OllieBray.com

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (6of10) – The New Horizons Project

This is the sixth in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

Over the years I’ve read various bits of work from Futurelab and have even been interviewed a couple of times. Sarah Payton, from Futurelab, led the facilitation of the second day of the European Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum. During her presentation Sarah was talking about the Enquiring Minds Project.

I was really interested in this for a number of reasons first of all it sounded very like our East Lothian Extreme Learning Project that I was involved in a few years ago (maybe an idea ahead of its time?) and also Sarah sold the idea, the thinking, the research and the tools behind the project really well.

According to Sarah this was her favourite tweet of the conference, ‘Sarah Payton from Futurelab introducing herself and showing us a picture of a goat!’

Seriously though, what a great introduction. By showing a picture of herself at school visiting a local farm and feeding a goat. She had instantly captured the imagination of the audience. Very few of us remember tests we took at school but we all remember the extra curricular activities and interesting real life learning experiences.

Unfortunately, in the UK it’s still mostly the test results that get you the jobs and the system continues to cut the extra curricular and exciting activities. I think this may eventually lead to some people having a really negative, perhaps even fearful, experience of school?

Anyway, so what is Enquiring Minds? (from their website)

Enquiring Minds is...

• a response to the challenges schools face in the task of preparing children for a future characterised by rapid social, technological and cultural change
• a distinctive approach to teaching and learning that takes seriously the knowledge, ideas, interests and skills that students bring into schools
• a set of principles to underpin relationships between adults and children in schools and classrooms, which see children taking increasing responsibility for determining the content and purpose of their learning
• a set of print and digital tools to support teachers and school leaders to implement, adapt and explore Enquiring Minds approaches
• a three-year programme of research testing these approaches, principles and resources in UK schools.

Enquiring Minds is not...

• a new name for thinking skills or learning to learn approaches
• a return to the child-centred permissive education of the 1970s
• a special programme for gifted and talented or disaffected children.

Or as Sarah described it,

‘it’s about children coming to school and not taking off their backpack of knowledge - instead teachers help children up-pack their backpack [knowledge]'

So how does it work? It’s very simple - but as I’ve always said it’s the simple ideas that change things and have real impact!

Basically children pick a topic or a place and research it through the eyes of different minds. For example they might pick Vienna and think about questions to answer about Vienna through the eyes of a scientist, geographer, mathematician, politician, tourist etc...

Tools to help children do this were developed through Exploreatree (http://www.exploratree.org.uk/) this is a free resource that anyone globally can use or tap into. Its very self explanatory so clicks on the link and have a play around.

Children that took part in the initial pilot enquiring minds projects commented on their freedom to think, how the work opened their minds, promoted positive skills and most importantly, for me, changed the relationship with the classroom teacher. You can find out more about the project here.

Next Sarah set us a task about 'what does a 21^st Century Learner need?'. We had to share our ideas and feed back to other groups in the hall. I forgot to mention that I was working with a great bunch of Scandinavians! Here’s James Kent presenting his groups thoughts back to our group.

Finally, we were set a group talk to use the enquiring minds methodology to work in small groups to research and explore Vienna. Stuart Ball (or was it Bell?) from Microsoft UK gave the audience an overview of some of the technology they might choose to use. As always Stuart encourages people to be as creative as possible and always backs up his arguments with, ‘children would love doing that!’.

He showcased the Davitt Random Activity Generator and talked about other new technologies such as Deep Zoom and Photosynth.

I’ll talk more about how we got on with Sarah’s challenge in my next post.

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (5of10) – Recharge the Batteries

This is the fifth in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

For me, one of the highlights of the presentations at last week at the European Innovative Teaching Awards was Dan Roberts ‘Recharge the Battery’ Keynote presentation. Dan has a uniquely laid back presentation style but comes across so passionately in his performance.

Dan is a previous Innovative Teacher European and Worldwide Winner for his project and was also part of the UK contingent in Vienna. Dan and I instantly hit it off and I can’t help thinking that we both share the same education philosophy that of often summarise as one of my presentation slides (show below). ‘Sometimes it’s a lot easier to apologise than gain permission!’ 

Dan is currently Assistant Head Teacher at Saltash.net Community College. The school has specialist college status in ICT and I think the schools commitment to this is summarised in their name change. Dan was quick to point this out during his presentation and was also keen to share his own personal learning journey in a really honest and down-to-earth way.

