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Taking Risks with Leadership, Learning and Teaching (2 of 5): Doing things differently

 

This is the second in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.

In the first article in this series I have already mentioned Monkseaton High School in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle. It is a school that has embraced controlled risk taking and does things differently.

But there are of course lots of other examples of education delivery around the world where doing things differently and risk taking approaches are encouraged.

Lets look at some examples:

1) Tinkering School (my personal favorite!)

"Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized."

Gever Tulley (founder of Tinkering School) talks more about the project in his 2009 TED Talk (embeded below):

One of the key aspects of Tinkering School is its playful approach to learning and teaching. I’m a huge advocate of play and games in education. I think that if you think about any good game they tend to offer challenge, progressing and reward. Computer games are now so sophisticated as well as challenge, progression and reward they also offer personalization and real-time feedback.

Hmmmm… not a bad five words to describe what we continuously try to create in our classrooms and learning spaces. I’ve written a lot about games based learning before and this recent talk that I did for Microsoft sum up most of my current thinking.

Some schools have taken the notion of games and computer games to an extreme. Which brings me nicely onto my second example of different global practice.

2) Quest to Learn

"Quest to Learn [in New York] is a school for digital kids. It is a community where students learn to see the world as composed of many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.

Quest to Learn has purposely responded not only to the growing evidence that digital media and games offer powerful models for reconsidering how and where young people learn, but also to the belief that access for all students to these opportunities is critical. We believe that supporting students, their parents and communities in a quest to become motivated, resourceful, life-long learners is a true aim of education."

More information on Quest to Learn can be found in this Macarther Foundation YouTube Video below:

Of course some people are skeptical about on-line teaching and I strongly believe that children should have a blended approach to learning. But part of this blend has to be exposure and use of digital technology.

It is however interesting that increasingly some learning delivery models are entirely available on-line.

Which brings me nicely onto my third example of different global practice.

 

3) The Khan Academy: A free world-class education for anyone anywhere

"The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.

All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

With a library of over 2,400 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 180 practice exercises, we're [Khan Academy] on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace."

More information on The Khan Academy in this short You Tube Video:

Here is an interesting thing to consider. The Khan Academy gets over a million unique views a week (and rising). What percentage of these come from the UK to do think? I would bet not very many. I’ve got no real data to back this up but I expect statistically many of the views come from Eastern Asia and India. Of course there is nothing wrong with this - in fact a free on-line education is in theory great for everyone. But we do need to consider why globally some people are motivated to learn and others are not.

I have said time and time again that in the UK we do not lack resources (I know we could always have more) but we do lack motivation and this seems to be a very hard thing to crack at a system wide level.

Now I am not suggesting for a moment that we replace our schools with The Kahn Academy or even smaller UK versions of it. But in the back of a taxi on the way to Reading Train Station Professor Sugata Mitra once told me, “If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, they should be.” I think he was quoting Arther Clarke.

Of course he didn’t mean that we should replace teachers with computers. But he is right and I have come across a few (luckily, very few) teachers in my career who’s only role seems to be to press the spacebar to advance the PowerPoint presentation while rows of children copy the projected side into their jotters.

This is not an engaging activity, it is very poor pedagogy (if done all the time) and is certainly not a great return on investment for a teachers time.

The work of Sugata Mitra brings me onto my forth example of different global practice.

 

4. The Granny Cloud

Professor Mitra’s work is fascinating and if you have never seen his TED Talks (one and two) you need to spend some time watching his projects on the use of technology to educate children in places where no one wants to teach.

The ‘Granny Cloud’ is one of is latest and most successful projects. 

"When I last visited India, I asked the children what they would most like to use Skype [the internet telephone service] for. Surprisingly, they said they wanted British grandmothers to read them fairytales – they'd even worked out that between them they could afford to pay £1 a week out of their own money," Mitra said.

He had already recruited one woman to spend a few hours a week reading fairy tales to the children, with her life-size webcam image projected on to a wall in India. He appealed to Education Guardian readers to volunteer. And some 200 people stepped forward.

"Many are retired teachers, who are now regularly on Skype teaching children in the slums," says Mitra. "The children are forming relationships with them, and the teachers, many of whom were upset at the thought of having finished their careers, have realised they're more important than ever."

More information on the Granny Cloud in this short YouTube Video:

Again, I am not saying that this is the answer to our literacy issues within the UK Education System. But I am constantly surprised with how few schools have grasped the concept that it is now very possible to beam and expert into your classroom for real-time engagement with children and young people.

