For once I got my timing right; last week was quite busy – the whole week away from home whilst this week is somewhat quieter. It’s just as well really considering the state of the road through the village. Plenty of neighbourly good spirit – at one point yesterday most of us were out clearing the road and driveways. Shame we got another load of snow overnight – feels a bit like Groundhog Day.
Monday was spent at the National Motorcycle Museum near Birmingham International. The event was the final meeting for the parental engagement initiative that has been so successfully led by Becta. Quaintly entitled ‘Powering the Front-Line: Engaging parents through Online Reporting’, it was clear from the outset that this was no ordinary Becta event, the minimum possible had been spent on the ‘Becta’ presence and their name didn’t appear on stage at all. Quite appropriate really, the day was spent celebrating the successes of many participating at the event.
Mike Brisco kicked things off – a look at how we got to where we are today. Some key words appeared on his slides – dialogue, consensus, meaningful, appropriate, proportionate, and manageable. As the day progressed and we heard from school colleagues the importance of these words was reinforced. Success means encompassing all of them. Mike reminded us of the work by Thousand and Villa – ‘Managing complex change toward inclusive schooling’ – the chart below is from this – to be successful you need an Action Plan, Resources, Incentives, Skills and Vision – missing any one of these out is a recipe for disaster!
The next three talks came from Anson Primary School, Grays Infant school and Woodlawn Special School. Common themes throughout – parents feel engaged and part of the learning community. It’s engagement not reporting. Engaging pupils and parents has had a high impact on attainment, a measurable impact on achievement. Engagement takes many forms – web sites, learning platforms, emails, SMS texts, face-to-face, mobile devices, each has its place – the skill is in choosing the one for the moment. There were some good examples of using iPad/iPhone/iTouch devices so that children could show their parents/siblings what they’d been doing in school.
After lunch we had a session from Brian Lightman – General Secretary of ASCL – he has some challenging and critical things to say about our new administration – I’m not going to repeat them here – a quick search www.google.co.uk/search?q=brian+lightman+ascl+2010 or www.bing.com/search?q=brian+lightman+ascl+2010 will come up with the goods. I may be a bit slow at this point – but until I copied the search queries into this document I’d not noticed that Google and Bing’s search syntax is identical!
Simon Thomson from Monkseaton High School then gave us an update – I’ve written about Monkseaton and its leaders in the past – they’re always good value, challenging and inspiring – today was no different. Then we heard from Val Cameron of Park Lane Primary School who gave the last of the practitioners’ addresses – providing us with an interesting take on the challenges and successes.
Charles Desforges OBE (University of Exeter) gave the final presentation ‘Parental engagement – Why we should persevere’. We weren’t an audience that needed much convincing; we just need to find a way of continuing with the evangelism. The evidence seems quite conclusive and there’s some useful ammunition in the Becta Harnessing Technology School Survey (2010) click here to go to it.
All in all an interesting day – success tinged with sadness. It was a bit like the end of year assembly in a primary school. Teachers, parents and pupils all together celebrating achievements but knowing that some of the relationships made are going to come to an abrupt end in the near future.
Tuesday was a rare ‘day in the office’ – working from our Telford office at the University of Wolverhampton campus. It’s always good to spend time there, they’re a well humoured, creative bunch with just a hint of anarchy. I learn something on every visit. On Wednesday I was reminded of them when listening to a talk by Professor Erica McWilliam at the SSAT National Conference in Birmingham. She mentioned Pareto Improvements – paraphrased as change that makes things better without any losers – it seems to me that this is a goal that my colleagues are successfully achieving (well most of the time).
Also on Wednesday I participated in a session at SSAT run by John Davitt – I use the word participate advisedly – with John you can never be passive, he always provokes a Marmite reaction! So, things to look out for following this session: word clouds, learning event generator, learning score, Scratch – a programming language, and Twitter in plain English. Finally a revisit to QR Codes – 2D codes that can represent a url, or text, that can make printed materials ‘interactive’. You can find a code generator and reader here and readers such as Mobiletag and BeeTagg are available from the Apple store and elsewhere for other devices. Here’s an interesting example of classroom use of QR Codes.
Wednesday had sessions from Sugata Mitra and David Hemery both interesting and with much in common. Find the full details of the event here, the official blog here, and others here – (Merlin John) and here.
Thursday was spent with Microsoft in London – cloud computing and a catch-up – it was very interesting but I missed the education buzz of the SSAT event – caught up with the Twitter feeds on the train back to Birmingham but it wasn’t as good as being there!
Friday back to SSAT – more interesting talks – some quite challenging – again look at the blogs and the tweets (#nc10) if you want a flavour of the sessions. All in all I think the conference exceeded expectations – the themes were very appropriate for these times.
Patrick Kirk