The experience of the last two years has demonstrated the crucial and significant role of Edtech in education, overall schools have risen to these challenges and have had to transform their use of Edtech to support teaching and learning and many other aspects of the wider school community. As one of the national Edtech Demonstrator schools we will discuss why it is crucial that all schools form a digital strategy and how you can do this.

Remote education – what happened?

Remote learning digital divide – Sutton trust – https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Remote-Learning-The-Digital-Divide-Final.pdf 

Education reimagined – The future of learning – Microsoft https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/Microsoft-EducationReimagined-Paper.pdf 

Learning in Lockdown – Sutton Trust – January 2021 – https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/learning-in-lockdown/ 

Remote Education research – What works?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/remote-education-research/remote-education-research

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/eef-support-for-schools/covid-19-resources/

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/Publications/Covid-19_Resources/Remote_learning_evidence_review/Rapid_Evidence_Assessment_summary.pdf

If you want support with Edtech?

The EdTech Demonstrator Programme was developed by the Department for Education to ensure schools and colleges across England could access free, expert advice on educational technology. The programme launched shortly before the Covid19 pandemic enforced an extended period of remote teaching and learning in the Spring of 2020. 

The programme is now in its second year and has evolved from crisis response to offer support to schools and colleges in developing digital strategies which make effective use of technology to enhance teaching and learning. The programme finishes in July 2022 and we are awaiting what further support the DfE will be offering schools and colleges.

https://edtechdemo.ucst.uk/

https://edtechdemo.ucst.uk/demonstrators/devonport-high-school-for-boys

The importance of having a Digital Strategy

https://ec.europa.eu/education/education-in-the-eu/digital-education-action-plan_en 

DfE launching their own digital strategy for their department: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252499685/Department-for-Education-publishes-digital-strategy 

How to approach reviewing or creating a Digital strategy

https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/best-practice/digital-strategy-post-covid-school-coronavirus-edtech-remote-education-esafety/https://www.netsupportsoftware.com/digital-strategy/

New Digital standards for schools and colleges – https://www.gov.uk/guidance/meeting-digital-and-technology-standards-in-schools-and-colleges 

If you have any comments or questions please get in touch.

It has been delightful to welcome all students back to school this week. We have had an extremely positive and successful start, it has been wonderful to see the joy, happiness and hear the laughter return to classrooms and the school.

I am incredibly grateful and proud of our students, staff and our parents for the way that they have responded and supported the new measures and rules to ensure that students and staff can safely return to school. Contrary to the reports from some of the media the education community are happy to be back to school.

An alternative observation on Covid-19 in schools (warning some of these are light hearted)

So, amongst all of the social distancing, blue tape safe zones for staff, face coverings, one-way systems, frequent sanitising and cleaning, here are a few immediate musings:

• The queues for food are shorter (unlike the supermarkets) – there was the possibility that more children would bring packed lunches etc as a precaution, however, with the staggered breaks the wait time for food has been dramatically reduced and initially numbers seem to be up. I had a whole year group (180) most of them eating go through in just 6 minutes. Well done to our staff for their efforts with this.
• PE lessons are longer – with the rule of no changing, PE teachers found themselves with much more time than normally to teach particularly with Year 7 students where you normally have to allow additional time for several attempts to put their tie on. It was so positive to see students running around doing games.
• The corridors are quieter and calmer – They were good before but with staggered timings and a one-way system, I have been surprised how effective this has been in managing the flow of young people in tight spaces.
• Staff are smashing their step count records – Particularly, the senior staff who are now doing numerous more duties each day, the one-way system is helping all staff clock up more miles which can be good for  exercise.
• Blisters, blisters… everywhere – students and staff have not been used to wearing shoes, they have had to peel their flip flops off and break in shoes again (there have been quite a few people hobbling around the site by Friday afternoon). Once again, with the increased step count (see the previous point) and the new shoes there will be lots of foot treatments over weekend.
• I haven’t found one person who wasn’t pleased to be back – sometimes there will be people who won’t necessarily be 100% ready to be start back after the summer, after the last few months, everyone is genuinely happy to be back, you can tell from the smiling faces and the extremely high levels of attendance.
• The most tranquil start ever? – Despite the personal and collective anxieties of a return, we can all take confidence in having completed a successful and positive first week back, together we have supported each other, together we can do this.

