OllieBray.com

The Changing Learning Landscape

Last week I was involved with a forward thinking professional development event with all the headteachers in East Ayrshire (primary and secondary). The event was based on the ‘Building Windmills Model’ that was developed by Con Morris from the National CPD Team.

The title of the event gets its name from the old Chineas proberb:

‘When the winds of change come, some build walls, others build windmills”

As well as facilitating, I was asked to deliver a couple of sessions on new technology and education. One of the sessions was titled ‘the changing learning landscape’ where I tried to get the audience to think a little differently about new technology, education and schooling.

My message was basically in three parts:

1. How technology and youth culture is changing (linked to recent research)
2. Examples of effective learning due to sound pedagogy and student engagement (linked to the LTScotland Consolarium Project)
3. The notion of digital entitlement and other critical questions for school leaders

The slides that I used during the presentation are embedded below:
 

The Changing Learning Landscape: Building Windmills Ayrshire 2009

View more presentations from Learning and Teaching Scotland.

I also delivered a session on Personal Learning Networks. This was basically a re-run of my workshop at the Scottish International Summer School on School Leadership. You can access resources about personal learning networks for school leaders here.

Andrew Brown was also presenting at the conference and you can find copies of his slides and observations from day one over on his personal website.

Also, if you were one of the headteachers present at the workshop remember you can continue with the discussion via the South Ayrshire Building Windmills GLOW Group – or just send me an email.

Tynecastle High School – Staff CPD / Residential

As a teacher is not often that you get enthusiastic about the thought of getting up early on a Saturday morning to go to work!

However, yesterday I was asked to go along and present the early morning 09.30 opening presentation at Tynecastle High Schools annual staff CPD event. The difference between the Tynecastle event and most other staff CPD events that I’m asked to go and present at is simple.

The staff had already been at the CPD event for the last 18 hours which had included an overnight stay. Over half of the Tynecastle staff had volunteered to take part in this event which included teaching staff, support staff and two Dutch teachers that the school is twinned with.

This was the fifth time the school had organized such an event and I was delighted to be asked along to contribute.

One of the nice things about Tyncastle is that its about to move into a brand new school. This combined with a committed staff and a new headteacher (only been in post for 6 weeks) means that there really are exciting times ahead for Tynecasle. I really wish them the best of luck in the future and thank them for making me feel so welcome on Saturday morning.

Anyway, I focus of my presentation was on New Tools for Teachers. I won’t post the slides (although I have emailed a copy to the school) as they are similar to recent presentations. However, the links that I mentioned are below:

1. The use of ICT

Generators Use generators to liven up your lessons and to set learning / home learning objectives in a more creative way. Some good examples include:

• Fodey – Includes the famous wizard text and the newspaper generator
• Wordle – Turn paragraphs of text into beautiful work clouds (try it with your exam syllabus departmental development plan or anything else you can think of!)
• Smoke Signal Generator - Make smoke signals come out of your location.

2. 21st Century Students

21st century students are a new bread of student. They exist in a high tech, multimedia and glamorized world. We need to be prepared for this in our classrooms.

Tips:

• Think about your own on-line presence (social networking, ex-directory in the phonebook, be carful what you post etc…)

• Make sure you know what resources your students have at home. For example how many of them have a computer with Internet access? How many have the capacity to play an mp3 file? How many have a games consol? If you don’t know this information how will you set appropriate and imaginative home learning tasks and get a real understanding of prior learning?

• Knowing your students also means you can set appropriate assessment tasks.

3. The Basic Tools Search Tips and good search engines:

• Use the Advanced Google Search – remember you can use this to get specific file type returns such as just PowerPoint or shockwave flash (animation) files.

• Quintura provides a really good visual search – excellent to use with children on project work.

• Google News – searches the most up-to-date news web sites

Images

• Don't forget Advanced Google Image Search

• Flickr can often provide really good and powerful images that can be used in education without breach of copyright.

• BigHugeLabs lets you do all sorts of things with images such as make motivational posters.

• The BBC Day in Pictures – great starter or discussion activity.

• The BBC 3 minute news bulletin – children like to watch the news if you give them the chance!

3. The audience tools

• Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis allow you to quickly publish information to the Internet.
  
• Most importantly they can be used as an alternative to traditional assessment and give the children a real sense of audience.
  
• Use these tools to make your own World Wide Wall Display. Some Good Blogging Tools include wordpress, blogger and typepad.
  
• Audacity is a free audio editing piece of software that will also w you to edit voice and audio recordings. It is also available as a Portable App – which means you can run it off a memory stick.
  
• Think about getting your students to write Wikipedia articles.

4. On line CPD

• Find on-line CPD Opertunities - CPD Find
• Record your CPD - CPD Reflect
• Dowload CPD - LTS iTunesU
• Drip Feed CPD - ICT in Education (part of the LTS online service)

5. Finally

Please leave any comments and feedback from the presentation below.

I also presented a workshop to a small group of staff on Personal Learning Networks. This was basically a repeat of my presentation at the Scottish Leadership Summer School and you can find the slides and links here.

After I had finished my input I stayed on to listen to a presentation from Professor Brian Boyd on A Curriculum for Excellence – more on this later…

GLOWing Thursdays - Free CPD for Scottish Teachers

Every Thursday during term time teachers in Scotland have an opportunity to take part in some live on-line CPD in part of the GLOWing Thursdays programme. GLOW is the Scottish National Intranet that connects schools and learners across Scotland.

