I've written a few ebooks (and lots of other things) for Microsoft over the years. You can link to some of my other publication on the right hand side of this website. My latest ramblings are on how you might use 1:1 Computing to Unlock Learning. As with all of these things it is a free .pdf download.
One to One Computing in education is the simple concept of every child and member of staff in a school or institution have access to a personal computer. Supported by the folks over at Microsoft I put together some thoughts on this based on my experience of being involved in a variety of 1:1 projects over the last five years.
Sometimes it seems to me that we have been banging on about 1:1 computing in education for years. Everyone I speak to seems to understand that it is an important paradigm shift in terms of education delivery and one that pretty much every system in the world will adopt (or try to adopt) over the next ten years.
As someone who has been involved in 1:1 deployments in schools across Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. It constantly surprises me how slow we are to join up our thinking in the UK and how quite often projects fail or are abandoned because the basics aren’t in place.
Born out of this frustration, this eBook (supported by Microsoft UK) is my attempt to get people thinking about 1:1 in a more joined up way. I’ll talk about why 1:1 is important? The types of devices you should consider, policy considerations, how to make learning exciting in 1:1 environments and some emerging types of classroom practice from other areas of the world.
I’ll also point you in the direction of free tools and services from Microsoft that might help you on your journey. One of which is the Partners in Learning School Research Tool that will help you perform a diagnostic assessment of where you are, so that you can in turn create an action plan of how you move forward. Throughout the book, I’ve also provided a list of key questions that you need to consider before any 1:1 investment.
Finally, like all the other books in this series – this is a book about learning and how technology can provide better outcomes for children and young people.
Contents
What is 1:1?
Developing your 1:1 vision.
Policy and procedures
Good teaching and learning
Re-imagining classroom practice
Overcoming obstacles and getting started
Conclusion and next steps
You can view and download the book from this link and it is also embedded below:
Almost two years
ago Ian Stuart (@islayian) and I
sat in the audience of the Microsoft Partners in Learning Conference in
Washington DC and listed to David Christian deliver a
keynote presentation on Big History.
What I liked
about David’s ideas the most is that in his own learning journey he has started
to challenge what knowledge is important to teach. Like many teachers he
started out teaching ‘depth’ but
realised in the end that ‘breadth’
was just as important. Big History also challenges subject silos. In encourages
people to take a more integrated look at science and humanities and realise
that both have common ground and many parts of both curriculums are not very
far apart.
Anyway the
YouTube Video below explains Big History in a lot better way than I ever could:
After Washington Ian remained in contact with
David and facilitated a conversation between him and Joe Wilson, Head of New Ventures at
the SQA. Ian and
Joe were keen to explore how we might get Scottish Schools involved in the
pilot programme for 2012/2013 before the large scale worldwide rollout in
2013/2014. Joe and I also met with David when he visited Scotland in early 2012
and as a result of a lot of hard work from Joe (and others) combined with a
personal recommendation from David. Scotland
participated in the global Big History Pilot.
As
we expected the pilot was a success and the Big History Course is now
available for all schools and educators globally. There is also a public
version of the course that will go live in September 2013.
The
resources and learning tools built into the course (including the teachers
dashboard) are really good and although it is currently only aligned to the US Common Core ELA
standards for 9/10th grade, making links to CfE is not rocket science.
Whether you like Windows 8 or not –
no one can question that this is a
fantastic deal for schools and local authorities. It has already generated a
real stir in the Scottish Education Independent Sector and I just hope that
some of our state schools will be in a position to make use of the deal.
Microsoft are really pushing surface at the
moment – they even gave 10, 000
away at the recent ISTE Conference in the US.
There is a lot of talk as to why Microsoft doing
this sort of thing, but ultimately the aim is to disrupt the
education tablet market that is currently dominated by iPad.
This is the closest technology to minority report that i have seen - worth a look if you have a few minutes. We have seen the data manipulation before but to the data manipulation combined with touch, Kinect, mobile and voice.
The most clever schools are already replacing projectors with LCD screens (and there are lots of advantages to that). It gets even more exciting for me when I think about what might be built into this type of technology in the future.
Tim Scratcherd (the School House Partnership) and I were
recently asked to write a report for the Oxford Education School
Improvement Series on the use of Tablets and Apps. The
purpose of this report is to provide practical support and guidance for school
leadership teams who are considering the purchase of tablet devices. The report
is aimed at school leaders and teachers in England but the ideas within the
report are transferable to other parts of the world.
With permission from
Oxford I’ll be duplicating some of the report on olliebray.com over
the next week. You can download the full report or order a paper copy over at
the new Oxford School Improvement Tablet and App Help
Centre.
_____________________________________________
Part
Three - Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning – What
does good learning with tablets look like?
