OllieBray.com

Ofsted new arrangements for inspecting schools

Ofsted has announced its new arrangements for inspecting schools from January 2012 in response to developments in education policy and in anticipation of Parliament passing the Education Bill 2011.

Ofsted has stated its aim as being to focus more extensively on the quality of teaching when judging the quality of the school, with inspectors spending most of their time in classrooms.

Inspections will now focus on four areas:

1.    the achievement of pupils at the school

2.    the quality of teaching in the school

3.    the quality of leadership and management of the school

4.    the behaviour and safety of pupils at the school.

In reporting, inspectors must also consider:

• the pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development at the school

• the extent to which the education provided by the school meets the needs of the range of pupils at the school, and in particular the needs of disabled pupils and pupils who have special educational needs.

Other key reforms are that:

• Schools will be able to request an Ofsted inspection in addition to scheduled inspections and Ofsted will be able to charge for this.

• Schools will not have to fill in a Self Evaluation Form but schools self assessments will be taken into account in planning inspections and in assessing leadership.

• Schools judged to be Outstanding will be exempt from regular inspections (subject to Parliament passing the Education Bill)

• Schools judged to be good will be re-inspected within five years

• Additional inspections can be triggered for these schools by: a decline in parental confidence, concerns highlighted by the risk assessment process, safeguarding concerns, concerns raised by subject or thematic reports or other complaints.

• Schools with a notice to improve will be re-inspected between 12 and 16 months.

• Schools in special measures which have demonstrated sufficient improvement in its monitoring visits may be removed from that category, otherwise they will be re-inspected within 24-28 months.

You can read the new framework in full here:

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/draft-framework-for-school-inspection-january-2012

 

Source: SSAT Blog

#BETT 2011 - SQA wins 2011 BETT Award Games Based Learning Assessment

I didn’t get to the BETT Awards this year (I must have been to loud last year?). But I was delighted to hear that our colleagues at the SQA along with their industry partner ‘Learn TPM Ltd’ picked up one of the 2011 awards.

The award was for ICT Education Partnership for the work that they have done on Games Based Assessment Products for Skills for Work.

The judges comments were:

“The quality of entries this year has been consistently high, highlighting the tremendous vision of the ICT industry and its commitment to education. The BETT Awards judgements were achieved through lengthy analysis and detailed discussions.”

“The judges thought this was a clear winner because of its partnership working in achieving creative e-learning solutions. The submission showed collaboration in an exciting environment. They were impressed to see a Qualifications Authority treating gaming seriously.”

“The judges felt that this partnership and the resources they Create, bring course-assessment and learning into the twenty-first century.”

Well done SQA and Learn TPM Ltd – If your interested in the work that we are doing on Games Based Learning in Assessment in Scotland. You can find further details on the SQA Game Space Website.

 

Ubiquitous Mobile Computing at the Abilene University

I went to an interesting  talk on Thursday afternoon at the Department of Informatics and the University of Edinburgh. The talk was on the introduction of the iPhone / iPod Touch at the Abilene Christian University in Texas, USA.

Every student that goes in to the University gets given either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. This is bought for them from the University. The difference is that if you opt for an iPhone the individual student has to enter into an 18 month contract with the mobile phone operator (in the US this is AT&T). There have been nearly 2000 devices distributed to students of which 68% are iPhone and 32% are iPod Touches.

The university then provides resources for its students via  an interactive website that it optimized for the iPhone /iPod Touch. Lecturers and university professors also suggest and develop Apps that the students might want to download to help them with their learning. The results were quite staggering in terms of how much the students believed that the devices improved their learning and gave them confidence in class.


One of the big questions from the audience was on cost and how ever did the Abilene University afford such an initiative. It seems that the university made three very clever but significant cost savings in order to fund the initiative.

1. Cut back on open access computer suites

One of the things that the University did was cut back on the open access computer facilities that were available to students. Particularly the facilities that were available in dorm rooms (halls of residence).

After research they found that these facilities were not being used as much as they were in the past because 98% of students going to the university brought with them their own laptop. They also found that the biggest usage of the open access areas in the student accommodation was between 11pm – 3am when students were playing first person shooter games with each other!

By cutting back on and not refreshing these underused facilities they saved thousands.