Dan showed the Saltash.net logo and explained that all of the primary schools that feed into Saltash.net are reflected in the logo. I thought this was a great idea and something I wish I had thought of while trying to create and re-represent the Musselburgh Learning Community over the previous two years.

Next Dan moved on to talk about his project. You see one of the unique things about Saltash.net is that it’s an ICT college and really embraces traditional values and one of these values is that it keeps its own livestock. This initially started off with pigs but now also includes chickens. You can watch the pigs and chickens live at any time via the schools pig and egg cam! YouTube Video of the pigs below.

During his keynote Dan linked live to some of the children at Saltash.net and there was an opportunity to ask them questions about how having the animals at the school helped them with their learning. The children were real ambassador to the school and spoke clearly about how the school farm made ‘learning real’.

The chickens kept at the school came from a project devised by the students where they wanted to learn more about battery and non-battery farmed hens. One of the children had suggested to Mt Roberts that they buy some rescue chickens and look after them at the school. Dan agreed and the class purchased 6 chickens for £3 (50pence each!) all of the chickens would have otherwise just been slaughtered.

The class then carried out investigative work on battery and non-battery farming. They worked with Dan to co-create the curriculum, decided how they wanted to learn and designed their own assessment criteria. (If this project was in Scotland it would be being held up as an example of A Curriculum for Excellence in action!).

Next we heard about ‘Stevie Cooper’ the school chicken expert. Stevie’s 12 and wasn’t always that interested in school. But he loved the chickens and started to make his own educational videos on a mobile phone talking about them. The videos were hosted on the school website and other video sharing sites. In fact Stevie’s videos were so successful that he started to accept and answer emails from members of the wider school community.

Dan wrapped up his keynote by going live back to the school to speak to the headteacher and depute head about the schools ICT strategy. They have done some impressive stuff. I whole school ICT Conference on a Saturday where over 40 staff turned up, embedding the format of the Virtual Classroom Tour as a model of continuous professional development and introducing the European Pedagogical ICT License for students.

Overall this was an impressive keynote and a school that I hope to get the opportunity to visit sometime over the next two years.

MGS Guitar Hero Project gets write up in Scotsman

A nice write up in today’s Scotsman about our Musselburgh Cluster Guitar hero project. You can read the full article here: http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Award-is-music-to-ears.5120017.jp

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (4of10) – The Climate Mystery

This is the fourth in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

The second keynote of the conference was delivered by Christian Fonnesbech (Director of Congin ApS). It was titled the climate Mystery – dramatic learning & entertainment

The Climate Mystery is an on-line learning game that is about mixing education with entertainment - it's free to schools and is a new type of ‘edutainment’. It’s not the first time that Microsoft has invested in edutainment our Scottish Partners in Learning Small Business Game project is a good example of this. 

The Small Business Game (www.sport4life.biz) is an educational game where you run your own football franchise store (The Sports Store). The game is linked to the Scottish school curriculum and designed to teach you enterprise skills. It’s definitely worth having a look if you have not seen it!

Anyway, the climate mystery is a new type of game and takes the levels of interactivity further than the Small Business Game. It’s been developed by Congin (an Austrian Company) and one of the things that I liked about Christian’s explanation of the game was when he said, ‘how do we keep children’s attention? – simple, stories remain as motivating as ever!’ I have always been a strong believer that the power of the narrative and the strength of the mystery will always remain very captivating for young people.

So what is the Climate Mystery? Basically, it’s an on-line documentary that children and adults can watch. The idea is that episodes are released over a number of weeks and viewers get more and more absorbed into the story. There is also an opportunity for viewers to interact with the characters and further interact by playing simple on-line games.

An on-line community also supports the Climate Mystery and there are opportunities for people to interact, ask questions and play games. As the story progresses the community has to make more and more decisions to support each other but to also understand the effects of climate and change and ultimately save the world!

I really liked the sound of this and I hope that the marketing for this great free resource will be really good in order to get as many schools involved as possible.

For more information about the Climate Mystery visit the site (www.climatemystery.com) and register a note of interest. Teachers can also email: climatemystery@congin.com for more information.

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (3of10) – Franz Kuehmayer: The Future of Education

 

This is the third in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

The first keynote was from Franz Kuehmayer from Reflections, Research and Consulting. Franz was a good speaker to get the proceeding rolling. I felt that a lot of early quotes from his presentation came from the work that has been done by Karl Fish on the Shifthappens presentation. But still Franz had me captivated. He said a couple of really important things that I liked including,

'Teachers do not just help children prepare for the future - they help children shape the future'

And, despite Franz getting Batman and Spiderman mixed up he really made me re-think and intellectually re-visit some of the work from Friedman the author of the ‘The World is Flat’ and most recently, ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’ (the latter of which I really enjoyed).

