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I’ve already written here about our involvement as a school in the BectaX event last month. In this second post I’d like to reflect on our reaction to the feeling that the schools weren’t as involved as we’d like, and what we did about it!

By lunchtime there was a growing feeling coming from the schools that our comments weren’t being responded to in the conference room. The organisers added a ten minute response session straight after lunch, but at the end of that we still felt that the views of the students needed to be better collated and fed into the day. To that end, we threw together a Google Form based around what we considered to be the key issues emerging from the conversation (as opposed to the five ‘big questions’ previously laid out by the organisers). We felt these were:

1. Should we give open access to social networks in schools?
2. Should schools provide open wifi
3. Should we be allowed to bring in and use our own devices
4. Should schools be responsible for providing mobile devices to students

We tweeted the form around and got 10 responses by the end of the session, and another 3 in the following hours.

Although we intended the form to be completed by each individual at the school (aware as we were that there were disagreements on these issues within the room) we probably didn’t make that very clear. We also added a ‘school name’ field after the form had been up for a few minutes as we had no idea who was responding. Thanks to our students, Westfield CTC, Tiverton High School and ‘SMS’ who replied, plus the others who did but before we added the school name field!

The results are given below as they arrived. I’ll leave them to speak for themselves, although I may come back to them in a future post!

1. Should we give open access to social networks in schools?
Comments:

• Trust us. but if we abuse it we lose it. teach us how to use them wisely
• Website like Twitter which can be used for many different ways.
• I think that this will restrict the student’s learning. The socialising websites interupts with the children’s learning as it makes their outward appearance much more important than who they really are.
• Only to some social links twitter , you-tube , flickr sites that we know there are some educational content.
• As long as the users can be restriced to that network and don’t get people from all over the world joining in.
• In spare time in lessons i would much rather check my facebook than play games, but in school time who are you going to be able to talk to in facebook who’s not in your class.
• A different website should be made for pupils and students, which integrates into websites such as Facebook and Twitter!
• Yes, but only in conjunction with some explicit teaching and learning opportunities about responsibilities, safety etc.
• Students already get distracted by the odd games site which is not blocked. Opening social networking sites would simply lead to a much higher level of distraction for students and therefore a lack of work completed whilst using the internet.
• Perhaps though, in core IT lessons, or Year 11 students could be allowed – a more flexible blocking system, through which you block sites for individual users (students) or filters could be turned on/off in certain rooms at different times during the day.

2. Should schools provide open wifi?

Comments:

• We’d need better broadband connections in schools.
• Yes as long as it’s used properly.
• As a wifi hotspot is the best way I think.
• Have a public hot-spot in a central area e.g our quad, and library
• depends if pupils really want to bring laptops is it better though. laptops can be damaged (crunchy nut advert)laptop was sacrified for the crunchy nut cereal
• Yes, mobile devices should be encouraged to be used, such as digital planners.
• If students have wifi enabled personal devices we should encourage them to use them for learning. We need to promote an atmosphere of trust and personal responsibility.
• Research in lessons would benefit greatly – no longer would a teacher need to rely on booking a computer room, students could access all the information needed for a project from their phones or personal laptops brought from home. That would also mean more classes could work online at any point because students would be asked to bring their personal system (whether that be an iPhone or a laptop) to use in a lesson next week and those that don’t have a personal device could use a school laptop, of which are school has about 30 currently.

3. Should we be allowed to bring in and use our own devices?

Comments:

• It saves the school  money and the tech we use in school is pretty rubbish and out of date compared to what we get at home.even if some people dont have any devices the school can equip them with better quality tech because they wont need to provide everyone with them.
• Yes but the school shouldn’t have to be responsible for our own devices seeing as it’s not the schools it’s our responsibility!
• If a student brings it own devices to school, they will look after it more as its their device.
• Yes as I use my net-book in class and it helps me spell and do my work really eficently
• As long as the person admits responsibility for bringing the product and as well has what could happen to the product if not looked after carefully
• Not everyone will have these devices and those who do will have different quality devices and marking work from different formats would be difficult. But those who do shouldn’t be held back or restricted because they can have these devices, in a races nobody’s held back for having low quality trainers, that’s a metaphor.
• People should have an option if they want to use the provided technology or not!
• Research in lessons would benefit greatly – no longer would a teacher need to rely on booking a computer room, students could access all the information needed for a project from their phones or personal laptops brought from home. That would also mean more classes could work online at any point because students would be asked to bring their personal system (whether that be an iPhone or a laptop) to use in a lesson next week and those that don’t have a personal device could use a school laptop, of which are school has about 30 currently.

