The question of what is so special about classrooms demands more of an answer now than ever before. Historically, the classroom was almost the only place where learners could have access the resources to support their learning, but a wide range of resources can now be accessed online: from school owned resources made available through Learning Platforms, to educational resources created and shared widely (from MIT, OU, BBC, and resources like icould) to resources created purposefully for out of school learning; to resources for alternative purposes, but that can be used by learners to find out and discover (youtube, videojug, wikipedia etc).

Historically, the school was one of the only places, other than perhaps Churches, where a trained, professional was available to teach and support learning; now mentors and teachers can be found in supermarkets, accessed from home and found online. The extended school moves school aims and practices into the home; the ‘whole child’ agenda attempts to bring the life and wellbeing of the child into the actions of the school. This blurring of roles can be seen to continue with the possibilities offered by social software, online networks and new ways of organising interest groups.

Similarly, as the interest grows in bringing Children’s services together to provide a more coherent offering to students, it is important to recognise the education provision from other quarters: for example, the National Trust offers contextualised, hands-on discovery learning; Museums offer the chance to engage with a range of artefacts and stories; Science centres the chance to explore processes of science, and outdoor sites provide opportunities to develop skills of leadership, enquiry and collaboration. These sites for learning have developed these approaches to learning over many years; digital technology affords newer approaches that are still very much being investigated - but there is a whole host of providers of education and many new opportunities for accessing learning.

Within the current economic context, when budgets are tightened and cuts are looking to be made, surely now is the opportunity to look at how non-formal providers, and indeed services through digital technologies, can be used to share the responsibility for ‘formal’ educational provision.

Could workforce remodelling look not only at ‘in-school’ staff but utilise the expertise of museum educators?  Could curricula developments include provision from online networks, and could the partnerships set out in the Government’s recent whitepaper move beyond schools to the non-formal providers?

Of course there is something very special about sitting in an auditorium listening to a world expert talking about their work and insights; there is something very special about discussing a subject of interest with peers facilitated by an person whose role is to help you understand; and there is something very special about being able to access world-class resources online and using them when needed. And of course there is something very special about a really good classroom experience.

But they all have different reasons for being special, and offer something distinct from one another.

The classroom is a complex place: it brings together of a group of people with a professionally trained expert in a site dedicated to teaching and learning; it provides access to resources that often are created to help learn about particular subjects or issues. But what is so special about them? What is it that can’t be provided by non-formal education organisations? What is it that can’t be accessed through digital technologies? If we can begin to understand this uniqueness, perhaps we can focus our efforts on building on it, whilst creating stronger links to alternative providers of education and other access points to learning.

What you’ll hopefully have found is Michael Rosen, possibly the UK’s most celebrated children’s poet, performing ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’, at your finger tips.  A brilliant opportunity to engage with a crafted performance of a poem, directed at the viewer, with sub-titles to read along with.  A valuable resource, right there in your living room, office, or wherever else you access the internet. But not in your classroom.

At the South West Grid for Learning conference 2009 many examples were cited where blocking policies impedes teacher’s ability to use such learning resources in the classroom.  For teachers who seek to get round this by downloading videos and images, it was pointed out by Doug Dickinson that they are breaking copyright, and so the law.   Teachers who use innovative educational resources like Channel 4’s Battlefront, which engage young people through social media like Facebook and MySpace, face criticism for engaging students the use of social software.  In a system where teachers are pushed for time, teaching a full national curriculum, and to striving to provide quality learning experiences for their students, this does seem, at the least, like a wasted opportunity.   Particularly considering the increasing focus on home access.

As highlighted by the Byron review, E-safety is a serious concern when it comes to the internet.  But simply blocking out sites seems unlikely to solve the problem.  The internet poses a variety of well documented dangers, ranging from risk of contact with inappropriate material to buying a mechanical digger from New Zealand. However, these dangers present themselves on a regular basis to the 49 % of 8-17 year olds Ofcom reported using online social networking in 2008, and the 75% of young people who have access to the internet at home (2005 figures).  These numbers are set to increase with the Home Access programme and the ongoing developments set out in Digital Britain.  For these young people the internet is simply another environment they engage with, presenting risks and opportunities.  While blocking sites removes an immediate danger within schools, it does nothing in developing young people’s critical and evaluation skills in negotiating dangers.

Incidentally when you read ‘click on this link’ as you did above, if you’re anything like me you’ll get a sudden flash of paranoia as your mind races to check the possible dangers that exist there.  You may have assessed the YouTube url, the fact its attached to this blog, and a host of other indicators to decide its safe - I wonder if those skills were taught or developed from experience?  And I wonder which way we’d rather young people learnt them.

Channel 4 Summer education conference

The Channel 4 Education Summer conference gathered together an eclectic mix of digital media and education professionals to consider how the UK Education system “struggles to respond to ever increasing demands, new policy initiatives, new demands from parents and students, and all the innovations in pedagogy, technology and neuroscience.”