2. Cut back on traditional telephone

Another significant saving was with telephone bills. As most university professors and a large proportion of students were now using the iPhone and as calls from one iPhone to another (in the States anyway) are free they effectively created a free telephone service across the campus. They also saved by not refreshing the telephone infrastructure within the University. Why would they bother – everyone has a mobile and there is a Skype App.

3. Photocopying

If everything available electronically as pdfs or as podcasts, savings on photocopying were significant.

iPhone Vs iPod Touch

One really interesting part of the study was how it seemed that the iPhone was the more successful device with the students.

This was possibility down to a number of reasons:

• Anytime, any place connectivity (and learning)

• Students felt more ownership over their phones (even though they were given them, they were still paying for them on the contract)

• Phones were nearly always brought to class and charged up where as the iPod touch was left at home more or not brought fully charged (students seemed to embrace the social connectivity of the phones more – eg: they needed their phones to stay connected to each other)

• Although it wasn’t mentioned I’m guessing that the phone also has a camera which can be used as powerful tool for learning.

Is the project iPhone / iPod Specific?

One other question from the audience was about platform and if the project completely relied on the iPhone / iPod touch. Although there were a number of university lectures (and students) who were developing Apps specifically for the Apple platform. The main resources produced by the university were all web based but optimized for the iPhone. This meant regardless of the device students could access the material in different ways.

It also means that if a more appropriate device comes along the University can easily migrate their content.

Overall a very interesting study that I would like to replicate in a school. You can find out more about what the university have done over on their website.

Should schools use Wikipedia?

At the recent Handheld Learning Festival 2009 I was talking about the use of Social Media in Schools. The session seemed to go well and generally has been quite well received.

One of the points from my presentation was that I felt that schools should have their own Wikipedia article about their school and the wider school community.

My argument for this was not only in itself does this present an opportunity for a fantastic cross-curricular project but it also can contribute to the positive ethos of a school. Many schools already have Wikipedia articles written about them and some of them present a negative picture of the learning community.

During my presentation this message was tweeted out by a few people in the audience and then in turn re-tweeted.

Bart Van B (A geography teacher from Belgium and @geobart on Twitter) took a bit of an exception to what I was suggesting and an interesting three way conversation occurred between Alan Parkinson, Bart  and myself.

I’ve documented the conversation to provide a bit of background by combining the tweets below:

Ollie: All schools should be written up on Wikipedia

Bart: I totally disagree on that matter. Wikipedia should only be used as a starting point, not as an actual reference.

Alan: Presumably Ollie Bray means that the students write the entry?

Bart: That's even worse (shivering at the mere thought of it). I think we should train examining and experimenting skills far more often than other children and even adults will copy and paste those mediocre entries in their presentation without questioning validity. We no longer allow students to use Wikipedia as a source at our geography department. Sorry, but 'wiki' and 'web 2.0' have become new hypes and there are apparently loads of lemmings on the premises following blindly.

Ollie: Yes, I was suggesting that schools should write there own Wikipedia entries...

Bart: I'm having serious questions about that. Maybe they should properly learn how to write. And will they just copy the entries from another source? And how will they be ever mature enough to discern true or valuable from rubbish? I'm so very scared this will be the ultimate rectification of the copy-and-paste mentality. I think writing an entry in a Wiki may be a form of presenting experiment results and conclusions though, but writing (filling up a wiki as a goal on itself is as useful/useless as making e.g. a powerpoint and sharing it.

Ollie: You have completely missed the point? I'll post a reply on my blog ASAP and I look forward to the debate from there...

Bart: Ok, I am very interested

So this is my reply - its a bit long but I hope that some readers will find it useful

First of all for the reasons that I’ve mentioned above I’m sticking to my point about schools having their own Wikipedia articles. The task presents a great opportunity for teachers to actually work with children to produce a good, well researched, appropriately referenced and collaborative article. By doing this we will avoid the creation of a ‘mediocre’ entry as Bart suggests and also teach children more about how Wikipedia works.

I also don’t think that wiki’s and web 2.0 are hypes. I think they are powerful tools for learning and part of an increasing teaching paradigm. I want to emphasis the word ‘tool’ here. A wiki in itself does not create good learning. But, if used appropriately and combined by sound pedagogy from the classroom teacher the results of using such resources can be outstanding. You only have to look as far as some of the great Wiki work going on at Perth Academy, Scotland led Neil Winton and his team to get a good understanding of the power of these tools.

