Creative ICT News

Protecting Teachmeet

2011-05-14T22:56:01+01:00

I can hear the groans already: not another "Future of Teachmeet" blog post! 'Fraid so.

Earlier I tried to edit my entry on a Teachmeet wikipage for an upcoming event. I couldn't, I had to apply for a password by email (still not received). I signed up for another event via a Google Form as editing a wiki was obviously beyond my ken. Before you all scream, "Elitist (add your own epithet)", I fully buy in to getting people to sign up by any means you like, by pigeon post if that works for you, I just want to edit my wiki!

My irritation led to a minor Twitter rant which kicked off a whole debate that stretched long into the evening providing a useful diversion from Eurovision. You can read the whole #tmdebate here. I hate trying to summarise debates as you can often get accused of putting words into people's mouths, but in this case I shall make an exception.

My original irritation had been festering for a while as a result of a number of issues I had experienced at recent Teachmeets. These included:

Overt corporate pitches which in one case seemed to involve duping an NQT into pitching for a company;
Poor organisation with long overruns on talks leading to people not getting their chance;
Raffles and prizes taking over from the meat of the event;
Worthless goody bags full of fliers and trial CDs.

It seems to me that as Teachmeet gets ever more successful, there are organisers who haven't full understood the ethos, and corporates who attempt, sometimes not terribly subtly, to muscle in. This, in in my view, was a shame and I felt intuitively that something ought to be done to protect it. I wasn't sure what. It was suggested that the setting up of a charitable trust to look after Teachmeet might help by:

Providing a conduit through which sponsors could legitimately channel cash (local donations of cash are fraught with issues including tax and fraud) and could thus provide an opening for trusts and benevolent corporates to further their aims;
Protect the Teachmeet "brand" by complaining loudly about attempts to hijack Teachmeets by business (the trademarking of Teachmeet was also discussed but considered by most as too expensive and, more importantly, too expensive to defend in court);
Providing seedcorn funding for local Teachmeets to help with the cost of refreshments etc and thus obviate the need for organisers to find sponsors;
Provide ethical guidance through some kind of charter for which local organisers might sign up to in order to access funding;
Provide practical guidance to new Teachmeet organisers.

This view was by no means universal and objections included:

A charity was too onerous and a social enterprise company might be better (or even a co-operative);
The setting up of a central organisation was totally contrary to the spirit of Teachmeet and local Teachmeets should be entirely left to develop along their own lines;
The existence of a central organisation and rules to access funding might discourage people from organising Teachmeets.

The debate encompassed much more than this, but this was the crucial issue for me, and one that I think warrants careful and close discussion. Has Teachmeet grown so far beyond its original founding principles that it just has to be left to run in the wild and see which direction it moves, or is it time for those that really value the format and its integrity to take back a little control to keep it free from corruption (in the literal, not financial sense)? Please add your view.

News from Creative Blogs

2011-04-05T13:44:31+01:00

Blogthenews.net

My school blog platform, Creative Blogs, has launched a new free blogging project that you might like to get involved with.

Called Blogthenews, the new project is attempt to bring the school or class newspaper into the 21^st Century. It acts as a news site that collects stories automatically from school bloggers all over the country. Best of all, you can write your news story on your own school or class blog and providing you indicate that you want your story to be syndicated, it will automagically appear on Blogthenews saving loads of time and effort. We would prefer it if you had editorial control of your content, and you and your class decide what’s newsworthy. Whether that is a brilliant piece of writing; some fantastic poetry; a summary of a topic that your class has been doing; or a genuine news story that is happening in your school, all we ask is that you edit the story and provide some context so that readers get an idea of who the author is and where they are from prior to syndicating it.

To set up a link from your blog to Blogthenews is very simple. All you have to do is sign up here, and we’ll do the rest.

Creative Blogs teacher wins Naace Impact Award

We were absolutely delighted to hear that David Mitchell of Heathfield Primary School in Bolton recently won a Naace Impact Award for his work with blogs. To read about David’s reaction (under the most trying of circumstances) click here. Needless to say, we are immensely proud to host Heathfield’s blog and are delighted that it is now regarded as a benchmark for excellence when it comes to educational blogging.

