If you’ve not encountered a TeachMeet it’s an informal ‘unconference’ where teachers can share ideas, pose questions and network. The key is that any TeachMeet is ‘by teachers, for teachers’.

Teachers Ross Morrison McGill and Steven Lockyer are currently running a number of TeachMeets in London #SLTeachMeet is a new twist on the basic concept and brings senior leaders together. The event was completely packed and, in the space of two hours, we listened to 17 quick fire presentations. Here are some of our personal highlights.

From plantation to rainforest

Tom Sherrington made the case for rainforest thinking rather than plantation thinking when it came to school leadership. He acknowledged that as a head he was drawn to the ‘plantation’ where things were ordered and standardised. Plants flourished and outcomes were predictable and uniform. However, he argued that when heads adopted this approach they stifled individuality and creativity.

Instead he made the case for rainforest thinking something that he’d encountered for the first time at the school he now leads. As with a rainforest it can initially seem disorganised as staff are encouraged to adopt their own approaches whether that’s staff meetings, CPD or classroom practice. However, letting go of control allows new things to emerge.

A point made by James Heale in an earlier presentation possibly sums up the advantage of the rainforest: ‘tighten up to be good, loosen up to be outstanding’.

For more thinking on this and other themes visit – http://headguruteacher.com/ and follow @headguruteacher

Share the love

We loved Stephen Lockyer’s ‘SLTDropbox’. This invites senior staff to share their three best resources in a dedicated folder on DropBox. Stephen realised that schools across the country were creating many of the same policies and documents and that sharing them could save time for everyone. Only launched three weeks ago, SLTDropBox already has 180 members and over 200 policies, plans and ideas have already been uploaded.

Follow Stephen on twitter @MrLockyer

17 years of wisdom in six minutes

Kenny Frederick, head teacher at George Green’s School, is retiring after 17 years in the job (this won her a round of applause from the audience).

Kenny shared some of the challenges she’d faced as a head including dealing with the death of students, tackling racism and how she managed to turn an exploding playground into an opportunity. At the end of the presentation she offered some advice to those in the room.

• Remind yourself of your values and principles and core purpose
• Allow others to help you – you are not on your own!
• Admit your mistakes and face up to them
• Learn to be assertive and have difficult conversations
• Don’t allow yourself to be bullied – some will try!
• Don’t be afraid to take risks

To sum up she said headship was about “how to keep calm and carry on when all hell is breaking loose”.

Follow Kenny on twitter @kennygfrederick

From clueless to ninja in less than a year

Sarah Findlater spoke about the journey she’s been on to understand digital learning since last summer when, in her own words “I was totally clueless”. Key to her increasing her knowledge was Twitter. She discovered a huge community of teachers able to help and support her development.

As she grew in confidence Sarah realised that no one was coordinating digital learning across her school so she took on the role.  In the past year she’s used a wide range of tools and offered the audience some advice:

• Don’t simply follow fads, choose wisely
• Stay focused on the learning
• Find tools that help teachers to save time

Take a look at Sarah’s blog – http://msfindlater.blogspot.co.uk/ or follow her on twitter @msfindlater

Watch all the presentations (including Ross’s brilliant ‘My Ed Hunt’) here

The next #SLTeachMeet is taking place in Scotland on 13^th July more information here.

Join the conversation on Twitter – #sltchat takes place every Sunday 8.00pm -8.30pm (GMT)

Until recently MediaCore, like many cloud-based services, stored customer data in the US. However, Canadian public schools, and many other education institutions, are required to store all user data securely within Canada. With a growing number of enquiries from Canadian education institutions we wanted to ensure it was possible for them to use MediaCore.

The first organisation to get on board the Canadian Cloud is Wolf Creek Public Schools in Alberta. They’re now able to use MediaCore to manage their growing library of video learning resources.

Mark McWhinnie, the assistant superintendent at Wolf Creek Public Schools explained why he valued MediaCore’s Canadian Cloud:

“Sensitive data is stored securely in Canadian data centres and allows us to permission the access to this content protecting student information where necessary. Our staff and students are thrilled with the ease of use that the MediaCore platform provides for viewing streamed content from a Canadian location.”

Now any school or university can securely store data such as names, addresses and personal information in Canada.

Contact us to find out more!

Since then the school has implemented the flipped model initially with freshmen classes and, in 2011-12, across the whole school. Test scores, graduation rates, and college attendance have increased, student engagement has improved dramatically, and discipline problems have declined in both number and severity (check out Pearson’s case study for more information).

However, what does this mean for school leaders who want to do the same? We caught up with Principal Greg Green, to ask him what advice he could offer to other school leaders.

What is the best way to start out with flipping your school?

“I really recommend taking an incubation approach. Select two or three departments and recruit small groups of enthusiastic staff to work together. Find the people that are tech savvy and those already interested in video. You may find you already have teachers flipping their individual classes, get them involved.

