Even that approach fails to take into account any new ideas which haven’t yet been thought of. That’s an obvious point, but one worth making I think, for the following reason. We need to try to be as open to new ideas and innovations as possible, and having a fixed list of suggestions, while useful, mitigates against that to an extent.

The answer is to think of ‘mobility’ in terms of an attitude rather than in terms of technology. Failure to do so not only results in potentially great ideas being missed, but in the bizarre phenomenon of class photos of kids siting in rows staring at their iPads.

As Graham Brown-Martin said at the Naace conference in March 2013, “What part of ‘mobile’ did they not understand?”

The whole point about mobile technology is that it enables you to work with the technology where you want or need to be. You don’t have to do what we had to do in the past, ie do the best we can until we can get back to a computer or laptop.

So here are a few ideas about how handheld devices can be used.

1. You’re not confined to a building or a power source. I am writing this article, for example, in my garden, which is allowing me to enjoy the beautiful (and rare!) sunshine. This isn’t a trivial issue: we all need vitamin D, for which we need sunlight — so why not take advantage of it? There is no reason, or at least no TECHNICAL reason, for school work and health to be mutually exclusive.
2. You can observe and record nature in a natural habitat. If you want the pupils to see minibeasts going about their business, you can have them use their devices to record photos and videos, which they can analyse more thoroughly back at school.
3. A great way to explore the environment is through geocaching. As explained at http://www.geocaching.com/, you try to find hidden ‘treasures’ using GPS. Many devices are GPS-enabled these days. It’s a fun way of discovering information (eg historical or geographical) because it’s like going on a treasure hunt. Have a look at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/news/new-geocaching-trail-education/ and http://www.ehow.co.uk/how_2038103_enjoy-geocaching-kids.html for examples and ideas.
4. Interview people in the field. Well, not necessarily in a field as such, but in your local town centre. The old-fashioned way, which is still fine of course, is to ask passers-by some questions and record their answers on a survey sheet. That’s useful for building up a data set you can manipulate and explore in a database or spreadsheet. However, a video or audio recording would be a great way of enriching the exercise. These days, even a mobile phone is good enough for recording perfectly acceptable video or audio.
5. Record interviews for a living history project. Similar to the foregoing item, this involves visiting, say, an elderly person’s day centre and asking the oldsters what the area was like when they were your age, or what it was like being a teenager during the war, and so on.
6. Live blogging. If you take the kids on a school trip, they could provide a running commentary via a live blog. If that’s a step too far, they can at least record notes on their handheld devices for working up into a blog post or article later.
7. The kids can use dataloggers to record rainfall, or changes in temperature say. The data can then be transferred to a desktop computer if necessary and the data analysed.
8. A more up-to-date version of that sort of thing is uploading data to the cloud and even using social networking to gather other people’s views and opinions. You may wish, for obvious reasons, to do that only with older students. A great example of educational social networking in science is http://www.ispot.org.uk/. This enables you take a photo of, say, a flower, upload it to the web, and ask: “Does anyone know what this is called?” A great way of sharing and collaborating with, potentially, thousands of other people.

Hopefully, this article has given you a few ideas to mull over. The interesting thing for me is that many of them are not even new ideas. But light and inexpensive modern handheld devices, combined with low storage costs, means that they are so much easier to do these days.

What are you waiting for?

We have joined forces with Microsoft to offer a range of mobile devices at fantastic discounts, have a look at our Shape the Future page to learn more!

Another 751 schools have applied to convert to academies (of which 471 are approved), and 257 sponsored academies are in development.

This brings the proportion of secondary schools which are now academies or in the process of becoming academies to 59%. The figure for primary schools is much lower with 89% of primary schools not yet applied for academy status.

The speed of conversion has slowed slightly in recent month, with the lowest number of academies converting this month in over two years.

At the latest Ofsted inspections, the majority of converted academies were either rated as ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’(36% and 50% respectively), but 13% required improvement and 1% (or 13 currently open converted academies) were even deemed ‘inadequate’.