This was a timely event given the announcements the same day from the Government about 21st Century schools and the White paper, the recent ministerial changes in DCSF and BIS and the uncertainty around funding and a growing awareness of the rapidly emerging “more for less” concept facing the public sector in general.

Zenna Atkins, Chair of OFSTED opened the day with a reflective and honest appraisal of the need for the inspection regime to be sensitive to the need for 21st century learning and there is an interesting piece by Merlin John on his blog agent4change.(link below)

Professor Rose Luckin from the London Knowledge Lab drew on the increasing body of evidence which supports technology enhanced learning but still warned of the “illusions” of technology, organisations and knowledge.

Matt Locke the commissioning editor at channel 4 outlined some of the successful projects they have supported such as Battlefront, which has succeeded using digital technology to help young people explore community, campaigning, and communications.

Donald Clark spiced up the late afternoon with his usual passionate perspective on young people, technology, gaming and learning.

Finally the Teach meet concept came to channel 4 as a variety of practitioners shared their nuggets of effective practice in bite sized chunks without the use of PowerPoint!

Channel 4 seem to be filling a space (the event was sold out) surely it is time the education sector answered back?

Links;
http://www.channel4learning.com/
http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/
http://www.teachmeet.org.uk/
http://www.agent4change.net/

The LSC will allocate a further £2.5m to continue to support the mobile learning in Further Education and Skills project ,MoLeNet for another year to add to the £12m spent in 2007/8.

Despite the crisis in the LSC capital funding the MoLeNet project goes from strength to strength industry and education members of the project advisory board were told in Manchester on Friday.

Stephen Nichols, from the LSC said,

“We are delighted at the positive outcomes of Molenet 1 and 2 and will be looking to Molenet 3 to focus on sustainability, productivity and employability. We are also keen to encourage specialist colleges to get more involved in the next round.” He added

Mobile Learning has continued to grow in popularity and has proved invaluable in increasing access to learning and engaging and motivating learners in colleges and also in work based learning.

John Cannon, Director of Skills for Learning, at Manchester College was very enthusiastic about the potential of mobile learning in the college;

“The learning gains have been spectacular” said John “students who have found literacy and communication challenging have been transformed into confident learners.”

A range of showcases demonstrated learners using voting kits, net books, Nintendo Wii, MP3’s and Natalie, Parveen, and Dean, part of the preparation for independent work programme demonstrated the potential of the mobile games consoles on their spelling and numeracy ability.

In all the examples demonstrated the College had purchased the mobile devices for the students and they were predominantly used in classrooms.

An interesting perspective emerged when the learners described the mobile technologies they already own and use in their own time, which often exceeded the capacity and capability of the college bought equipment.

Perhaps this might explain why the LSC are asking Molenet 3 bidders to focus on sustainability and capacity building?

www.molenet.org.uk

Dean,Parveen and Natalie have improved their spelling and numeracy by practising at home on their own devices.

Whilst most of the gossip in the bars and tea rooms was about who would be the new speaker, mobile learning was getting some exposure in dining room B as Roberta Blackman-Woods MP hosted a launch of the “bite sized learning opportunities on mobile devices” (BLOOM geddit?) project.

The partners in the project Tribal, Communication Workers Union, GoSkills(the sector skills council for transport) and Bango,a mobile technology company were hopeful of a ministerial appearance but in the frenzied politicking going on upstairs that seemed unlikely.

However the MP’s who did wander in discovered that taxi drivers in Liverpool can now access learning in their cabs on mobile devices (not when driving obviously!) and can work towards their NVQ’s whilst at work.

Carl Werbeski a taxi driver and NVQ assessor was pleased with the opportunities mobile learning presents;

“mobile learning makes the task of the assessor more professional. It helps me deliver feedback in a more professional way”

Mike Short, Vice President of Research and Development at O2 was equally positive abut the potential of mobile learning describing it as;

“the greatest opportunity for inclusive education this century”

The Mobile Learning movement has gathered pace in the last few years and the UK is a hotspot of development.

Geoff Stead has been at the forefront of this development and is one of Tribal’s “thought leaders” on learning technology and sees his job is to “take learning visions and weave them into mainstream service and product offerings.”

In the FE and Skills sector the LSC has invested over£12million into mobile learning as part of the MoLeNET project and Danny Atwere of the LSN shared some of the outcomes of what was described as “the worlds largest mobile learning project”

The potential for the use of mobile devices for learning is enormous and is beginning to have an impact in schools as Elizabeth Hartnell Young from the LSRI reported last year.

Perhaps the private and work based learning sector, freed from some of the constraints of schools and colleges, will be more innovative?

