Naace are holding three Think Tanks around the country and I attended the one held in Bradford yesterday (21/07/2010). It was an interesting and I think successful day – the attendees came together from many sectors – commercial, LAs and schools – amid the gloom there was optimism – but the challenge of influencing the policy makers has never been so great. Naace will be producing a paper in the next week or so summarising the outcomes of the three sessions.
From the Think Tank brief:
Our aim is to work together and plan concise key messages – decide who needs to hear them and what action we want them to take. Our aim is to build a strategy (and practical products) for defending the place of ICT in Education – and to ensure this is shared with as many people as possible.
Here’s what we will be doing at the Regional Think Tank.
We will be engaging in debate and these are some of the questions we will be asking:
• ICT IS Important – Do we agree? Why and how is it important?
• What do we need to do?
• What are our Key Messages? (The USP of ICT in a learning environment)
• Who are the audience? And who needs to hear what?
• What do we want those who hear our message to do? How do we provoke this reaction?
• Building a Strategy (and Practical Products) for defending the place of ICT in Education – What should it include?
• Naace is about community – how can we build the effectiveness of that community so that our VOICE is heard and effective?
Here’s a link to the presentation Mark and Bernadette used to stimulate the discussion.
As an aside – there were some useful communications tools in use during the day:
http://visibletweets.com/ – a site that presents tweets in a very visual way – suitable for presentation on a large monitor. More fun when I discovered that http://visibletweets.com/#query=naace&animation=2 could be used as the URL in a Page Viewer Web part in my Sharepoint MySite – pre-selecting the query and the animation! The only problem with the above is that you may need to filter the tweets before displaying them!
http://tidytweet.com/ – this allows you to filter the tweets before they appear on visibletweets.com.
http://wallwisher.com – set up a wall here and allow users to post their own electronic post-its – you can specify whether posts have to be approved before they appear.
And finally, for a bit of collaborative writing we used PrimaryPad – Super funky collaborative padding – a useful tool that was fun to use!
Patrick Kirk