We simply must make more of these opportunities to turn our schools and classrooms into child centred exciting places for young people to learn, question and imagine.

Obviously, the above examples aren’t the only examples of schools taking risks and doing things differently. There are lots of others for examples including Shirleands Collegiate Academy in Birmingham, Broadclyst Primary School in Devon, Saltash.net Academy in Cornwall, High Tech High in San Diago, Silverton Primary School, Western Sydney and of course the proposed all through Academy on Portland, Dorset.

It is also important to remember that you could never lift one of these models and retro-fit it into a new community. Some of the learning plazas in Wales have tried this and it just doesn’t work.

What risk taking schools and leaders do is take the best bits from a global recipe and create a model to serve their local circumstance and need. As long as the model they work towards is flexible and agile it doesn’t matter if some parts or ideas do not work - the important thing is that it is kept as child centered as possible and the philosophy of trying new things is built into the very foundations of any new school.

In the next post in this serise I'll talk about solving problems with empowerment and experiences.

 

Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says [Cisco]

I was at a Conference (very briefly) this week that was considering the importance of Moving Image Education, Multimodal Learning and Digital Literacy in schools.

As part of my preparation for sitting on the panel at the start of the day I cam across this Research Whitepaper from Cisco which is about Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says.

It starts off by challenging the classic assumption "We remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear etc.". It then draws from neuroscience to put in place a more robust theoretical framework for examining the impact of different media combinations on learning, in particular a mix of the verbal and visual.

It makes an interesting read for anyone interested in this sort of stuff!

Open publication - Free publishing - More cisco

Google Art Project - opening up the worlds art galleries to millions of learners

Google’s ‘Art Project’ is a collaboration with over 15 of the worlds most famous art galleries. It uses Google’s “Street View” technology to move through selected galleries and learn about the museum.

You can view featured work, find out about the artist, watch YouTube videos of further information and read about the artwork.

This really is an amazing resource that will be of obvious use to schools, in particular art and design departments. One of the most impressive features allows you to create your own collection by saving specific views of any of the works of art. You can also add comments and share your collection with other (eg: your art teacher)

I’ve embedded a YouTube video below which shows more details about Google Art project:

Project Based Learning from Commoncraft

I’ve mentioned Commoncraft lots of times before and even had students recreate their own paper animation movies. There most famous movie has to be the one about Twitter.

Commoncraft has recently created a movie on ‘Project Based Learning’ on behalf of the Buck Institute for Education.

More information on the creating of the video can be found over on the Common Craft Blog.

Nice work.

The History of Computer Gaming - [video]

I love this video on the history of computer games and games design. It was made as part of a university project by games design students from Munich. It really shows the progression of devices, graphics and game play since 1958.

History of Gaming from Florian Smolka on Vimeo.

The only thing that seems to be missing is the Microsoft Kinect. There final type of controller is future looking and consists of Augmented Reality Glasses (I wonder how long it will be until we get something like that which is commercially viable?)

The games and controllers showcased in the video are listed below – how many do you remember? 

• Tennis for Two, Oscilloscope, 1958
• Pacman, Arcade, 1980
• Donkey Kong, NES, 1986
• Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1991
• Street Fighter II. SNES, 1991
• Super Mario 64, Nintendo 64, 1996
• Final Fantasy VII, Sony Playstation, 1997
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursiut 2, Sony Playstation 2, 2002
• Ecco the Dolphin, Sega Dreamcast, 2000
• Super Smash Bros. Melee, Nintendo Game Cube, 2001
• Wii Sports Golf, Nintendo Wii, 2006
• God of War III, Sony Playstation 3, 2010
• Rock Band, XBox 360, 2008

Magic Moments #5 - Sock Monsters

Each week I post a photograph of something that I have seen, like or has just made me laugh.

There was a recent invasion of sock monsters at Mid Calder Primary School. All of the children had made their own monster (complete with Googly eyes!) and offered some useful advice if I ever wanted to make my own.

WARNING: If you are thinking about making your own sock monster make sure you ask the owner of the socks first!

30 places you want to work (Will SEQIA be one of them?)

Good Business website recently published a list of 30 places that they would want to work. To develop their list they came up with ten categories that each company was judged on. Obviously not all companies do well in every category but it still remains an interesting list.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Learning and Teaching Scotland and HMIE are being brought together to form the new Scottish Education Quality and Improvement Agency (SEQIA). I wonder if SEQIA will make it into the top 2011 places to work and I hope that some of the criteria suggested below make it into its founding principles.