A difficulty that we have is training teachers in this new technology and the pedagogy that is associated with it. This is where appropriate professional development within schools is needed. The East Lothian Teachmeet Roadshows are and excellent and sustainable example of this.

I’m a bit concerned that Bart seems to think that I’m suggesting that young people shouldn’t be taught to read and write? I’m not – but I am suggesting that Wiki’s and other engaging technology can be used to improve literacy and numeracy skills in young people. Again I’ll sight Neil Winton and his department as an example here.

I partly agree with Bart about his point about children presenting work in PowerPoint. But again this actually depends on the task. I don’t think there is anything wrong with getting young people to submit work as a handwritten piece, word processed, as a web page, as a video, as a podcast, as poster or as a newspaper report. The reason for this is that all we are talking about here is presentation. In teaching we do often give some credit for presentation eg: how neat your handwriting is, if you have used a good page layout, if your video is well edited etc… But we actually normally give more marks / credit for research, planning and content of the piece of work. We also should give marks / credit for referencing.

Bart seems to be worried about a ‘cut and paste’ culture but banning wikis won’t stop this. Only by good teaching combined with instilling the idea of intellectual property and copyright in young people will we be able to reverse this shift in culture.

To be honest I don’t think there is any point in banning Wikipedia in schools. Students will continue to access it when they go home or on their mobile phones and therefore still use it to gain knowledge (no matter how accurate this knowledge is). If we ban Wikipedia in schools how can we ever teach young people to use this resource in a safe and responsible way? Its the same argument for most social networking sites.

What we should be doing is teaching students how to use Wikipedia properly – because it’s not going away.

It annoys me when people simply dismiss Wikipedia as a source because they feel it is not actuate. In my experience these are people who don’t really understand how it works and teachers need to understand how Wikipedia works so they can pass on this knowledge to their students.

The first thing that teachers need to understand about Wikipedia is that it openly acknowledges that it might not be accurate. You don’t have to look very far through it pages to see disclaimers like:

• 'The factual accuracy is disputed'
• 'This article contradicts another article'
• 'This article contradicts itself'
• 'This article reads like an advertisement'
• 'This article needs additional citation for verification'

The interesting thing about these and the many other disclaimers that appear over Wikipedia is that by acknowledging that it could be wrong it is actually adding credibility to its articles.

I can’t remember ever seeing a disclaimers like these in a more traditional encyclopedia (eg: Britannica) or a Sunday newspaper. But these sources can also be wrong and the errors are often just corrected in a re-print of the encyclopedia or as an apology by the newspaper months or years later.

Young people should be being taught to question everything that they read on-line and in print. The Wikipedia disclaimers help remind us of this and should be being used by teachers as a teaching and learning point. Fundamentally, we should be getting children to use a bit of common sense to decide for themselves if something is true or not.

I think teachers can get students to use wikipedia in a more responsible way by:

1. Using the disclaimers as a starting point to help think about an article in a more critical way.

2. Challenging students to check to see how many times an article on Wikipedia has been edited. As a general rule I would say that if something has been edited a lot, it’s more likely to be accurate than if it’s just been put on-line and never edited. I still come across people who don't realize you can edit wikipedia.

3. Encouraging Wikipedia users to look at the discussion forums that accompany each article to see if we agree or disagree with the justification for the sources.

4. Looking carfully at the original reference of articles (normally to other on-line sources). We should be teaching young people to follow the chain of references backwards to assess the credibility and validity of the original source.

5. Getting our students to understand exactly how a good wikipedia article is produced.

I think good wikipedia article is produced by groups of people collaborating. The authors reach a compromise by allowing everyone who wants to put their own point of view across. A so-called expert with a strong opinion about exactly what should be said who keeps reverting an article back to only what they think will be locked out of Wikipedia. 

Conclusion

Finally, a question I often get asked is ‘Is Wikipedia actuate?’. Some researchers at the University of Colorado would argue that some articles are more actuate than similar articles in Britannica. Wikipedia is also more up to date in terms of real time events – for example when Pluto was declassified as a planet in 2005 Wikipedia was up-dated almost straight away. Other more traditional encyclopedias had to wait for a re-print. There is of course difference between up to date and accuracy.