4. Should schools be responsible for providing mobile devices to students?

Comments:

• I think that pupils should be able to bring their own devices in – But schools should also have a responsibility to provide them with devices – To allow a fair playing ground for all pupils.
• Not mobile phones but something of that nature would be good.
• They can mange the device and control how students use them
• Depends if schools restricts the use of mobile phones in break times and lunch times and are strict about them when teachers take mobile phones off at the end of the day will the pupil have a phone to use.
• Not a mobile phone, but something similar that would be kept in school.
• They should be responsible to provide the software, but hardware should be provided by the pupil!
• There needs to be as level a playing field as possible with regards provision. if students have their own devices, let’s make use of them. If not, it is our moral obligation to ensure that they are not discriminated against because of that, and to ensure that they are equally well equipped to engage with the kinds of learning opportunities.
• No, it’s the students mobile device and therefore, like their uniform they should pay for it and own it themselves. However I do think schools should have a large stock, say in our school of 1200, perhaps 100 laptops at the ready would be enough to cater for the students in a lesson where they need internet access, but don’t own one themselves…
• Perhaps though, if you could set up an efficient penalty system for not following the rules, the school could have a supply of laptops for the whole school, with which they could do their homework and school work on – they could take it home like a textbook and also use it at home. Then when Year 11 leave, the next Year 7s could have them.

A few weeks ago a few people suggested me in response to a tweet by Ewan McIntosh looking for schools in Wales to be involved in the BectaX project, and having that little bit of the brain that says ‘actually, you’re pretty busy at the moment, maybe you’d better say no’ missing, I happily agreed.

For anyone who has been living in a cave recently (or more likely, just not on Twitter),  the BectaX launch day on 31st March kick started a process which, according to their website “will help identify how education might evolve in a connected world.” The day brought together 150 people from across various affected fields, 14 schools from around the country, plus many others watching the video stream and interacting via Twitter. There will be a couple of posts following on various aspects of the day, but I thought I’d start by reflecting on our experience as a school involved in an innovative day like this.

I tweeted a request on the school twitter account for student who wanted to be involved and three of our sixth formers responded. The remainder of the group came from year 10 students suggested by ICT dept staff. Kirsty at Just-b who were running the event was very helpful at getting accounts set up and tested ahead of the event, although needless to say when the day came we had problems both accessing the live video stream and connecting to the Adobe Connect room that was being broadcast to the conference room. (Annoyingly we had had it up and running, only for it to crash a couple of minutes before the big wave). Hugh thanks to Paul and Greg our long suffering technicians, Matthew at Swansea LEA for getting everything up and running against the clock, and thanks and apologies to Nick, who was very calm in the face of yet another Dave induced panic!

Our job was to watch and comment via Twitter on a dedicated Twitter account. The other schools would be doing the same. If we saw a comment we liked, we could retweet it. This re tweeting triggered that message to be send to the ‘learners map‘ being displayed on a big screen inside the conference room. While I was initially skeptical about this, it did seem to work very well – allowing some good conversations between the schools, with key ideas being forwarded to the conference room. It became clear that the idea of one computer sending the twitter account wasn’t working in the way we liked, so I grabbed some net-books, and each student ended up tweeting directly, as well as interacting with each other both on and offline. Far from distracting, this seemed to really help focus all of us on the job in hand and have the room a real buzz – so much so that one of the Learning Directors popping in to see what was going on compared it to CTU in a crisis!

One of the real successes for us was some of the school specific conversations that spun out from the event. In particular we got some great ideas from the students about how we should be teaching e-safety (it should be much more embedded in our PSE programme) and some interesting feedback on some ideas for future developments. So much so, we’re planning on keeping this group of students together as an advisory board to the ICT strategy group. It was also great to see so many members of the school management team pop in throughout the day. It showed off our students in the very best light, and showed how important to the school the whole issues of technology in schools is.

The biggest downside of the arrangement was that we didn’t always engage very well with the conference itself – we were reacting more to the back channel that we were to the speakers. This was partly because some of the talks simply didn’t seem relevant and other simply weren’t very engaging from the other end of a video link. Interestingly some of those that we pretty much ignored got some of the best reaction from the live audience. The size of the room meant that at times I was able to go and watch the conference more closely and then relay the key questions back to the students. I would suggest that this kind of curator role is vital for this kind of activity to work.

As the day progressed there was a growing feeling from the schools that we weren’t really able to engage in the process to the degree that we had hoped. Sure, our messages were being relayed, but it felt like the conversation and the conference were two separate things. To the organisers’ credit they recognised this, and added a ten minute session for comments from the room, but however well intentioned it didn’t really get to grips with our concerns. To try and address this, we threw together a quick Google Form to try and get some feedback from schools on the big issues that we felt had emerged from the day. (More details on this to follow in a separate post). I don’t know if this was referred to in the room itself, but for us the biggest improvement for any future event based on this model (and I really hope there are) would be other ways of integrating the conference and the schools – perhaps by the kind of voting that we tried to throw together, or perhaps by developing some kind of Etherpad style page on particular issues that would allow the schools to pull together their viewpoint.

We finished at three, although I know some of our students continued to follow (and tweet) from home. I only caught the very end of the conference, but it was great to see that they managed to connect one of the schools to the conference room itself (via Skype?). Another suggestion for improvement would be to investigate other ways to bring the students directly into the conference in this way. There was some talk about getting the students there, but I’m not sure we would have been able to be involved if that had been the case. By remaining in school Nick, the students and I could pop back to exam classes for an hour as necessary and still be involved.

To sum up, a great day, very inspirational, and while there is some work to be done on getting the most of involving learners in this way, this was a big step forward. Huge credit to all those that ran the event, and particularly to Ewan for doing a great job of holding the whole thing together on the day and a massive thanks to all our students who did such a great job on the day.

Photo credit: Nick Francis