The list of ten criteria are:

• It exists at the intersection of creativity and impact. The solutions it finds to real problems are original, inspiring and transformative.

• It cares as much about people and the planet as it does about profit (or in the case of non-profits efficiency). But profit (or efficiency) is really important. Its actual mission – not just the way it operates – and its products or services make the world a better place.

• It values transparency. Openness and accountability are core values.

• People talk about it. And as often as not, it’s a part of that conversation about itself.

• It loves its employees. From legendary perks to fair treatment to fiercely bred loyalty to total mission buy-in, it has made itself a place people are happy to go to every day.

• People love it, viscerally. Emotional reactions to its products and services are not uncommon. Evangelism come naturally. You respect your friends for working there. And maybe your even a little jealous.

• It plays well with others. Collaboration and sharing are common practices.

• It uses smart technology smartly. Everyone can use social media and Google docs; these guys do it meaningfully to drive their business.

• It’s appropriately located. It’s in a city that makes sense for the kind of business it does (especially as that relates to reducing travel needs), and builds a strong relationship with community.

• Design is important. From its logo to its website, it understands that one of the most powerful tools at its disposal is a refined aesthetic sense.

 

Where do good ideas come from… in 4 minutes

I first heard my pal Ewan McIntosh talking about the idea of ‘where do good ideas come from’ at the Scottish 2009 Summer School on School Leadership.

Recently, I bought the book of the same name written by Steve Johnson.

As I was Googling for reviews I came across this great YouTube Video that Steve has been using to promote his lecture tour and book of the same title.

I’m looking forward to reading the book and the creativity behind the above YouTube promotional video is also well worth a look.

You can also listen to Steve Johnson talking at TED Global 2010 - I've embedded the video below.

Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn (4 of 5): Augmented reality combined with Facial Recognition

This is a fourth of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinions and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.

The fourth technology that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is augmented or layar technology when it is combined with facial recognition. I first talked about this in my Keynote to the Holyrood Internet Safety Conference in February 2010. Let me explain my thinking.

Augmented reality (or at least my understanding of it) is a way that we can lay virtual data or images on top of real images. It has been around for years but again has only recently become more robust and cost effective. I mentioned augmented reality recently in a post about how such technology may allow relatively unskilled people to easily do the jobs of people who currently need to be skilled.

Have a look at the BMW Research Concept Video (YouTube Video below) to see what I mean:


I think that this type of technology may be particularly appealing for some industries as it could be more cost effective but also safer and less of a risk for employees.

We are still a little way off Augmented Reality glasses – this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist (they do!) they are just a little bit expensive at the moment and normally have to be plugged into a computer to work robustly.

However many people have an augmented reality viewer already in their pocket – their mobile phone (a recurring theme of this mini series!).

Modem smart phones know exactly where they are because they have GPS in them. They know which way they are facing because they have an accelerometer and / or digital compass in them. They also have a camera and large viewing screen so you can easily see the world though them. Finally, as long as you have a 3G signal most modern smart phones are constantly connected to the Internet – making them very powerful mini computers.

There are already lots of augmented reality / layer apps available for the iPhone and for the android platform. The new Android commercial shows some of the possibilities of this technology (YouTube clip below).


The potential is huge. Imagine walking down the high street and you are looking for somewhere to eat, you walk past a restaurant, hold up your phone to the restaurant and the latest customer reviews appear around it.  Or, you go on a history field trip to a famous battle field and by holding up your phone you can actually see a re-enactment of the battle take place. Or, what about if you visited and extinct volcano (such as Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh) and you hold up your phone to see the geological information about the volcano or even what it might have looked at millions of years ago.

The potential for augmented reality in gaming is also huge. As part of out work at Learning and Teaching Scotland we have already put Sony Eye Pets for the Play Station 3 into a number of Early Years establishments (more about this in a separate post) and also have Invizimals and second sight for the PSP ready to go out to some partner schools early next session. The interesting thing about all of these games is that they use the ‘real world’ as the backdrop for immersive game play.

I’m convinced that these ‘real world’ augmented games will be the big thing of 2011 – 2012 and devices like the Parrot AR Helicopter will add to this new phase of game play. The Parrot helicopter is a hover helicopter with two cameras on it so that you can see what the helicopter sees. The amazing thing about the Parrot helicopter is that you control it over WiFi with your iPhone (and probably other devices as well).


All of these applications are interesting but the real point of my post is to think about what will happen when you combine augmented reality technology with facial recognition software.