However, the simple truth and answer to the accuracy question is that, like books, WIkipedia is full of mistakes! But this is why we need to need to teach young people how to use it as a resource properly. It’s not going away and we certainly shouldn’t ban it from schools.

UK Weather Met Office Google Map Mash Up

In case you haven’t noticed it’s not been a great summer in the UK weather wise! 

In fact if you look at the graph below from the BBC you can see that there has been a lot more rain than sun.

 

However one thing that might cheer you up during these ‘dreek’ 'dreich' times is this new Google Map Weather Mash Up from the UK Met Office. You can find the interactive map here.

The interactive map has all the zoom tools and geographical features of Google Maps combined with the ability to overlay layers of GIS data about the current and predicted weather (for up to 24 hours). The layers include cloud cover, temperature, pressure, wind and weather warnings. You can also adjust the opaqueness of the individual layers so that you can still see the landscape.

 

I think this will be a great resource for teaching weather in schools and Scottish educators teaching standard grade will find it particularly useful.

DREICH – ‘means bad weather. The kind of weather which makes you miserable: dull, grey and wet. If it rains hard and water runs down your neck it's dreich’.

SLF 2008: Enriched Assessment for Enriched Enquiry:

On the Thursday of the Scottish Learning Festival Seonaid McGillivray (Headteacher at Stoneyhill Primary School) and I presented on the topic of Enriched Assessment for an Enriched Curriculum.

We used the work that we have been doing on Guitar Hero as a transition project as our example. The sides from the presentation are embedded below.

Enriched Assessment: Guitar Hero

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: slf08 slf2008)

Further information on the project can be found here:

• 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.

 

Further information about enriched enquiry can be found here:

• Enriched      Assessment for an Enriched Curriculum

Enriched Assessment for an Enriched Curriculum

Today, Seonaid McGillivray (Headteacher at Stoneyhill Primary School) and I attended a meeting at the Scottish Government Offices in Leith. We have been working in collaboration with the Scottish Government Education and Training Department and Learning and Teaching Scotland on a project to explore enriched enquiry in more detail. The full title of the project is Enriched Assessment for an Enriched Curriculum or EAEC.

An ‘enriched enquiry’ is one which supports pupils to develop their understanding of the world and broad skills and attributes for learning, life and work, through carrying out a structured investigation. Enriched enquiry is fully consistent with the principles and purposes of Curriculum for Excellence. The original model has been developed from successful projects in New Zealand.

The broad aims of enriched enquiry is to allow children to:

• access different sources of information and media to explore the chosen topic in some depth, over a sustained period of time
• plan the enquiry and exchange and develop ideas about the topic with others of the same age, and with relevant adults in the school and local community
• bring together and build on learning and skills from different disciplines, school subjects and other areas of their lives
• build working relationships and contribute effectively as part of a team
• explore important principles and issues, such as human rights or moral, ethical, social, scientific, economic, or environmental issues, allowing them to reflect on and clarify their own attitudes and values
• comment and reflect on their findings, as part of a group and as an individual – how things are in the chosen aspect of their community, and why
• provide a personal view on what might be done locally to improve their lives, making a case for how things might be changed for the better, and what needs to happen to enable those changes, reflecting challenges faced in the real world
• bring together their findings and views in a written final report for local ‘publication’
• present a summary of their findings and recommendations for local action to members of the school and community

Working in collaboration with Stoneyhill Primary Primary School last years P7 teachers used the enriched enquiry approach while delivering our Guitar Hero Transition Project. I think that the model that we are developing for assessment is really exciting and hope that we can expand on this further as we continue to develop the project in session 2008 / 2009.

As a result of today’s meeting we have been asked to contribute to the Enriched assessment for enriched enquiry: inter/cross-disciplinary studies to develop skills and attributes for learning, life and work in the UK, Queensland and New Zealand session at the SLF next Thursday. (Yes, I know it’s not a catchy title!)

During our 15 minute slot of the presentation we will talk about how you can go about gathering, evaluating and reporting achievement in the context of an enriched enquiry and the assessment, and recognition of pupils’ achievements.

New KS3 Boardworks Resources

One of the companies that I often do some work for is Boardworks. Our last big project together was producing work for a new KS3 Geography Resource. My copy of the CD arrived over the summer and I was really impressed with the quality of some of the flash animations. Its great to see how my hand sketched flash storyboards have been taken by the Boardworks design team and turned in useful resources for the classroom.