I hope the start has been positive for you and your communities, I hope week 2 is just as positive. Next up, I will be picking up the baton to rant concerns over Covid-19 testing – watch this space.

How has #backtoschool been for you?

Since the EU Referendum in 2016 I had been confident that with the increase in funding for Erasmus projects since 2016 that the UK Government and members of parliament would be committed to supporting the cultural education of our next generation of young people, I am sure that it was clearly stated in the last year that Brexit wouldn’t affect it at all. However, I was utterly dismayed and disappointed to hear that on Wednesday this week MPs voted against continuing the membership of the Erasmus+ education and youth programme (See the tweet above) or what many others thought was the case.

However, within minutes of posting this blog, I received a very helpful tweet from @chris_eud, thank you to him for sending me this twitter thread below from Professor James Chalmers that clarifies the current situation:

So although, at first it appeared that it was the end, it may well not be, however, we must work to ensure that the Government does commit to successfully negociating for Erasmus to continue.

In the last twenty years of working within education, myself and my students have been involved in some absolutely wonderful opportunities and projects that have opened our eyes to the world, our young people have connected with young people from other cultures and countries, they have learnt important lessons about respect, tolerance and humanity that they simply wouldn’t have received from a text book.

In the unsettling times that we face globally from extremism and radicalisation, the polarisation that we face here within the UK and increasingly across Europe, and the impending ‘Brexit’. It is more important now than ever to ensure that we are nurturing global citizenship in our young people and creating these rich learning opportunities.

Our school is currently in the middle of two fantastic Erasmus projects and we have have at least one more in the pipeline before the funding is potentially removed, for our students you can’t underestimate the impact of this experience on their personal and social development, in addition they provide brilliantly rich professional development opportunities for our staff that will enrich their personal growth for years to come. 

What do you think of this recent news? 

Are you involved in Erasmus projects?

This blog post gives an insight into what our colleagues will potentially experience by Ross’s keynote.

I first connected with Ross back in 2010 through Twitter, at that time there weren’t so many teachers on Twitter discussing education and sharing resources, but just look how things have changed. We have kept in touch ever since and have occasionally met up over the years (one particular occasion was in 2014 when we had the ‘pleasure’ to meet with Michael Gove, a couple of days before he was axed as Education Secretary, along with Boris Johnson, I believe there are photos of this encounter on Ross’s blog).

So, over the last ten years I have tried my best to keep up with what Ross is actually doing but to be perfectly honest it has been impossible, he has achieved and has been involved in so many important developments in Teaching and Education. It is no surprise to me that he is now busy travelling the world supporting and working with teachers everywhere, holding politicians to account for their interference in the education system, writing yet more and more fantastic books, running the Teachertoolkit blog – sharing to over £10million people worldwide and yes as if that wasn’t enough has started on his journey to complete a Doctorate!

If you want the full life story then please read here:

https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/ross-morrison-mcgill/

Shorter version https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/team_member/ross-morrison-mcgill-2/

We are incredibly excited that Ross is our 2^nd Keynote at InspirED and we are really looking forward to hearing particularly about his latest developments including the recently announced research completed on the verbal feedback. In preparation for his talk you may find the following links of interest:

There is so much to read out there, so much on his blog https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/

Books https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/books/

Further reading taken from his website:

1. Verbal Feedback Project– seven English schools trial no written marking (2 mins)
2. Curriculum Questions– Intent, Implementation and Impact (3 mins)
3. 25 Years of Educational Fads(9 mins)
4. 17 Principles of Effective Instruction(5 mins)
5. The Flow Modelby Csikszentmihalyi (2 mins)
6. 6 Teaching Ideas to Bin in 2019(5 mins)
7. The Differentiation Bubble– shifting perceptions associated with differentiation. (7 mins)
8. How we can reform our examination system? The End of Average. (3 mins)

This blog post gives an insight into what our colleagues will potentially experience from Graham’s keynote.

Who is Graham Brown-Martin? (Short bio taken from http://www.grahambrownmartin.com/)

Graham Brown-Martin is a leader in the field of foresight and anticipatory research, bringing together social, political and technological trends to consider how we might prepare ourselves for the future. He is the author of Learning {Re}imagined, the best selling book on global education published by Bloomsbury. He has enjoyed a 30 year career spanning the education, technology and entertainment sectors. He was the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live.