New Bloggers

Creative Blogs has been growing from strength to strength, and several new schools have set up projects. Please visit their sites and provide encouragement!

http://stmarysdeane.net Bolton
http://barlowhallblogs.net Manchester
http://clarendonblogs.net Bolton
http://anchorsholmeblogs.net Blackpool
http://devonshireblogs.net Blackpool
http://htrblogs.net Stockton on Tees

And what about the renowned author, Pie Corbett, whose blog we have just set up! http://piecorbett.net

More are on the way, including our very first international school!

Quadblogging

If you have a class that isn’t getting many visitors to their blog, then consider signing up for a quadblogging project. Quadblogging is an idea of David Mitchell’s from Heathfield. Simply, each school signing up is partnered with 3 others, making a quad. Each week one school becomes the focus for visits and comments from the other members of the quad. So far it has been very successful with many schools from all over the world signing up for quads. To read more and to sign up, click here.

BETT 2011 - a new dawn!

2011-01-11T10:24:37+00:00

I'm very excited to be travelling down to the BETT show tonight; I'll be working for 3 days (Wed-Fri) with my friends from Lightbox on the RM stand so if you are attending, please drop by and say, "Hello." I am also taking part in one of the Teachmeet events on the Thursday evening called Collabor8 4 Change. I'm talking about how blogging engages learners through a series of talks called "Tales from the Blogface" in which I'll be joined by one of the best blogging teachers that I know, Jack Sloan from Ferrylane Primary School in Haringey.

BETT 2011 is, I think, going to be a watershed year for the event. For the first time in a long time the educational ICT community (and I include service providers, LAs, software companies and schools in that broad term) are facing a future with no direct funding from Government. We had NOF training, NGfL grants, Harnessing Technology grants and so on. Now it's all gone, and whatever the spin, it's clear that school budgets are going to be under severe pressure for the next few years. Actually, in many ways, I think this will be a good thing as I think all 3 of the funding streams I mentioned above distorted the market in various ways:

NOF was just an opportunity for big service companies to grab chunks of money and provide rubbish training: I vividly recall being given an opportunity by Stockport to act as an online mentor for one big service provider who were suggesting that year 3 use Microsoft Encarta as a tool. When I pointed out that the product wasn't suitable for year 3 I was just ignored - I didn't do the mentoring;
NGfL funding, especially the ring fenced bit for buying content simply enabled software companies to churn out huge numbers of CDs, many of which simply sit in drawers;
The Harnessing Technology grant allowed Local Authorities to build little empires around a small group of Becta approved learning platforms, many of which weren't ever designed for use in primary schools.

All of these have gone, and the agency tasked with co-ordinating it all, Becta has gone with it and the result will be an industry that is exposed to the white heat of competition. This is a good thing. It will drive innovation; force schools to collaborate in new ways; make companies respond to the needs of their customers. No longer will there be any diktat from above that says you have to subscribe to this or that service. I see evidence of this starting to happen already: the mushrooming community of educators on Twitter (I'm @hgjohn); the increasing number of Teachmeets; the seedling development of new networks such as the Northants BLT group, and so on. What I don't see yet are the large scale changes in the commercial sector and I will be looking for evidence of these at the show this year.

I have a feeling that BETT 2012 will be a very different event.

Heathfield Scoop International ICT Award

2010-11-25T21:42:41+00:00

Today, Heathfield Community Primary School received an international ICT award from Toshiba for their teaching and learning through blogs. I'm particularly delighted for them as David Mitchell, the deputy head has put in an immense amount of work with teachers and children on their blogsite. On visiting the site it's hard to believe that it was only set up last December! I am very proud to host Heathfield's blogsite and will blog more about the award and their site when David has filled me in on the details.

#twitterjoketrial How would a teacher react?

2010-11-13T09:51:15+00:00

#twitterjoketrial has become an internet cause celebre for free speech on the internet. Briefly, back in January, Paul Chambers, out of frustration with delays in his journey, "threatened" to blow Doncaster's Robin Hood Airport sky high through the medium of a tweet to his followers. What has followed is a ghastly example of a lack of common sense among the various authorities involved and a total failure on the part of the judiciary to understand the nature of social media. Paul Chambers now has a criminal record and has lost his job for making a joke,albeit in bad taste. To be clear, I completely stand by Paul's right to tweet what he did without fear of prosecution in a free society, even if I think it was a clumsy and ill-considered attempt at humour (which he completely accepts).

So, for those involved in education, how would we react if a child made such a threat about school on a Facbook page? What should we do about it? Even if it was obvious that it was a joke, would that child face disciplinary action? How would parents expect us to react? How would the local media react?