In terms of sponsored academies, the largest sponsor is the Academies Enterprise Trust with 54 sponsored academies currently open, and a further 11 sponsored academies in development. This is followed by E-Act which currently sponsors 28 academies and has a further six in development, while the United Learning Trust sponsors 25 academies and also has seven in development. Looking at sponsors with a large number of academies yet to open, Navigate Academies Trust has 10 sponsored academies in development (in addition to the three already open), and the Oasis Community Learning Trust has eight academies in development (in addition to the 22 already open).

Please click here for a graphical summary of academy trends.

The delivery of learning resources via digital means is on a consistent upward trend.  Although our use of ebooks in UK schools is still in its infancy, demand is growing:

• Three quarters of students asked said they preferred reading on a tablet or an ereader[1].
• Alice Phillips, Girls’ Schools Association President Elect and Head of St. Catherine’s, Bramley, asked delegates at the GSA’s February 2013 conference, “If your current textbooks were made available in PDFs at the same quality and same prices as their physical counterparts, who would switch tomorrow?”. 75% of the delegates raised their hands.
• Teachers want to use content from trusted sources.

Today’s best ebook systems let you to do things you just can’t with physical books.

Early adopting schools are realising they can transform books into targeted intervention tools to raise attainment.

Specifically, they are finding they can:

• Afford to rent a rich range of ebooks for the month they’re teaching each topic and theme
• Easily allocate the right level of ebooks to each student’s reading level
• Provide anywhere, anytime access to those ebooks, so the learning continues at home

 Examples include:
Boy’s Literacy – affordably rent a rich range of engaging levelled boys’ ebooks, such as Boffin Boy, delivered through exciting technology devices, to get boys reading.
Transition – students arrive in Year 7 with very different literacy levels: assign appropriate levelled reading for their ability without the peer stigma of coloured book stickers.
EAL – target appropriate level content to accelerate literacy and confidence of your English as an additional language students, both in class and at home.
Flipped learning – learn the content at home, discuss and debate it in class; all so much easier when teachers can simply allocate a range of ebooks that are accessible at home.
Motivating soarers – engage, challenge and stretch your gifted and talented students by putting books into the elibrary to encourage independent reading.
Project work – short-term rent ebooks for specific projects and theme-based learning in Primary and Key Stage 3 competency based curricula, e.g. Year 8 ‘Water’ project.

 “I would read more if I could read on a computer,”
Student, St Nicholas CE Primary School, Wantage

 What are the other benefits of ebooks for schools?

• Always having a pristine copy – no graffiti, no missing pages.
• Always having the most up-to-date book – keep pace with curriculum change.
• Access all books through a single, internet-enabled device rather than carrying heavy bags.
• Increased student engagement – help foster the love of reading, especially with those who are a little reluctant to pick up a book.

Where to start?

However, adopting ebooks can seem like a headache you don’t have time for. Which solution should you use? Where do you start?

When looking at an ebook system we suggest you consider:

• Is it a better educational tool than paper books? Can you use the ebook system to target interventions to raise attainment? E.g. by easily pushing books out by pupil reading level, by being affordable enough to offer a breadth of ebooks for each topic, by allowing easy access outside school, and by not being tied to a particular device.
• Upfront costs – does the platform require an upfront subscription? Will it be used? Will you get a good return on your investment? Look for platforms that don’t require a large investment, let you trial them for free and have a pay-as-you-use model so you’re confident you’re getting results from your spend.
• Flexible licences – has the supplier considered the way books are used in schools – classroom textbooks, support project topic work, target short-term inventions, and in the library. Can you use the same platform for all types of use?
• Management – can you easily manage users and devices? Being able to assign books to individuals and groups of students is essential to the right books being used at the right time.
• Devices – does the platform work across multiple devices? Many schools will want students to access content from home; will it work with whatever device that parent has?

 “RM Books is really cool, I read for two hours a night!”
Student, Coombe Dean School, Plymouth.

 Is there such a platform out there?