I’ve been asked to deliver two sessions before Christmas one is on the 10th September 2009 that will be on New Tools for teachers where I will be talking about some of the productivity tools that are available for school staff. It will be an adapted version of my Nomadic Learning talk that I gave at the International Summer School on School Leadership.

The second presentation will be on the 12th November 2009 when I will be picking up the Internet Safety and Responsible Use theme. This will be similar to my recent NQT Internet Safety Talks.

You can find out more about GLOWing Thursdays on the GLOW Scotland website.

What’s your big Idea for A Curriculum for Excellence?

Recently at the Scottish Education Leadership Summer School we were asked what our big idea was for Scottish Education / CfE. Con Morris from the National CPD Team has put all of the big ideas into a presentation, that you can view over on the CPD Team Blog.

On Monday at an Internal LTS event about A Curriculum for Excellence I asked the audience the same question. Whats your big idea for CfE.

Participants could either up-load their big idea to a GLOW group or email me directly to a Blogger account that I set up for the event. Just to clarify these are all people’s personal ideas and some of them are light hearted and some represent ‘big picture’ thinking.

I have duplicated some of the ideas below:

• Allocate a week of summer holiday for CPD
• We need Open Wireless Networks for pupils and staff.
• We need a GlowTube network for teachers across Scotland to share their big ideas 
• and experiences in taking CfE forward.
• Communicate the 'big picture' of CfE as weaving tartan: a creative process where you integrate diffferent thread to make your own beautiful, coherent, vibrant whole.
• Exemplification needs to be more than text based.
• Involve teacher-training colleges more in developments for CfE.
• Rather than Curriculum for Excellence, how about 'Counseling for Educators'?
• How about we stop having recurring meetings where people just give updates? We could give updates online, and everyone could read how we are getting on :-)
• LTS should strive to model good practice when engaging with the profession to ensure we practice what we preach
• Teachers finding what is happening on the journey at present rather than at the end.
• Accessing online support to aid the journey
• Enthuse children for life
• Switch on to positivity
• Success comes in 'cans', not in 'cannots'
• 'LTS in the Park' - roadshow :-)
• Use mobile phones to collect pupil voice
• Keep the language simple

I am convinced that small  ideas change things and that we need to bring more of these ideas to the table if we are going to successfully implement the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.

What’s your big idea for a Curriculum for Excellence / Scottish Education?

Cartoon credit

Nomadic Learning: Building Personal Learning Networks

Below are the slides and links from my talk today on Nomadic Learning: Building Personal Learning Networks from the Scottish Education Leadership Summer School.

I have embedded some YouTube Videos into the presentation to explain a bit more about some of the tools that I mentioned during the talk. They are not the same video clips that I used but hopefully will give you a clearer explanation of how some of these applications can be used to build powerful learning networks with the education community.

Presentation slides:

Personal Learning Networks - Scotland Education Summer School

View more presentations from olliebray.

Links mentioned during presentation:

Nice tools

• Wordle.net – great way to analyse text

Email Alerts

• Learning and Teaching Scotland education email bulletins (GLOW, daily news, aifl etc…)
• ASCD Worldwide Edition Education Smartbrief (twice weekly global education email bulletin)

Online Communities

• Learning and Teaching Scotland Online Communities (heads together, deputes together, virtual advisory service etc…)
• GLOW – Scotland’s National Intranet
• UK Innovative Teachers Network – free sign up, free software, supported by Microsoft and lots of networking opportunities

Personal Learning Network Social Networking Tools

• Google Alerts – worth setting up an alert for your school name (and your name!)
• RSS and Google Reader – create your own personal newspaper and get the web delivered to your desktop
• Social Bookmarking (delicious) – never loose a good website address again, share and collaborate with others.
• Twitter – A micro blogging service
• SlideShare – a place to up-load, download and view on-line presentations
• Teachers TV – a great tool for finding classroom resources and professional development video’s

If you have any questions about the presentation, or if I’ve missed anything please get in touch.

Scottish International Leadership Summer School

In 2007 I had the great privilege of being asked to facilitate at the first Scottish Leadership International Summer School. It was a great event and really kick started an exciting partnership journey between the National CPD and myself. I blogged about the event at the time and it still remains one of the best conferences I have ever attended.

Last summer I had to turn down my place as I was away with a group of young people in the Cascade Mountains but I was delighted when I heard that the Leadership School would be returning for its third year.

This year the theme of the school is Creativity and Innovation in School Leadership: realising the potential of the Curriculum for Excellence. The programme really is looking fantastic. With input form a number o world class speakers including:

• Jim Spillane Northwestern University, Illinois, USA;
• Steve Munby National College for School Leadership, England;
•  Bob Fryer Department for Health, England;
• Irwin Turbitt Warwick Business School; and
•  Scotland’s own Ewan McIntosh (now at Channel 4)

I’ve been asked to run one of the round table CfE discussion groups on the Tuesday. During this workshops I’ll be talking about Nomadic learning: building personal learning networks. I’ve been asked to cover this following successful input at the recent Building Windmills event.

More information on the Leadership school can be found at www.scotlandschoolleadershipevent.com. The website is also a great archive of the previous two events with some great footage that can be used for personal CPD.