I don't think I need to remind people about the awful events at Columbine and subsequent school shootings to imagine that most schools would not react to such a thing by standing by that child's right to free speech. I know that an awful lot of teachers agree that Paul Chambers' prosecution is a terrible example of the State using legislation in a way that was never intended, yet the case raises serious questions about how we deal with such issues in school. I see some material for some excellent 6th Form debates.

For much more on the Paul Chambers case, read Jack of Kent's superb coverage

#hashtags and the power of Twitter

2010-11-12T11:18:00+00:00

The addition of a humble # sign at the beginning of a word is an incredibly powerful tool for users of Twitter, as Amazon, the English legal system and an obscure educational company in Australia have found to ther cost this week. By adding a hash sign to a word, you are creating a tag that groups of Twitter users can use to tweet on subjects of common interest. This can be demonstrated most simply by referring to my previous blogpost on the group of teachers and children tweeting about the Gunpowder Plot. Every tweet about the Gunpowder Plot contained the hashtag #gtp2010 so that by using Twitter search you can aggregate all the tweets using that hashtag and thus seeing the full picture of the unfolding plot from the points of view of all the protagonists. Hashtags are used extensively at conferences where people will agree on a hashtag for the event so all tweets for that conference can be simple collected together for record.

This week we have seen 3 controversies that have had the spotlight of public opinion brought to bear upon them through the use of Twitter hashtags. One of these was international (#amazonfail), one British (#twitterjoketrial) and one purely educational (#edsoft).

Without going in to specifics (I don't want my blog blocked by any more education filters than it already is), #amazonfail is an unfolding social media car crash of epic proportions in which one of the most tech and social media savvy companies, Amazon, sought to defend its position on free speech by ignoring Twitter users who were demanding the removal of a particular book title from their catalogue. The ensuing use of the #amazonfail hashtag spread across Twitter rapidly with thousands of users threatening boycotts of the company, removal of advertising and flooding the company with complaints. Amazon eventually caved and removed the book, but to date there still has been no official response from a company that censored the views of 2,000 negative reviews of the book in question by removing them, yet failed to see that free speech didn't extend to distributing books that advocated the abuse of minors. It is perhaps the biggest example to date of the hubris of companies that think they are more important than their customers, and the power of social media to shine a bright light on to their actions.

#twitterjoketrial is purely an English concern as it relates to the English legal system's complete failure to come to terms with modern technology and social media in particular. Briefly, a trainee accountant was so frustrated by the delays to his journey that he threatened on Twitter to blow Leeds/Bradford airport sky high. Foolish, certainly; a major terrorist threat, most definitely not. To read the full background on this important case, I refer you to the excellent JackofKent's blog. Suffice to say, that Paul Chambers has a criminal record, has lost his job and has failed in his appeal to get the ridiculously illiberal court decision overturned. The decision by the CPS to prosecute him on anti-terror grounds is deeply worrying and completely blurs the boundaries as to what our "War on Terror" actually constitutes. I actually wondered, as I tweeted as @tombatesesq, whether my Tweets plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament could be construed as a terror threat! Again, Twitter, though the #twitterjoketrial hashtag, throws a critical spotlight on the decisions of the judiciary.

Finally, #edsoft concerns the abuse of licensed material by an educational services company based in Australia of the same name. To understand the nature of this particular issue read Tom Barrett's post about how the company in question copied materials from his blog site, removed all attributions and then sought to pass them off at a conference as their own materials. What made this issue particularly reprehensible was the fact that the material was the work of lots of teachers who had freely given of their time and expertise to produce a set of resources for others to download and use without cost or restriction save that if reproduced, the proper attribution should be given to the authors and was not to be used for commercial gain. One of the delegates at the Australian seminar who was a member of Tom Barrett's Twitter network (Tom is based in Nottingham) alerted Tom to the use of our materials and a minor PR disaster for Edsoft has now unfolded. They completely failed to recognise the necessity for a formal public response to a person who has nearly 10,000 followers, the vast majority of whom are teachers.

(note: if you are not familiar with the "Interesting Ways" set of resources, they are truly excellent and can be found here.)