RM Books is the first ebook solution that has been specifically designed for schools. It transforms books into targeted intervention tools for teachers to use to raise attainment with different ability groups. It’s free to use and provides anywhere, anytime access to the latest etextbooks and ebook novels from any device with an internet connection, with offline reading options for windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Create your free RM Books account today and begin your ebook revolution.
Register: www.rmbookshelf.com

Well, I am not going to attempt to give you a definitive list of must-have apps, because that would be a whole book in itself! In a related post I’ve suggested 11 apps that I’d recommend you consider, and if you read that article you will note that I have very carefully selected mainly generic apps.

The reason is simple: the ‘best’ set of apps will depend on factors such as the age range you teach, your budget, where you’re located and, therefore, the curriculum you follow, whether your pupils have particular special educational needs, and so on.

So, you are left to your own devices: looking in apps stores, looking at “X best apps” articles on the web, and keeping your ear to the ground on Twitter and other social networks  to find out what others are recommending. But that is all pretty time-consuming, and you would still have to go through some evaluating process before recommending that all one thousand (or whatever) tablets in your school have those apps installed. What can you do?

The first thing to do is get back to basics. If you cut to the chase, apps are only any use if they either enhance learning or enhance teaching in some way. That is the bottom line. It’s easy to forget that, because so many apps are incredibly clever: it’s very easy to get carried away by all the bells and whistles. The best defence against that is the “so what?” question. After all, that is what an Ofsted inspector will be asking themselves in your lesson.

Put that way, you can see that the criteria by which you might evaluate apps are not too different to those you’d apply to any other resource, eg:

• Is it easy to use?
• Can it stretch the pupils?
• Can you customise it to better suit your pupils?
• Is it readable on the screen?

There are some technical questions too, such as:

• Can it be deployed easily, ie en masse?
• Are there any age restriction limits?
• Is it virus-free?

This is by no means a definitive list, of course, and you will find other criteria in my article at http://bit.ly/23factors.

If you wish to take a more sophisticated approach which also has a practical element t it, you could try evaluating apps according to how well they address the aspects of Bloom’s Taxonomy. There is a very good example of that approach here: http://langwitches.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Bloom-iPads-Apps.jpg.  Why not check out the apps there for a start? If you work with colleagues, you could divide the Bloom’s strands between you, and search for a few UK-oriented apps which will be suitable.

Talking of colleagues, there are two resources which are absolutely crucial: other teachers, and your pupils. You don’t have to do all the work yourself! One approach, for example, is to allow teachers to buy, download and install the apps they like, at least up to a limit. This was an approach taken by Harrogate Grammar School (see http://edfutures.net/Harrogate_Grammar_School for a case study). After all, each teacher will have their own ways of working, and they can tell you, and other colleagues, which apps they find most useful.

And, of course, there are the pupils. If they are old enough to be using a tablet at home, why not ask them which apps they use for school work – and how they use them? You might even wish to set up a competition for the best suggestions/ You may receive loads of brilliant recommendations for the cost of the prize of a book token – or a decent app!

As well as the plays themselves RM Books offers a number of companion titles to help students get the most out of their Shakespearean studies. From as little as £2.40 for a year’s rental, the Globe Education Shakespeare Series from Hodder Education and Shakespeare’s Tragedies from Education Britannica (£2.65 for a 30 day rental) provide excellent additional resources to support and extend learning.

Alan Hodgin, Head of RM Books, attended the launch of Shakespeare Week (sadly, Education Secretary Michael Gove was a no-show but the event went ahead nonetheless), “The learning resources developed for Shakespeare Week are fantastic for primary school children.  When it’s time to move on the plays themselves, RM Books offers a free and easy way to access them.  We know most children prefer to read on a device and with RM Books they can access great literature from the 16^th century in the way that suits children of the 21^st.”

For more information and to register, please visit www.rmbookshelf.com

• Cyberbullying
• Taking inappropriate photographs.
• Sexting.
• Accessing inappropriate websites.
• Intellectual Property Rights issues
• Data Protection issues
• Personal safety issues.

None of these are the exclusive province of mobile devices. However, mobile devices present some unique challenges for a couple of reasons.

First, the smaller the device, the harder it is to tell from a distance (such as from the front of the class to the back of the class) if the device is being used appropriately. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be at a distance. In one school I was told about a girl was texting her friends under her teachers’ noses almost by hiding the phone on her knee, under her skirt.