What’s important is to not just focus all your energy on one department. Much better to get things moving in a number of departments so you can start to build interest across the school.”

What’s important in persuading your staff to support the idea?

“You need to think like a salesman and sell the concept! It’s really important to look at things from the perspective of your staff. What’s in it for them? How can this help them?

They need to be ready to invest extra time when you’re making a change of this magnitude. What’s important is to articulate why it’s ‘time well spent’. How this will save them time in the future and the benefits it can offer to individual students.

But you have to work things through. It’s a process so take one step at a time.”

How can you best support educators that are less confident in using technology?

“The approach we took was to partner them with teachers that were really confident users of technology. We encouraged them to co-create videos using simple tools for creating videos and then moved them along the technology ability chain.

We collected lots of video resources, such as Khan Academy, that they could access from our MediaCore platform. Having everything in the same place rather than spread across the internet made it much simpler for teachers to get started.”

How would you approach flipping your school if you were stating today?

“When you start something like this there are going to be moments when you have to rethink. You need a culture that rewards leaders and teachers trying something innovative and understands that some failure is part of the learning process.

The important thing is to give everyone a chance to innovate without the fear of failure.

The bottom line is do you really want to threaten innovation with a stick?”

Want to start flipping your class? The Flipped Institute has lots of free resources and MediaCore offers free educator accounts to help you store and organise video resources.

The survey of professors that had taught MOOCs (103 respondents from a sample of 184 professors) showed that 38% had been motivated to teach a MOOC to pick up tips to help improve classroom teaching. And once they’d taught their MOOC 73.7% said that the experience had inspired them to change the way they teach their traditional classroom based courses – that’s a significant proportion.

So what’s happening?

Coursera, edX and Udacity each gather a great deal of data in particular student interactions with each other and with course materials. It’s this information that professors are poring over to get an insight into their teaching and assessment methods. For many professors MOOCs are providing some of the most tangible feedback they’ve ever received about their teaching.

Furthermore, designing a MOOC means a professor has to create an online version of a course they may have been teaching for years. Associate Professor Kevin Werbach who taught a MOOC on gamification for the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and recently wrote about the experience  shed some light on what’s involved in creating a MOOC:

“MOOCs aren’t just online lectures. My course had a series of short pre-recorded video segments, featuring me behind a desk discussing key topics, woven around slides, live diagrams, practitioner interviews, video clips and thought questions posed to the students, along with discussion forums, social media exchanges and real time “video office hours” that I participate in.”

This takes considerable effort. Which is why it’s no surprise that going through this process is making experienced professors reflect on their real world teaching experience and think about whether it’s time to make some changes.

Finally, Werbach’s course generated a huge level of student interaction, nearly 20,000 forum posts. Although overwhelming in number, feedback on which methods or materials learners love and which they find boring or unhelpful is starkly clear. And instead of just one or two voices in a class it’s a vast number of learners.

What’s interesting about this research is that it demonstrates the power that technology, in this case MOOCs, can have to transform behaviour in the real world. We see this regularly with MediaCore users who find that creating, uploading and sharing online video helps them to reconsider their classroom practice.

What’s great about this is that everyone’s a winner – the students learning online, those in the classroom and the professor. Clearly a spring clean is good for us all.

One of the big points of debate is the dramatic student dropout rates from MOOCs (typically 85% – 95%) and what this means for their future development. We came across a couple of interesting things which gave us pause for thought.

Dr Kevin Devlin, Mathematician at Stanford University made the point in the Huffington Post that the metrics being used to understand MOOCs were simply not relevant:

“…applying the traditional metrics of higher education to MOOCs is entirely misleading. MOOCs are a very different kind of educational package, and they need different metrics — metrics that we do not yet know how to construct.”

We think he has a point, and this was reinforced when we read new research from three doctoral students at Stanford University. The students suggested that the debate on large scale dropout implied a binary categorisation of learners, i.e. those that pass the class and those that don’t.

What the research identified was that there was another group of learners that stayed engaged but didn’t take the final test. These ‘auditing’ learners watched the video lectures and followed the majority of the course, but they simply didn’t obtain a credit. The research demonstrates that these learners are currently being overlooked in all debates and discussions about MOOC drop out rates simply because they don’t take the test. Engagement of this sort is still valuable learning.

Everyone gets dazzled by the enormous numbers surrounding MOOCs but this research reminded us that learning isn’t just about ace-ing the test. Anyone involved in this fascinating area needs to stay focused on the students that are engaged, what engagement looks like and how design of MOOCs can meet their differing needs.

Khalid Raza who lives in India, participated in a Gamification course delivered by Professor Kevin Werbach from the University of Pennsylvania. He offered the following insight:

“As a MOOC participant you need to be able to self-regulate your learning. I chose to participate fully but in the end it’s you, the learner, that decides what you need and whether you’re successful or not. It’s in your hands.”

(Hat tip to Annie Murphy Paul for highlighting the research on her blog)

Ben Rouse is a secondary maths teacher and head of faculty in a boy’s comprehensive in Surrey in the UK. The school is in a fairly affluent area and all students have access to the Internet at home.