Today he runs an innovation and design consultancy to help international government agencies and other organisations navigate the future. He was recently retained for a 2 year engagement as the Chief Education and Product Officer for pi-top transforming the way we learn and solve challenges together.

I first met Graham in 2011 through Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) some of my students were up for a national youth award as a result of a project they had developed using Xbox for education in primary schools. One of my projects won the Secondary Innovation Award at the LWF that year beating off fierce competition from companies such as Sony and Channel 4 http://www.danjjroberts.co.uk/2011/01/26/saltash-net-scoops-major-awards-at-lwf11/

LWF was an absolutely brilliant global platform which came together as a huge educational event every year in London. It brought together the greatest minds, thinkers and innovators and discussed the future of education, there really hasn’t been anything like it since and I believe that it is something greatly missed by the education community.

What is LWF?

This is Learning Without Frontiers from Learning Without Frontiers on Vimeo.

What is Learning Re-imagined?

Back in 2012 I met up with Graham again at the Worldwide Innovative Summit for Education (WISE) in Qatar, Graham was presenting at the conference and was busy finalising plans for the launch of Learning Re-imagined. Graham was commissioned to author and direct this project that involved him travelling over 130,000 miles, visiting 18 countries on 6 continents including Cuba, Ghana, UAE, Singapore, India, China, USA, Lebanon, Jordan, Brazil, Vietnam, Qatar, UK, Canada, France, Sweden and Australia. He found himself in diverse surroundings; refugee camps on the Syrian border, crisis response schools after an earthquake in China, a village in a remote rural area in Bihar in India, Silicon Valley in the US and London’s Shoreditch to mention a few.

He visited schools, universities and other places of learning. He met and interviewed some of the world’s leading thinkers including Noam Chomsky, Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Sugata Mitra, and he met some of the world’s most progressive education leaders, practitioners, government ministers and reformers. The outcome was one of the best books about education that I have ever read, if you haven’t looked at this then please do.

What is Pi-Top?

More recently he has been inspiring the next generation of makers and disrupters. In August 2019 he successfully completed a 2 year engagement as the Chief Education and Product Officer for pi-top leading a global team of learning theorists, industrial designers and engineers to create programmes and technologies to radically improve the way we learn, live and solve challenges together through the medium of making (social constructionism).

I am sure that all our colleagues attending #PlymouthInspirED will be incredibly excited to listen to Graham, I am positive that he will make us all reflect and challenge our thoughts about education and what future learning could be like in our classrooms.

Recent reading…

Education and the fourth industrial revolution

What does AI mean for education?

What is school for?

The future of work – 3 mega trends

DHSB CPD Library with thanks from @berrymanNick

For me, it was the Masters that I completed about 13 years ago. I have seen a few conversations on Twitter over the summer holidays as I dipped in and out about whether people would recommend doing a Masters or not. The comments were pretty mixed and the majority of which were negative with an emphasis on people commenting I did one but it didn’t lead to any promotions or help me with my career.

My Masters was focused on action research within my own classroom where I completed several small action research projects culminating in a final dissertation specifically reflecting on my own practice and implementing changes to improve it. Personally, it was transformational and reflecting back on it now I believe it was particularly inspiring because at that stage I was still a teacher in my early career so that commitment and focus on improving my own practice gave me a valuable insight into becoming a better teacher. So, for me would I recommend completing a Masters, then I would say if it specifically focuses on action research then it will be transformational to your professional development.

However, even if you don’t carry out action research, any significant commitment to your own professional learning can only be a positive with regards to your development. After waiting for several years for the timing to be ‘right’ in the last 18 months I have been completing a doctorate part time. It is a professional doctorate and what I love about it is that I have found I am drawing on and contributes to my knowledge and practice in my role as a Headteacher. In the last 18 months I have found it extremely challenging but I have loved every minute of it, you begin to critically look at everything you do and what has been particularly beneficial is drawing on important research in our profession.

Today #ResearchEd has been trending on Twitter and it is brilliant to see so many of the profession engaging with this, I look forward to getting there next year!

Are you completing your doctorate? How are you finding it? Are you considering doing one? It would be great to hear from you.

What are your CPD priorities for this academic year?