I liked his continued references to,

‘education being stuck in the industrial age while the rest of the world has moved on to the information age’.

I thought it was very interesting when he referenced Europe as being a clear winner in globalization but questioned how we could continue to be a winner. It was interesting to find out that China now sources some of their labour to Africa – what a basis for a geography unit!

Then, for me, things started to get really interesting and very refreshing. Franz stated,

' education is about transferring knowledge. But it’s also about transferring values and innovation'

He mentioned Social Entrepreneurship, a subject very close to my own heart (see my C-Project work). I realised that we were both speaking the same language.

Next followed an analogy of Lisa Simpson. In the Simpsons Cartoon Lisa is a very talented and intellectual girl. But Franz argued, beautifully, that Lisa would not survive and reach her potential in the 21^st Century world.

Bearing in mind, Lisa is a fictional character, it was a fascinating argument. He suggested that she might get the wrong advice from her parents, no-one noticed her at school, that playing the saxophone was unlikely to get her a job and Springfield simply wasn’t important enough. Although Franz didn’t explicitly say it I would like to think he was hinting towards the impotent role of responsible parenting and early intervention within a child’s development.

He summed up his argument by saying, 'modern education systems must embrace the talent and creativity of the entire population’. I would also add the word ‘recognise’ to this statement – far too many schools don’t recognise true talent just because children don’t get tested on it.

Next, Kuehmayer moved onto school architecture stating that, ‘A school of the future is not a fascinating building... but it has to create fascinating pupils’. I loved that idea – I’m a futurist and an optimist and I think schools should look very different in 20 years time this may mean that many of them might not have walls. But they still have to create interesting, fascinating, creative and employable people.

I also liked his next quote, ‘Students should not be recipients of information they should be information partners and explorers!’  As I tweeted this I received a reply from mwclarkson he replied, ‘The danger is you produce a generation of children who are not prepared to accept “anything” they are told.’ Mark is of course right and despite a quick discussion on the twitter conference back channel neither of us was any clearer how we might find a balance between these two ideals.

Franz moved onto social networking and games based technology. He mentioned the xBox (my ears perked up!) – ‘The xbox shouldn't be used to keep children quiet. It should be used for learning’. I immediately sent him an offer to come and look at my contribution to the European Innovative teachers Forum!

Next, some statistics about social networking, society and employment. Franz comparing playing World of Warcraft to remote project management and unified communication. He stated that, '35% of parents can put on Internet filters on home PC’s – 63% of children know how to bypass these controls.’ and then emphasised the role of responsible use.

I just wish I could have had a chance to have a beer with Franz. I think that he would have been interested on my on Social Entrepreneurship work, Internet Safety and Responsible Use Initiative and of course my work on Computer Games Based Learning Work.

Unfortunately, Franz had to quickly rush away from the conference. BUT he almost immediately contacted me via twitter after he had finished his keynote to thank me for live tweeting his talk and then he even started following me.

For me this is another example of how professionals can continue their discussion after the ‘traditional’ conference is over. I’m also confident that Franz will pick up on this blog post via Google alerts, his RSS reader or other conference feed. So I would just like to say, ‘Franz I enjoyed your presentation and you gave me loads to think about!’

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (2of10) – The Exhibition

 

This is the second in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

Every country and every project represented at the forum had a display space that they had to occupy. Most of the posters were of really high quality and I was really impressed with the quality of so much of the work. I am also really grateful for Stephen Walker who helped create the final vision for our Scottish entry – it is truly impressive (see below) and turned a few heads!

It’s difficult to define ‘innovation’. In the UK we have invested heavily in ICT for schools and business. For me a really innovative project in ICT has to involve minimal cost, minimal or easily accessible training for staff and can be scaled up on a local or national scale. On reflection, I hope that this was one of the things that impressed the judges about our project.

You can view all of the award winning VCT’s within the UK Innovative Teachers Forum. You have to joint the forum, but it’s free.

Below are some of the pictures of the exhibition so you can get an idea of the variety of the work. The pictures were taken by one of the Norwegian teachers – there aren’t any of the UK posters. But I’ll try to get them up online as soon as I can.

West Lothian Curriculum for Excellence Sharing Good Practice Event

 

Following my longest ever commute to work. (Got up in Vienna at 4.45am, taxi to train station, train to airport, flight to London, flight to Edinburgh, bus to car, drive to Livingston - I finally arrived at the conference venue a whole hour before my presentation was due to start.)

