Teaching with Technology

Today was a big day. After a very stressful couple of months breaking my neck to get the kids through SATs I finally got into my new classroom.

For those that don’t follow my Twitter feed (@mrkp) we have recieved a grant to create a ‘transformational learning space’ in our school. The theory is that in a couple of years we will be moving to a new all singing all dancing new build school, as such over the next two years my role is to try and develop a new pedagogy for such spaces. This really does present lots of exciting new opportunities. The basic layout is as follows :
- one large classroom linked through double doors to the year six classroom
- a large double stock cupboard that can be used as a mini breakout space
- a larger breakout space with interactive whiteboard and projector
- a large decked outdoor area with canopy and outdoor plasma screen
- a plasma display wall
- two 77″ smartboards aide by side to run multiple windows
- a tablet pc to wirelessly control everthing
- a switch system so that children’s umpcs can be projected onto the different whiteboards
- 1 to one access to umpcs for each child.

Needless to say I was very excited to take on such a project. The possibilities of changing the way in which I interact with the children and the way that they interact with their learning are endless. My head has been constantly buzzing with ideas.

Today however the reality of what I’ve taken on finally hit home. I walked into the classroom to find that it was completely bare. This shouldn’t have suprised me as it was a community space previously next to my old room. What was a little worrying though was that there was no sign of any of the kit! I’m sure that it will get sorted out soon enough but there’s only a week and a half before term starts!

Not only that but I hadn’t realised just how much stuff you need in a room, bookshelves, drawers etc etc

I think that I’ve made some progress today but it does look like a bombsite. I’ll blog more about the experience as things go along. Hopefully next time the post will be more to do with practical ideas once again but everything has to have a beginning!

Just a very short post.   Several colleagues and myself are running 10km for charity in a couple of weeks.   Please help us raise £500 for this great cause.

If you think my blog has been any use over the past year then please donate £2 to our appeal at http://www.justgiving.com/charlestownprimary

It’ll be interesting to see what happens – has this blog got the power to change lives?

The message here is short and simple SATs in KS2 are ruining what should be the best days of the children’s lives in Britain!

Year Six (10-11 year olds) should be fostering their love of learning and exploring all sorts of creative adventures that inspire them onto greater things.

Instead the pressure on schools to gain ridiculous levels of attainment (which are constantly changing) force schools to push children down a path of exam technique and points scoring.

I have no doubt that children’s self esteem grows when they suceed in attaining a good level, but this is gained at a loss of seeing learning as an achievement in itself.

It is only when the children enjoy the process of learning and discovery, that the seeds of lifelong leaning are sown.

It may be supposition, but I am forced to wonder if there is a correlation between the perception of the increase in dissafected youth and the implementation of league tables. Did schools in their quest for wishing to be seen as ’sucessful’ actually forget what sucess truely is in terms of developing children?

At which point did children stop going to school to ask questions and go to school to be given answers to remember?

This said tomorrow in my class will be different. SATs are going out the window for the afternoon – we’re going to have tea and biscuits and enjoy each others company!

Rant over.

This morning I took part in a focus group looking at developing leaders throughout the education system. The group had an excellent range of leaders present from executive heads of large colleges to lowly teaching deputies like myself!

The interesting thing that came out from the whole of the morning was the overwhelming feeling that the training at the moment on offer provides excellent opportunities in terms of leadership theory and understanding, but perhaps does not as yet provide practical operational experience / mentoring.

Most people seemed to agree that the best development they recieved was the face to face non judgemental discussions that were as a result of attending such events / training. It also highlighted the importance of having a mentor to challenge and guide you through early leadership.

This confirmed for me the value of blogging and using Twitter (see previous post) as professional development tools. Although these tools do not provide mentoring as such they do allow you to reflect and evaluate your thoughts (blogging) and to ask questions to your peers (Twitter.)

The difficulty at present as I see it is that there is no structure to the network that you can put together on Twitter so work needs to be done to put professionals together or hash tag appropriately.

As such I’m going to see if my network can help me build such a discussion forum. #leadershipexchange

After much faffing around I’ve moved my school blog to www.charlestownprimary.wordpress.com for those people who are interested!   Please go along and have a look and see what we’ve been upto in our school.

I’ll sort out another roundup post at some point over the holiday, but things have been completely insane for the past few weeks in terms of workload.  I can tell that people have been waiting on the edges of their seats!

I’m really annoyed with edublogs because of the adverts that they’ve started to put on their blogs. I’ve had to move the school blog across to wordpress which has been a bit of a pain in the bum! Not very happy at all!

This is the slideshow from my Bett Presentation on using Synchroneyes.   I did try to sort out some audio to go along with it, but as the presentation was 20min the audion file was massive an kept crashing.   So here it is for what its worth.

After chatting to Tom Barrett at Bett09 I’ve decided to try and get together a resource for teachers that are just starting out in trying to get into using simple web 2.0 tools in their classrooms. The mind map below is the start of that process. Hopefully people will make suggestions and collaborate to make it a really useful resource.

Any ideas / suggestions more than welcome.

Today I’m on my way down to Bett 09 the biggest technology show / conference in the UK.

In all the time that I’ve been involved in Ict in schools I have to my shame never actually made it to Bett before! This had been for all sorts of reasons, but mainly I think because of the cost.

The conference itself is free, but there’s always the train fare, possible hotel bills etc and that horrible feeling that your colleagues back at school think that trips like this are just a jolly!

This trip is different as the finance side of things has been taken care of very kindly by Stiljes, but I still have that slight nagging doubt that leaving the kids is in some way letting them down.

I know that this is irrational and that I’m sure I’ll come back buzzing with ideas, but I wonder how many other professions and professionals feel the same way about leaving the office?

Another exciting development of Bett will be the chance to meet what my wife terms ‘my funny friends’ off my Twitter network. To actually put names to faces will be a rather strange experience, should be great though !