Links

Bloom www.m-learning.org/bloom
Mobile is schools http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/ehy/LSRIfinalreport.pdf
Molenet www.molenet.org.uk

Geoff Stead,Tribal and Mike Short,O2 explain mobile learning to John Heppell MP

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-youtube-teaching-video

Some top-line stats may surprise you about the average 12-24 year old (or not, if you are one):

They personally own 8 devices (including MP3 player, PC, TV, DVD player, mobile phone, stereo, games console, and digital camera)
They frequently conduct over 5 activities whilst watching TV
25% of them agree that “I’d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone access”
A quarter of young people interviewed text or IM (instant message) friends they are physically with at the time
They have on average 123 friends on their social network spaces
And the first thing the majority of them do when they get home is turn on their PC

No surprises for our family with a 15 and 19yr old but poses some questions for their teachers and lecturers?

http://blogs.channel4.com/platform4/2009/05/26/technology-kids-and-telly/

Regardless of your motivations, it’s hard to ignore the continuing presence of modern foreign languages (MFL) in education. The recent Rose review, for example, sets out how foreign languages will become a statutory requirement of the National Curriculum at Key Stage 2 from 2011. There is currently a real interest in the role digital technologies can play in the application of MFL in the classroom. Social software and digital media are increasingly being used by teachers to help students’ access language learning, and language labs have been newly incarnated for the digital age.

So, how is this innovative software being applied in the classroom? Can it create a new interactive experience for users? And most importantly, can it save them from the future embarrassment of recalling only a disembodied voice from a long forgotten language lab asking “Où est la gare?”, when what they really need to know is where to find the toilet?

Blogs are increasingly popular, both as a place where teachers can find ways to share and develop their own practice, and as a teaching tool. Joe Dale is a leading practitioner in using ICT in MFL and his blog is an overwhelming collection of instructional podcasts, links and examples of where and how ICT is being used in MFL. With an ever increasing world of Web 2.0 tools such places are vital for teachers to find relevant tools quickly. It is this need that has led Futurelab to develop the Map of Innovations project.   Blogs are also being used as an area where students can access resources, relevant links, or showcase their own work to a real world audience.  ‘Langwitch!’ is a great example of a blog being used for different purposes (and features a video of Bill Bailey doing the Hokey Cokey in German - reason enough to visit it in my view). Part of the value of blogs for teachers is that they can be so flexibly used and managed, so don’t suffer from the restrictions of institutional VLEs.

MFL Teachers are also widely capitalising on new authoring software available to them to engage their students. This ranges from creating bespoke interactive exercises, through to downloadable podcasts explaining rules of grammar or giving listening practice. Ashcombe School in Surrey has even created interactive quizzes that can run on Ipods. It is interesting to reflect on this as a further example of the success of locally generated content and practice bring spread through networks, rather than being centrally led. Chris Fuller’s Spanish podcasts, for example, begun life as a support for his own students and have now been downloaded in excess of 50 000 times.

Microblogging is gaining momentum, both as a tool for teachers to develop their personal learning networks, but also to communicate with their students. Free software Edmodo has been used by teachers to create a secure microblogging environment to engage with their students. Teachers are using tools like Twitter to create easy to access professional learning networks outside of their localities, and with people they may never have met face to face. This means that teachers have tremendous access to support networks to enhance their professional development, and a great electronic bridge to their students outside of class. For MFL where learning how to communicate is such a vital part of the subject, these social spaces and communicative tools are offering a new ways for learners (and teachers!) to discover, practise and share.

In considering the future of microblogging in education it’s worth keeping an eye on the use of Twitter in the wider world. One the one hand it has provided an enormously powerful and liberating way of decentralising information, (and knowing about things before others do can make you feel like you’re in the cool crowd). On the other it has a limited ability to express context, runs the risk of spreading misinformation, and in the case of the recent swine flu ‘epidemic’, fuelling a global panic.

In considering the use of technology in the MFL classroom it is worth briefly turning our attention to mobile phones. Although banned in the majority of classes there are examples which highlight their value as learning tools in their own right. They have been used to play podcasts and to record verbal assignments. In Ireland another project created an oral teaching and assessment system to support language students learning Irish.  Although there are certainly difficulties in allowing mobile phones in schools, there is an ongoing question of how the increasingly ubiquitous tools of mobile technology can be of value to mainstream education.

The use of new software and participative media in schools has also been used to support students in creatively approaching MFL. Free software like Vokis allow students to put their recorded voice to created avatars to build confidence in spoken language skills. Packages like Glogster allow students to create interactive posters with embedded media and text. MP3 players and digital film have been used by students to create films, and dialogues to support their learning. Again this highlights the value of how interdisciplinary and creative approaches to learning have been seen to motivate and engage students.

So what does the future hold for the use of technology in MFL? Overarching educational trends like Mobile Learning and resource sharing are big opportunities waiting in the wings. The Open School for Languages is a large scale DSCF funded project to realise a key recommendation from the Dearing review. The creators, Lightbox, are creating an online resource to support secondary MFL - it will go live in the coming year.

In the longer term, Natural Language Technologies (NLT) gain increasing strength as research in the field deepens. There is a tentative interest in Chatbots - an artificial intelligence programme attempting to recreate the experience of talking to a human.  They offer 1-1 interaction in the language, can be less intimidating than speaking to a real human, and are capable of holding independent conversations with multiple users.