Facial recognition software has been around for years and just like all technologies its got better and cheaper over the last few years as computing power has increased. If you’re a mac user facial recognition has been built into the last few versions of iPhone (that ships with all apple computers).

Google image search also now includes an option to search for just faces and Google Picassa allows you to do the same thing with your own photos that you have up-loaded.

In fact Google has had a real interest in facial recognition for years – this is one of the reasons why they bought Neven Vision back in 2006.

Now lets take all the parts and add them together to think about what will be possible in the not to distant future.

• There are lots of people globally up-load pictures of themselves to the Internet, these pictures are often associated and tagged with the persons first and last name.

• There are also a number of websites that allow web users to aggregate all of their social content to one place (Google Profile and Facebook are both good examples of this).

• There are already websites that can build a profile of you from an email address, depending on what you have published about yourself on-line. If you don’t believe me check out spokeo – it scares me!

Also, in the UK (and probably other parts of the world as well) unless you are ex-directory (which we recommend all teachers are) then your address and phone number (including your mobile phone number) are all stored online.

What is my point? Well, very soon you will be able to run an App on your phone , hold it up to a group of people in a room and facial recognition software will be able to recognize their face (cross checked against images that they have on-line) and augmented around the face on the phone screen will be links to the persons likely on-line presence. This will probably include things like Facebook profile, Slideshare account, Flickr page, newspaper reports, LinkedIN profile etc…

The data displayed might also include links to their home address and / or phone number. The App will be able to make educated guesses about some of these things because it will know where it is (eg: its geo-sensitive). For example, just because there are tens of ‘Ollie Bray’s’ living in the UK there is only one (to my knowledge) living in the Edinburgh / Lothian region of Scotland.

Now here is the really interesting thing, this fictitious App that I am describing relies on their being a picture of you on the Internet and then linking data to other on-line sources. When I describe this to people the first reaction I often get is, ‘thank goodness there are no pictures of me on-line’. Of course, these reactions are normally from people who don’t actually have a clue if they have pictures of themselves on-line or not. What they mean is that they haven’t put any pictures of themselves on-line but that doesn’t mean that other people haven’t. You see privacy doesn’t really exist anymore (I’ll come back to this in a separate post).

The TAT Augmented Reality App concept gives a pretty good demonstration of how this might actually work (YouTube Video below).


Of course all of this is fictitious at the moment, but all of the peaces are in place so it won’t be long (I think 12 – 24 months maybe less?). In fact MIT already have a working prototype.


So what does this mean for schools and education? A few things I think.

First of all, more than ever, we need to make sure that we educate our children and young people about what they put on-line. This has to include very young children (I’m talking from 3-11 year olds) and most importantly the teachers that care for them. For far to long we have concentrated our efforts surrounding the Internet safety and responsible use agenda on children that are already too old to really have any worthwhile impact. In short, rightly or wrongly we have been far to reactive and now with the technologies like I have described above just around the corner we need to be far more pro-active to ensure our children remain safe and secure.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think we can stop the above. In fact I think there will be a whole generation of Young People who tick the box (or just ignore the box) on their social networking profile and volunteer their data to be given away in the in the way I have described above.

What ever we do we need to make sure that we raise awareness for both children and education professionals.

What do you think?

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! [TED Talk]

Ken Robinsons 2010 TED talk is now available on the TED Website. As always Sir Ken uses great humor to deliver a very serious point and some important key messages. I have embedded the movie below that is definitely worth 17 minutes of your time and probably 34 minutes (as you will want to watch it twice!).

The messages that I took from the talk were:

“We are currently suffering a crisis in human resources”

“Many children endure rather than enjoy education”

“Human resources are like natural resources – you have to dig deep”

“Every education system in the world is under reform, but reform is not good enough. Reform suggests fixing and actually many education systems need to be completely revolutionizes”

“The time for them [young people] is everywhere”

“Human communities require diversity in order to survive”

“A 3 year old is not half a 6 year old”

“The fast food model of education system will destroy our schools in t he same way it has destroyed our bodies”

“Education must be customized”

“If you do something you love an hour feels like 5 minutes. But, if you do something you hate 5 minutes feels like an hour”

“Human flourishing is organic not a mechanical process”

“Technology, the Internet and Media education combined with good teaching can and should revolutionize education”

The presentation finishes with a lovely quote from W. B Yates:

“Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

His point being that every day children spread their dream under our feet [in our classes, under our care] and we must tread softly to nurture these dreams.