Second, if the device is 3G- or 4G-enabled, it is possible for pupils to completely circumvent the school’s wireless and filtering systems. It is, theoretically, possible to block the mobile data networks over an area to include the school. Unfortunately, it also happens to be illegal.

Now, before throwing up our hands in horror and saying “We are doomed, we are doomed!”, let’s get a little perspective on this. Not every pupil in your school is likely to be wanting to put their device to as much nefarious use as possible. In fact, a report by UNESCO last year stated:

“… it is important to review them [statistics on how phones have been used for cyberbullying etc] in the context of similar behaviour that is happening offline or via other ICT, rather than simply condemning mobile devices as unsafe. Online behaviour usually mirrors offline behaviour in the physical world, and children at risk of abuse in the real world are at risk in the virtual world.”

“Mobile Learning and Policies: Key Issues to consider” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002176/217638E.pdf

Obviously, though, you can’t simply do nothing: schools, and individual teachers, have a duty of care to ensure that pupils are safe. Here are some ideas to consider, bearing in mind that I am not a legal expert so the usual sort of disclaimer applies!

Undertake a risk analysis

This is an excellent starting point, and one which can involve not only teachers but your ICT technicians, the pupils themselves and, crucially, their parents. What it involves, in a nutshell, is identifying what the risks are, trying to gauge how likely they are to materialise, judging how serious would be the consequences if they did happen, and then deciding how to mitigate against the risks. There’s a good article about this here: http://www.esafety-adviser.com/blog/e-safety-and-risk-assessment/.

It’s good to talk

It’s a good idea to talk to the pupils themselves about the sort of standards of behaviour you expect from them. You have no doubt already done so, of course, and probably have an Acceptable Use Policy. One approach that an increasing number of schools are taking is to adopt what is called a Responsible Use Policy. This puts the onus on the pupil to act appropriately, rather than  the top-down approach of the traditional AUP. Indeed, some schools have gone so far as to ask the pupils to draft it, or at least to contribute their thoughts to it.

Whichever approach you adopt, the AUP or RUP will make it clear to pupils that there will be consequences of behaving badly. However, the response should be proportionate, and the ‘offence’, depending on what it is, could perhaps be used as a ‘teachable point’.

Filtering and monitoring are important

It goes without saying that you should have a filtering system in place. It would be a brave school indeed that decided against having one. However, it is equally important to enable teachers to have some flexibility, and perhaps even be able to override certain aspects of the system when necessary. For instance, not all of YouTube is bad, and even FaceBook has something to offer in terms of teaching about using social networking properly and setting up a business ‘shop front’ using the Pages facility.

Depending on what devices are used and how they are managed, it may not always be possible to link a particular device to a particular pupil (“someone borrowed my tablet, Sir!”) – but that is no reason to give up on the idea of monitoring altogether.

Inappropriate behaviour is not simply an e-safety issue

This is important to bear in mind. As one teacher I spoke to said, when kids are up to mischief, they give off signs. Basically, you can usually read a guilty expression or shifty body language. It’s not just about the technology.

E-safety is not just an ICT issue

Cyberbullying, to take one of the issues mentioned earlier, is bullying with or through a digital device or context. It is still bullying, and dealing with it should be embedded in the school’s behaviour policy.

Similarly, sexting is likely to involve child protection issues, so the school’s Child Protection Officer needs to have appropriate training, as does the school counsellor, if there is one.

Procedures and processes are vital

One thing that is absolutely crucial is that there must be an agreed set of procedures and processes to follow should an incident, especially a major incident, occur. In extreme cases, making it up as you go along could even lead to legal difficulties later.

There are four other safety-related issues which ought to be mentioned. These are as follows.

Data Protection

This is a matter for school management rather than pupils, and relates to where data is being stored. A very useful document is the Information Commissioner Office’s Guidance on the use of cloud computing

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/topic_guides/online/cloud_computing.aspx.