Jenny MacNair (Whitecraig Primary School) and I had been asked by Veronica Brunton (our East Lothian Curriculum for Excellence Development Officer) to present on some of the work we had been doing in the Musselburgh Cluster on Games Based Learning.

We concentrated on some of the philosophy behind computer games in education, web-based computer games for home learning and our Guitar Hero Transition Project. I also briefly spoke about some of the work we have been doing with Nintendo DS’s in maths and modern foreign languages.

The slides that we used in Fridays presentation are embedded below:

Guitar Hero Transition in East Lothian

View more presentations from olliebray.

 

 

We also referred to the following links:

Autocollage – A great way to make fantastic pictures from Microsoft Live Labs.

Some examples of web based games that can be used for home learning:

• Classic Sim City – Useful for teaching about towns, cities and settlement.
• Ordnance Survey Map Games – Good for homework.
• Fantasy Famer – Manage a farm for a year
• Stop Disasters Simulator – Can you protect the world against floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and other nasty stuff?
• Sim Sweat Shop – What is it really like working in a sweat shop in a less economically developed country?
• An idea for setting web based games for homework activities

Games Based Learning to help Transition between Primary to Secondary Education:

• The Musselburgh Grammar School Guitar Hero Transition Project – Background Information and Timeline
• MGS Guitar Hero Transition Project – Part Two: The Virtual Battle of the Bands
• Guitar Hero Showcase: I love it when a plan comes together!
• Musselburgh Guitar Hero Project Features in the Times Educational Supplement
• Cluster Project that plays to all talents.
• SLF 2008: Enriched Assessment for Enriched Enquiry
• Download lesson Guitar Hero Lesson Plans and other resources
  

In East Lothian we are rolling out this project to all P7 classes across the county. The 2009 version of the project will use Guitar Hero World Tour for the XBox. World Tour is particularly good as their is more than one instrument, which provides more choice of students. 

Other Links:

• I recently gave a more detailed presentation on Games Based Learning in Scottish Schools at the NAACE 2009 Strategic Conference. You can view the on-line handout and slides for this presentation here.

• Learning and Teaching Scotland Consolarium
• Learning and Teaching Scotland
• Ideas Network Scotland: Innovation and Development in Education

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (1of10) – The Journey to Vienna

This is the first in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

For me, the journey to Vienna started back in 2005 when I first joined the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Network. Back in 2005 I was Head of Geography at Dunbar Grammar School and I took part in the Microsoft / SQA Partners in Learning Initiative and developed the original GEOCASTS (geography podcasts) that are now hosted over on the Do-Be site. At the time I thought this was a very innovative project – in fact I developed some of the first educational Mp4 and Mp3 technology available on the web and we even at one stage got into the top 20 educational podcasts on iTunes.

The Microsoft Innovative Teachers network has been a key part of my personal learning network ever since then and I read with interest the US Innovative Teachers Newsletter as it drops into my inbox bi-monthly.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t think the Innovative Teachers Network the only professional learning community out there for teachers. In fact you can find me all over the web collaborating, sharing and borrowing ideas from people. I’m regularly found within Promethean Planet, TES Connect, Google Teacher Forums and Deputes Together. They all serve different purposes and some are better than others - but I’m a big believer that teachers should make use of any resources that are offered to them. Particularly if they are free.

As I’ve explained before since 2005, when I first started to really embrace web 2.0 and its opportunities for learning. I really have become a ‘nomadic learner’ moving between real places and virtual places ‘grazing’ on information and knowledge but most importantly working with other committed teachers and education professionals throughout the globe. 

When it was suggested that I submit our Games Based Learning Transition Project for the UK Innovative Teachers Forum. I jumped at the chance, as it was an opportunity to further share some of the great work going on in East Lothian but also an opportunity to meet some new teachers. Dan Roberts from Saltash.net and Stuart Ball from Microsoft were very encouraging about the project when I want to watch their presentation at BETT. Walter Patterson, who works on some of the Partners in Learning Projects in Scotland, was also instrumental in helping me shape my VCT and being a real critical friend.

Anyway, I submitted the VCT which fully credited all of the teachers from the Musselburgh Cluster and was delighted to be selected to go to Reading in February for the UK Innovative Teachers forum. I was then even more pleased to be one of the four teachers selected to go to the European Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

In Reading I had a good opportunity to see some great work from other UK finalists. I’ve written about my experience here so I won’t repeat myself. But I will say that other three projects that were selected to go to the European Forum really did stand out as being truly innovative.