These 3 very different situations amply demonstrate the power of Twitter. Without the extensive international network of teachers on Twitter, it is extraordinarily unlikely that Edsoft would ever have been called to account for their actions. The trial of Paul Chambers clearly would never have happened in the first place without Twitter, but shows in extreme form how anti-terror legislation can be abused by authority to prosecute those who clearly and demonstrably never intended to harm a soul. While the Amazon debacle may not prove to be the "Gerald Ratner" moment for the company, it does show that no company can afford to be so arrogant as to ignore the legitimate questions and complaints of its customers. Without Twitter these 3 controversies would have taken radically different trajectories, Edsoft would have carried on ignoring licence obligations; the Paul Chambers case may have been a conversation point among lawyers; and the #amazonfail would have relied upon traditional media to expose its apparently rotten moral core.

Above all, these controversies demonstrate to those that still think Twitter consists of nothing but the vacuous utterings of minor celebrities, that their opinion is as lazy and wrong as those who deride Wikipedia. I am certain that very wise social commentators will look at these issues with much greater erudition and insight that I can manage, but I am equally certain that Twitter allows groups with a common interest (such as teachers) can easily and powerfully use the platform to communicate, collaborate and advocate in a democratic way, beyond the control of traditional media, or, in the case of teachers, outside the construct of authority based systems such as Learning Platforms.

I am @hgjohn on Twitter.

Breakfast with # browns: image under a Creative Commons licence by hugovk on Twitter

Gunpowder, Tweeting and Plot 2010 #gtp2010

2010-11-01T11:44:36+00:00

Thomas Bates was a minor protagonist in the Gunpowder Plot and as such, has a small footnote in English History. You can, however keep up to date with his activities by following him on Twitter (he is @tombatesesq). Further more, by simply going to Twitter and entering the following search term, including the hash, you can discover what all the characters in the plot are up to: #gtp2010.

You have probably guessed that I am tweeting as Thomas Bates and various other teachers, classes and interested parties are adopting the names of the other players. The idea is that the individuals tweet significant events and developments in the plot in real time on the same date as the actual events over 400 years ago. In this way, children are encouraged to engage and learn about the plot as it develops rather than as a single "event" in history.

So, today, 1st November, we learn that in 1605, Earl Salisabury, after much prevarication, showed James I an anonymous letter warning of the plot. My Master, Robert Catesby, believes that Thomas Tresham is the author of the letter and will confront him about it. I believe that Sir Thomas will try to persuade Robert to abandon the plot? How should I advise my Master?

Chris Leach, a teacher from Northamptonshire set up this project a year ago and it has been hailed as a great example of how new technology can be used to enhance children's learning. Enjoy following the plot as the drama unfolds!

Sir Ken Robinson - RSA animate: Changing Education Paradigms

2010-11-01T09:24:26+00:00

Sir Ken Robinson's talk on Changing Education Paradigms is witty and thought provoking and made all the more entertaining using animation to help underscore the main thrust of his argument. Well worth the investment of the 11 minutes and 40seconds required to watch it.

The Death of the VLE?

2010-10-22T15:01:06+01:00

One impact of the end of the Harnessing Technology Grant will be the direct invoicing of schools for their learning platform. In most cases Local Authorities have held back a portion of the grant in order to provide an authority wide platform. The subscription invoice for this service will now go directly to schools and in most cases will amount to over £2,000 for an average sized primary school. This is going to cause a lot of soul searching on the part of school leaders and the value for money question will come to the fore. One Local Authority advisor told me privately that they expected up to three quarters of their schools not to renew. Many would argue that the exposure of the VLE industry to proper market forces was long overdue and I would expect subscription prices to tumble. Who will blink first the schools or the VLE providers?

In search of balance, I read this blogpost yesterday by @simfin which argues that the problem with VLEs has largely been down to the adoption model. I disagree, but hey, I would say that. It's an excellent post and definitely worth a read if you are trying to evaluate the impact of the learning platform in your school.

Green Park's Story

2010-10-19T11:31:45+01:00

I am very pleased to read the first of a series of posts about blogging on BrainPop's blog. Pleased, because the first post in the series was written by Peter Rafferty. I met Peter over 5 years ago at a conference, I think, and his school became the first to order a blogsite from my then brand new Creative Blogs service. In those 5 years Green park's bloggers have gone from strength to strength while watching blogging in primary schools grow from a minority cult to a widely accepted and powerful medium for communicating children's learning. It's clear from the story how deeply embedded is the culture of blogging in the school's community, and long may it continue.

I look forward to reading further posts in the series from other top Creative Bloggers, David Mitchell and Jack Sloan.