Intellectual Property Rights

This is an issue which comes from using the web, rather than mobile devices per se. Put simply, pupils (and staff) need to be aware that using other people’s pictures and so on may be a breach of copyright unless permission to copy is given in a licence (eg a Creative Commons licence).

Privacy matters

Taking photos and videos of people in a public place is easy, and publishing them online may be OK if certain conditions are met. For example, crowd scenes would likely be fine, but a close-up of one or two people probably would not be. In any case, how would you feel if you suddenly came across a video of yourself on a website without anyone having had the decency to ask your permission to do so?

Will my child be mugged?

This is a common area of concern for parents, worried that as soon as word gets out that the kids are getting shiny new tablets or netbooks, the local muggers will come out in force. The sorts of security measures that schools adopt include:

• Making the devices look unattractive
• Security-marking the devices
• Setting up a system whereby the device becomes useless once a particular command is issued
• Making sure that the bags used to carry home the devices are not obviously laptop bags
• Keeping the devices safely in school and not allow them home (though you may wish to ameliorate the effects of this by establishing homework clubs where pupils can work on their devices after school has finished for the day).

None of this is a walk in the park, but there are plenty of places you can go to for advice and guidance. In the first instance, have a look at the ones listed below.

This article has looked at some, though not all, of the issues associated with e-safety But do remember all the potential benefits of having a one-to-one device programme. It is not all doom and gloom!

If you would like to investigate more detailed E-safety options RM offer a wide range of products, consultancy options and training!

Further information and resources

The Information Commissioner’s Office, for guidance on data protection, privacy and copyright issues: http://www.ico.gov.uk/

The South-West Grid for Learning: http://www.swgfl.org.uk/Staying-Safe/For-Schools/Resources

The London Grid for Learning: http://www.lgfl.net/esafety/Pages/policies-acceptable-use.aspx

Ofsted: The safe use of new technologies: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/safe-use-of-new-technologies and Inspecting e-safety: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/briefings-and-information-for-use-during-inspections-of-maintained-schools-and-academies

Think U Know – Staying Safe Online: http://ceop.police.uk/#panel-5

Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft, commented that:

“The school continues to show its commitment to narrowing the attainment gap through the creative use of one-to-one devices to raise aspirations not just for the pupils but also engaging the wider family group. It has been astonishing to see the difference the devices have made to the school’s relationship with their students and their families.”

But you don’t have to take Steve’s word for it. The children themselves say the same thing, in their own way. I spoke to a group of Year 6 pupils (10-11 year-olds), and they made comments like:

“My parents love it, because it makes me want to learn!” and

“My parents and brothers and sisters like me taking the device home because it means they can help me with my work.”

Parental engagement is high on many schools’ agenda, but is notoriously difficult to achieve. It takes a lot of effort by the school, and there are no short-cuts. There is a big difference between informing parents and engaging them, of course. The reason the one-to-one programme at Victoria Park has gone down so well with parents is probably that the device makes it possible for parents and siblings to become actively involved with the child’s education.

The programme has had benefits in terms of pupil progress. This has been measured not just in general, anecdotal terms – one girl told me that she had jumped from a level 4a in maths to a 5b over two terms – but statistically according to Ofsted criteria. For example, the school’s 2013 tracking shows that a group of disadvantaged pupils in Year 6 are just 0.16 Average Points Score (APS) behind national expectations (25.5) in English and Maths, compared with 0.8 for the rest of cohort.

Unpicking the causes of the impressive improvements is not entirely easy, because the school has undertaken several courses of action at more or less the same time. For example, it has:

• Given tablets to 120 disadvantaged pupils in Years 5 and 6. The pupils use these for doing research, and organising their notes in OneNote, and being creative with SongSmith and PhotoSynth;
• Placed a very strong emphasis on pupil self-reliance and peer collaboration;
• Introduced a new curriculum which is both flexible and creative;
• Introduced highly structured learning activities using a TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context) approach;
• Partnered with other organisations, such as the Real Ideas Organisation (RIO), in order to get the children learning in a real-world context;
• Early identification and intervention for children likely to start falling behind.