I think one of the great things about a Boardworks presentation is that they are made in PowerPoint which means that you can modify and change them to use with your classes. Some of the animations and games make good starter and re-cap activities. The site licence for any of the CD’s means that it up-loaded to your schools VLE.

As I did with the Key Stage 4 resource I’ll try and complete a curricular matching exercise to show where the KS3 resources can be used in the Scottish Curriculum. I’ll even try and get this ready for the Scottish Learning Festival.

Promethean Active Expression Voting System

A couple of years ago I did some research comparing different interactive voting systems and looking at if Interactive Voting Systems Improved Learning. At the time I concluded that some systems were a lot better than others and that I thought that a system that allowed proper text based answers (similar to a mobile phone) would not be to far away.

I presented my findings at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2005 and you can still download the audio of my presentation if you are interested.

This evening I went to a demo of the new Promethean Active Expression System – at last this is a system that I would consider buying for the school. It allows full text based answers as well as a whole host of other great features. I’ve never been a fan of ActivVote as it just has never offered enough but Active Expression has really got me thinking.

I would encourage anyone considering investing in a voting system to give this some serious consideration, organise a demo and view the 3D Demo on the Promethean World Site.

Now who wants to give £2000 to do a full scale robust test of Active Expression in a secondary school?

Marshmallows and Emotional Intelligence

I am interested in the idea of emotional intelligence and its importance within schools.  Wikipedia defines emotional intelligence as,

‘The distinction between intelligence and knowledge in the area of cognition (i.e. IQ) is very clear, where generally, psychological research demonstrates that IQ is a reliable measure of cognitive capacity, and is stable over time. In the area of emotion (i.e. EQ) the distinction between intelligence and knowledge is murky. Current definitions of EQ are inconsistent about what it measures: some (such as Bradberry and Greaves 2005)say that EQ is dynamic, and can be learned or increased; whereas others (such as Mayer) say that EQ is stable, and cannot be increased’.

The concept of emotional intelligence has been around for a long time but was made famous by Daniel Goleman who has written a number of article and books on the subject. It seems that Goleman shot to fame after an article on emotional intelligence was published in Time Magazine back in October 1995. It’s the article in Time Magazine which references the marshmallows.

Basically during early testing to try and understand the concept of emotional intelligence. Four year old children were taken into a room and offered a marshmallow. The researcher then said they could eat the marshmallow now or if they waited until he got back for an errand, they could have two marshmallows. He results were fascinating. Some children subsided straight away, some lasted a couple of minutes and some managed to wait until the researcher got back.

Now here’s the interesting part,

‘[After the children got of secondary school] a survey of the children's parents and teachers found that those who as four-year-olds had the fortitude to hold out for the second marshmallow generally grew up to be better adjusted, more popular, adventurous, confident and dependable teenagers. The children who gave in to temptation early on were more likely to be lonely, easily frustrated and stubborn. They buckled under stress and shied away from challenges.’

In East Lothian we have recently been trying to identify the bottom 20% of pupils who are educationally the most at risk. Traditionally this has always been perceived as pupils of the least ability (the lowest IQ, CAT’s scores etc…) but we know that this is not always the case. Perhaps by exploring the emotional intelligence of children, we may discover some interesting patterns.

One of the problems it seems is whether we can actually measure emotional intelligence or not. I did a quick trawl on-line to see what I could find out about different emotional Intelligence tests – although I have to say I’m quite sceptical of anything like this.

I did find one test at Queendom.com. I completed the test in about 25 minutes (its 106 questions, some of which require a little bit of thinking about). He results are shown below, along with the follow description.

‘According to your self-report answers, your emotional intelligence is good. People who score like you do feel that they have little trouble understanding and dealing with their own emotions and those of others. They generally are able to overcome difficulties in their lives and they are able to control their moods in all but the most trying of times. It’s easy for them to motivate themselves to overcome obstacles and reach their goals. In addition, they find social interactions to be quite easy and fulfilling, for several reasons. They are comfortable allowing themselves to get close with others, and feel comfortable being vulnerable enough to establish intimacy. They also report having an easy time offering support to others; this is likely due to an empathetic nature and a clear mind when it comes to offering good advice’.

In summary emotional intelligence is a fascinating subject that I will be looking into in more detail over the next few weeks / months.

Does anybody know of any other good EI tests?