I loved James Kent’s Asian Tsunami project particularly as he was one of the first educators in the UK that I had come across to effectively use Deep Zoom in the classroom. I also liked the way he had trained up some of the older children from Croseceliog Comprehensive School in Wales to act as peer coaches for his  OneNote to collaborate project work. I also liked the project because you could pick any theme or global event.

I also really liked Chris Henderson’s Interactive Revision. I thought it was a great idea to recreate his science classroom in Photosynth so the children could use it for revision purposes. In fact it’s what gave me the idea to recreate one of the CDT rooms at MGS and we have plans to re-create the whole department. I also liked the way that Chris had sued other new technologies to create engaging content for your people including bubbl.us, audacity and wordle. Again Chris’s project could be replicated by anyone within any subject area.

Mandeep Atwal’s project on Young Voices from Shirelands College was also one that I thought we could re-create within GLOW. Mandeep’s project used a sharepoint online virtual learning platform to increase religious, cultural awareness and sensitivity within the school and local community. The websites that the students created were available to be access by parents at home.  

It was a real pleasure to be with such talented teachers in Vienna last week and over the next year as I travel around Scotland I am going to be encouraging as many teachers as possible to get involved in on-line communities (including GLOW) and, if appropriate, submit VCT’s for next years UK Innovative Teachers Forum. I hope that next year we have a few more Scottish Teachers at the UK event.

European Innovative Teachers Forum gets mention on Teachers TV News

Our Musselburgh Games Based learning project gets a mention on Teachers TV News along with some of the other award winning projects that were showcased last week. Including Jeroen Staltiens 'Hollywood in de klas'.

 

(click to view movie)

‘According to a 2006 survey on ICT use in European schools, the UK was at the front with 60% of teachers having access, competence and motivation to use the internet and computers in classroom situations. The EU average was just 38%.’

It’s interesting to reflect on the above quote – often we complain about ICT provision in UK schools. But in comparison to a lot of areas in the world we are not that badly off. Yes there could be some things that are done better, lots of website that should be unblocked but for me its about empowering more teachers to use ICT in a creative and innovative way.

I often use the slide below in my presentations. We need more teachers to take risks!

MGS gets First Prize in European Innovative Teacher Awards!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft European Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna, Austria. More than 150 education policymakers and teachers from 40 countries across Europe attended the Vienna event, hosted by Microsoft, to share ideas, experiences and best practices on integrating technology and innovative teaching into the curriculum.

I had a fantastic week, I listened to some interesting presentations, I was enthused by some great people and won first prize for the Innovation in the Community Category.

This is a great achievement for the UK, particularly Scotland and East Lothian. I also hope that my contribution to the forum last week will start to impact globally on the creative ways that teachers should be using ICT to support learning and to build relationships with children.

My good friend Merlin John (make sure you subscribe to his website) was the first off the mark to get something published on-line and you can read his article here. There is also an official press release from Microsoft about the event here.

I was joined during the last week by the three other winners of the UK Innovative Teachers Forum. Mandeep Atwal (Mandeep also got a 3^rd place in the Innovation in the Community Category for her ‘Young Voices’ project), James Kent (Wales) and Chris Henderson (Saltash.net). They were all fantastic company during the week. The biggest problem is they all gave me so many ideas I don’t quite know where to start!

The UK Contingent was also accompanied by Kristen Weatherby and Stuart Ball, who are responsible for the Innovative Teachers programme in the UK. They have already started to blog about the event – I don’t quite no how they found the time? We were also joined by Sarah Payton and Elizbeth Goodman (from Futurelab) Sarah ran an excellent workshop on the Enquiring Minds Project – I’ll write separately about that and the work we completed.

Finally we were joined by Dan Roberts also from Saltash.net community Collage who delivered an excellent keynote presentations.

I’ll write up more detailed reflection of the event over the next few days. But I would like to publically thank everyone for their best wishes and support over the last week and for award!

In particular, I would like to tank all of the other teachers who were involved in the initial Musselburgh Guitar Hero Transition Project. You were all fully credited within the virtual classroom tour. I would also like to thank the Musselburgh Headteachers for agreeing to take the risk and East Lothian for having the vision to support the scaling up of the project to all 46 schools within the Authority. I can’t wait to be involved in the next stage of the projects evolution!

If your not already a member its free to joint your countries own Innovative Teacher Network.