This is almost certainly one of those cases where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Any one of those approaches would have had a positive effect, but when they are all working together the results are quite astounding. As objective proof of this, note that the school went from Special Measures to Outstanding in just three years. Pretty good going, especially when you consider that nearly 70% of pupils do not speak English as their first language.

I found the children themselves to be as articulate as they are enthusiastic about the activities they enjoy at school, such when the whole school chartered a steam train on the Severn Valley Railway, or when they pretended to be Victorians and learnt how to make soap like our forebears did.

Victoria Park is a school in which economic hardship and other difficulties are challenges to be tackled rather than insuperable obstacles.

If you are interested in adopting 1:1 devices in your school, we have partnered with Microsoft to offer a range of fantastic devices at reduced cost with this goal specifically in mind. Take a look at our Shape The Future Project page to find out more.

We will be putting up new posts on the subject of 1:1 devices every day this week in conjunction with the Microsoft UK Schools Blog so please do stop by to read more!

A key reason is that each pupil has access to whatever they need at the time they need it, which makes it more possible to carve up the tasks involved in an activity. If, for example, the activity involves interviewing someone and taking photos of them and their surroundings, having a multi-purpose personal device means that a pupil can switch very easily and very quickly from one kind of activity to another. It sounds mundane, even trivial, but it means that a member of the group can say to the others, “Look, I’ll just go and do some background research now, while you record a video interview with the subject”.

It’s harder to be that flexible if the teacher has sent everyone out in pairs or small groups armed with pocket camcorders, and has booked the computer suite or laptop trolley for the next lesson so they can edit their work.  That is not to say that flexibility and collaboration are not possible without each pupil having their own device. After all, in the dim and distant past when schools viewed as progressive had one (and sometimes even two!) computes in each classroom, work would be planned well in advance and rotas drawn up. The big difference now is that everyone can respond to situations much more quickly, you can make more spur-of-the-moment decisions. There is room for serendipity.

So what sort of activities does one device per child allow? Here is a list of possibilities, and it is by no means exhaustive.

Digital story-telling

There are several different roles involved in digital story-telling: photography, perhaps finding or even creating music, writing a script, and editing. Having a device each means that the pupils can try things out ‘on the fly’, ask the others in the group what they think, and share resources.

The idea of different roles applies to other forms of communication as well: making a class news programme, for example, or a group podcast.

Sharing work on the class whiteboard

With the right app, you can present what is on your tablet to the whole class on the interactive whiteboard. Look, for example, at ReflectorApp, which lets people ‘broadcast’ their iPad to a computer  and, from there, to the whiteboard. Another handy app is Jot, which lets people share their drawings and musings in real-time over the internet. There are similar apps for Android devices too: just do a search for “collaboration apps” or similar, and you’ll find a plethora of options to consider.

Sharing with each other and with the teacher – and with yourself

If everyone in the class has a device, sharing becomes that much easier. Imagine, for example, that you and I are working on a project together. I do some research and send you a link to a great website I just found. You pick it up immediately, and we have a chat about it. Again, this is trivial, and happens all the time with or without personal devices. But it has happened there and then. We didn’t have to go through the usual palaver of my saying to you “I’ve just sent you a link”, and your responding by saying “Thanks, I’ll pick it up when I’m back at my computer.”

Sharing can be done via apps like Dropbox, and by email. With the right set-up, pupils can share their work via the class Apple TV. In an English lesson I attended in one school, the teacher asked the pairs of students working together to share their findings with a designated pair of students, so they could comment on each other’s work.

With apps like Evernote, you can take some notes or save links on your tablet device, continue to annotate them on the way home, and then continue with it on your home computer. You don’t have to email stuff to yourself any more, just store it in the cloud.

Assessment for learning made easy

Several examples of AfL have been given already, but you can also obtain apps that will make it easy to practise. One which keeps coming up in discussions and on websites is Socrative, which enables you to set quizzes for pupils to answer using a student response or ‘voting’ system. You could set a quick test at the start of the lesson to gain a quick idea of what the students know, or what they remember from last time.

