staff and students, though extra help (I’ve found screencasts to be the most effective) has been needed to help staff gain the skills to resize those 5mp pictures before failing to make them upload.

Some departments have taken this far further, which I’ll talk about next time in Part 3 – Keeping the ball bouncing.