Ben has been teaching for 9 years and recently started experimenting with the flipped classroom. He began with his older students but has recently been flipping the classrooms of his younger students. We spoke to him to find out more.

When did you first hear about the flipped classroom and why did you decide to adopt it as a teaching approach?

I’d begun making instructional videos for my class and had always wanted to explore the idea of homework as a preparation for upcoming lessons rather than just consolidation of previous. I discovered the flipped classroom via Twitter and the idea seemed to fit with the videos I was creating for my classes to change the focus of work outside the classroom.

I’ve been flipping my Year 10 class (14-15 year olds) for just over a year and focusing on specific topics rather than a wholesale approach to teaching.

Why did you make the decision to try a flipped approach with younger students?

My decision to try out the approach with younger students in my Year 7 class (11-12 year olds) was driven by the fact that I wanted to find a new way to teach constructions, i.e. the creating of shapes and perpendicular lines using a pair of compasses based on mathematical properties.

The traditional way to teach constructions means your class follows your instructions step by step. This doesn’t allow for differentiation, in fact this approach normally results in students being reprimanded for getting ahead of the class!

How did you present the resources for your students?

I created a page on my wikispace for my Year 7 class which included a series of videos to introduce the new subject, listed the topics and set out the video-based homework tasks.

What issues did you encounter flipping your class with younger students?

One of the surprising things was that students weren’t as familiar with using the Internet as I’d expected. This is why the wiki was so important, it was much easier for them to navigate within one website rather than move between different sites.

Another interesting issue was that younger students appeared to be much more anxious to get it right. I received a lot more emails from students and some came to see me at lunchtime as well. They asked lots of questions compared to older students.

Finally, I found that the students preferred to see the process demonstrated on the board while setting homework.

What were the results of flipping your class with younger students?

Some of the students made progress beyond my expectations. They spent extra time reviewing the videos and practicing the skills prior to our lesson and this meant they could focus on more challenging problems in class.

In addition, more students were able to help each other and extend the progress of the class.

Finally, I had more free time in class. This meant I could work with a small group of students who had struggled, go through the skills step-by-step, and accelerate their rate of progress so they left the lesson on track.

I’ve got three tips for teachers:

1. Make accessing the videos and other materials easy and plan to have to repeat the instructions for some students on another occasion. I have created playlists in YouTube and embedded these in my wikispace page for my class. A link to the video playlists on a VLE page would be an alternative.
2. Inform parents you are planning for a homework to involve videos on YouTube, they can be suspicious but generally supportive when it is explained. Ideally you may want to do your first flip just after a parent’s evening
3. Don’t assume any technical competence from your students.

You can take a look at Ben’s wiki or follow him on Twitter at @Mr_BRouse

This distinguished awards program recognizes outstanding solutions – and the best and brightest minds. Past winners of the EdTech Digest Award Program have included:

• Pearson
• Epson
• McGraw-Hill

The Cool Tool awards are presented to companies who provide outstanding contributions in transforming education through technology – and enriching the lives of learners everywhere.

The best companies, people, apps, products and services are chosen each year to be honored as finalists in this awards recognition program.
MediaCore is very honored to be a finalist for this great award and many others over the past couple of years.

The term MOOC was first coined in 2008 and grown in popularity. In the past year or so a number large-scale online campuses have launched including edX, a collaboration between MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, and Coursera. Both offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. Other key players include Udacity in the US, FutureLearn in UK and Berlin-based Iversity.

MOOCs don’t always lead to formal qualifications but they allow students to gain invaluable knowledge to support their careers, or their own personal learning goals. There are no entry requirements and students can take part in the courses regardless of where they live in the world.

For more information check out Wikipedia – happy MOOCing!

Once you have configured the MediaCore Building Block, Blackboard will be connected directly to your MediaCore site. At this time you can start adding videos to your courses. Simply click on “Courses” in the top navigation bar, select a course from your “Course List” and click on “Content”. From here, select “MediaCore Media” from the “Build Content” dropdown and you will be presented with a list of your videos. Simply click on a video and click “submit” to add it to Blackboard.

Users that are logged into Blackboard can navigate to a course page and watch videos posted whether they are public or private. Blackboard generates a signed URL for the video that is only available once and only for that user.

If this sounds like something you would like to implement in your learning environment, follow the steps below to get started:

Step 1) Install and configure the Building Block within Blackboard. For detailed step-by-step instructions click here.

Step 2) Add videos to your courses by adding MediaCore mashups to your Blackboard course pages.

You will want to start by ensuring that you have privileges to add a MediaCore Mashup to a Course. For further instructions click here.

Step 3) You’re done! Your students can begin enjoying your videos.

If you need to edit or delete an existing MediaCore Mashup in Blackboard click here for more details.

Questions? Contact support@mediacore.com and we’ll be happy to assist you.