Conclusion

As I’ve indicated several times,  not all activities that a one-to-one device programme makes possible have to be earth-shattering. But if you think about it, it is often the trivial things going wrong, or at least being a hassle, that prevents exciting stuff from happening. When each pupil has a device, lots of barriers or hurdles simply disappear.

Like all innovations, this one is probably largely at the stage where it makes it easier to do what teachers and students already do. In the future, there are bound to be apps designed to work with several devices at once in real-time, ie ones designed for classes rather than individuals. Then I think we will see things really begin to take off!

If you are interested in adopting 1:1 devices in your school, we have partnered with Microsoft to offer a range of fantastic devices at reduced cost with this goal specifically in mind. Take a look at our Shape The Future Project page to find out more.

We will be putting up new posts on the subject of 1:1 devices every day this week in conjunction with the Microsoft UK Schools Blog so please do stop by to read more!

It’s a great starting point for any school considering or enhancing their 1:1 learning program, and it allows you to see the diversity of Microsoft software and devices applied to learning.

We will also demonstrate how Windows 8 applies to learning and how it can be used to inspire students and improve educational outcomes. The course is available free of charge to any school that registers and has their course delivered by Friday 31^st May 2013.

In the seminar you will:

• See rich curriculum samples and global examples of best practices that demonstrate how technology can enhance teaching, learning, and assessment for students.
• Understand how technology and devices enable consumption, creation, and collaboration for students, educators, and parents.
• Learn how different devices can bring learning to life in a range of scenarios.
• See how students can continue learning where they left off – at home, in the library, or at the park.
• Discover how students can organize their learning, take notes, and become highly efficient in the way they study.
• Learn where to get free tools that spark imagination and inspire learning.

Guided by a qualified RM Education Consultant, these two-hour sessions can be held at your school at a time that suits you and your teaching staff.

If you are interested, complete our short online form and we will then get in touch to discuss a suitable date and time for your seminar at your school.

Yes, please register me for a free training seminar on Windows in the classroom!

We look forward to hearing from you.

Where do you stand on ebooks?  Whether you are a devotee or a refusenik there is growing evidence to suggest that both teachers and students are keen to make the switch to digital content.  In this post we share two recent events that point towards a future of ebooks.

•  Girls’ Schools Association votes for digital

David Brooks, RM’s CEO, spoke at the recent Girls’ Schools Association conference of deputy head teachers and senior leaders. Alice Phillips, GSA President Elect and Head of St. Catherine’s, Bramley asked delegates, “If your current textbooks were made available in PDFs at the same quality and same prices as their physical counterparts, who would switch tomorrow?”. Over 75% of the delegates in the room raised their hands.

“Students increasingly expect to be able to access learning materials via digital means. We must keep pace with their expectations to keep them engaged, which means embracing digital learning resources,” said Alice Phillips, GSA President Elect. She continued, “What our research, and particularly our conference, has revealed is that our members would happily make the shift to digital if it was made cost-effective, easy to access and robust.  It’s down to companies like RM and publishers to make this happen.”

For the full story click here.

• Why children prefer reading on a tablet….

Even if you’d rather curl up with a nice tatty paperback, your students may well prefer something a little more high tech. We had sixty primary school pupils visit our interactive learning centre for World Book Day and I interviewed them to find out whether they prefer reading with a book or a tablet.  As well as a very entertaining rendition of Gangnam Style and lots of giggling at seeing themselves ‘on tv’ (we’d rigged up a visualiser so they could see themselves on screen while they were being interviewed) they provided some interesting insights.

Over three quarters of the children I spoke to said they prefer reading on a tablet.  When I asked them why, it came down to enhanced functionality and how they interact with the device.

Several children said the ability to enlarge the text helped them to read:

 “I like tablets because if the text is really midgey [small] you can make it bigger.

Many said that it was ‘easier’ to read on a tablet because you can turn the pages simply by swiping the screen or pressing a button:

“You can just swish the pages and they turn so it’s better and makes it easier to read.”

They also liked the multifunctionality of a tablet – that once you’re done reading you can move on to a game or another form of entertainment.

“A book’s just a book – a computer can be anything.”

To find out about RM Books – the ebook solution for schools, click here.