We are hosting the first BrewEd event to take place in Plymouth on Thursday 17^th October 2019 from

6-9pm.

This is the first BrewEd event to take place in Plymouth, so if you work within education please come along and join us at #BrewEdPlymouth.

BrewEd is a grassroots movement for people from all phases, sectors, and areas of education. BrewEd events provide a space for educators to come together, enjoy each other’s company and have some open and challenging debate around thought-provoking ideas and issues. The intention is to provide a platform for local educators to have their voices heard within their community and share the experience. This is a chance to connect with other people from within education in the South West and network, to potentially collaborate or just chat about education.

It is the opportunity to connect, talk together and potentially collaborate together in the future.

So please come along

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/brewed-plymouth-tickets-64667262523

Here is an article about BrewEd:

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/brewed-bringing-together-people-pints-and-pedagogy

More on how to set up your own BrewEd from @MrEdFinch

https://mrefinch.wordpress.com/2018/07/08/brewed101/

Here you can find a list of BrewEd events in your area:

http://brewed.pbworks.com/w/page/120273042/FrontPage

Have you been to a BrewEd event? How did you find it? Have you got any suggestions for our first BrewEd event?

As the power of the LA crumbled, as more and more secondary maintained schools became academies and with the introduction of new types of schools, this greatly valued professional development no longer became viable or possible as the system and LA became more and more fragmented.

Fast forward to 2018 and as part of a community of twenty secondary providers in the city of Plymouth, with the support of a Teaching school we attempted to create secondary specific subject hubs, once again to improve quality of teaching and the outcomes of our young people. As expected there were great examples of where it worked well for the reasons I benefited myself as a Head of Science many years ago and also areas where we needed to improve the quality of these hubs. It was excellent to see the commitment, determination and trust from all providers to work together and to put the children in our city first. However, perhaps inevitably due to the fragmentation of our education system, all schools individually face challenges and must prioritise this above everything else, so therefore a year later following some open and honest discussions we have ended the hubs as we knew it.

Despite the challenge we face, as an education community we all know that a teacher’s subject knowledge is incredibly important in the effectiveness of teaching and to improve the learning of young people. It is incredibly important that teachers and subject leaders have the opportunity to develop their subject specific pedagogy and to do this effectively it must be with other subject professionals and those experts in their subject field. So as a school with six other schools in our city with the valuable support from a local teaching school we have come together to form Secondary InpirED Subject Communities (SISC) for all our subject areas. Each subject community will plan their own professional development conferences (3 a year), focusing purely on improving the quality of teaching and learning and their pedagogy in the classroom not on what tends to happen these days such as exam board training. Each subject community will be quality assured by a senior leader from one of the schools and the senior leaders will come together as a group to regularly review, monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of each subject community. They will share good practice across the subject communities and drive forwards the improvement agenda whilst setting the strategic priorities.

In addition, these subject communities will be encouraged to connect to their specialist national and international subject associations and to connect and collaborate with other more grassroots organisations that are incredibly successful. One great example of this is the Twitter subject communities like #TeamEnglish and #Litdrive I think what the teachers are doing here is fantastic to see.

We kick start these subject communities in October with our first ever Plymouth InspirED Conference #PlymouthInspirED, where the subject communities will have subject specific time wrapped around two internationally renowned keynote speakers Graham Brown-Martin @grahamBM and Ross Morrison Mcgill @Teachertoolkit. I am positive that it will be a wonderful event and a fitting way to begin the commitment to our subject communities.

If we as subject teachers, subject leaders and senior leaders are to improve the outcomes of young people then we must work together to improve our collective pedagogical growth through a self-improving school system. I know this from my own experience where with the support of the Science subject community consisting of strong subject leads and a couple of fantastic Science advisors from the LA, combined with the hard work and commitment of my colleagues, the worst performing subject department became the best performing department in the entire local authority within 3 years.

This is exactly what we hope for our new Secondary InspirEd Subject Communities, we have a collective responsibility to improve the practice of all practitioners thus improving the life chances of all our young people in Plymouth. It is a brilliant opportunity for teachers to focus on their own subject based practice, deepening their own knowledge to enhance their curriculum offer to have a richer knowledge base and provide appropriate challenge for all our young people.

Are you part of a subject community? How do you find it? What are your thoughts on this approach?