There is no doubt that good technology
integration has the potential to be transformational. This is particularly the
case if you decide to go down the route of 1:1, where there is one Internet
enabled device for each child in your class/school. It is important to note
that technology integration of this scale and teaching with tablets will have
an impact on models of learning and teaching.
It is also important that teachers and
school leaders have thought about what this new type of pedagogy might look
like within a tablet environment before any large-scale deployment. If you have
not done this then the technology is more likely to become a distraction to
learning rather than have the transformation impact that it deserves.
Tablets,
teaching and learning
When we consider what teaching and learning
might look like in a tablet environment it is important that we focus on what
makes learning good and how technology can improve the learning and teaching
process.
The concept of Exciting
Learning from Microsoft captures some of the components that make learning
engaging for young people.
For
learning to be successful it needs to be:
Culturally relevant
Include real-time interaction
Provide different learning pathways
Showcase learning achievements through authentic audiences
Accessible to all
The information below provides some further
background on each of these principles and the full report outlines
what these principals might look like when applied to a tablet and app learning
environment. A major factor with Exciting
Learning is that, because pupils are highly motivated, you get more
learning. This idea is important to further justify the investment.
CULTURALLY
RELEVANT: Learners learn best when they can see the
point of what they are learning and how it relates to them. We can also help
them engage with their learning more by using tools that they like to use.
INCLUDE REAL-TIME INTERACTION: Learners like it
when teachers use information that is current and up-to-date. They
also like to engage with real people either face-to-face or via
videoconference.
PROVIDE DIFFERENT LEARNING PATHWAYS: Learners like to have a choice of output. Sometimes this choice of output
can be incredibly motivating as it gives a more focused and personalised end
point for children to aim towards.
SHOWCASE LEARNING ACHIEVEMENTS THROUGH AUTHENTIC AUDIENCE: Learners like to have the work that they are proud of showcased to people
who care about them. Authentic audience is an important aspect of motivation.
ACCESSIBLE TO ALL: Learners need to be able to
learn in a variety of places at a variety of times. This includes in school, at
home and everywhere in between. Technology can also make learning accessible
for learners who have additional support needs.
A few words about assessment
Good pupil assessment should use a
combination of both summative and formative techniques. Tablet technology
integrated in the right way offers opportunities for both.
For example, summative tests can be
administered to learners individually through the use of multiple-choice tests
and other assessment generators such as Quizlet,
Google Forms (part of Google
apps for Education) and SharePoint 2010 (part of Microsoft
Office 365 for Education).
However the real power of tablet
technology is the opportunity to build on current formative assessment
practices and to provide learners with digital feedback on their work and
progress.
For example, tablet technology,
particularly in 1:1 environments, allows learners to quickly comment on other
pupils’ digital work (such as using Google
Docs, which are part of Google Apps for Education). It also allows pupils
to quickly be able to record their achievements through digital learning logs
and e-portfolio solutions (such as SharePoint Blogs, which are part of
Microsoft 365 for Education).
In my next post I’ll discuss Choosing and
using tablets? – you can download the full “Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning” report
now for free over on the Oxford School
Improvement Site.
I wasn’t too keen on the RM Notebook 320 – mainly
because it didn’t have a touch screen and Windows 8 needs a touchscreen. But I
did like the Asus W510 and I gave it a pretty robust test over the Christmas
holidays when I was away in the Alps.
Shape the Future is now in Edinburgh and
Glasgow and I’m hopeful that other Local Authorities might start to follow
their examples as it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
"Shape the Future is an innovative, simple and cost effective way to get all students using 1:1 devices at home and in the classroom. The affordability of this device and software package is supported by Microsoft's global digital inclusion programme, in collaboration with RM Education and Intel. Exclusively available from RM Education, this has been specifically designed to help you provide a great value 1:1 device programme for all students and their teachers."
One of my predictions
was around on-line translation tools and I’ve really seen these improve in leaps
and bounds since June 2010. I spent two weeks working in Eastern Europe over
the October holidays (Albania, Romania and Bulgaria) and if it wasn’t for Google Translate and Bing Translator I would have really
struggled to transfer the learning to the teachers I was working with.
The following YouTube
clip from Microsoft Research is a really interesting step forward in real-time
translation. Although it is still not 100% perfect what is interesting about it
is that firstly, it is pretty good and secondly not only can it have a pretty
good go at translating the spoken word into Mandarin Chinese but when it does
it, it sounds like you!
The video gets
off to a slow start, but if your interested in this sort of thing it is definatly worth a watch.
I love the cinema but I had never been to an IMAX before. Then almost a year ago at the end of the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum in Washington DC (where I was a judge) we managed to get an extra two days in the city seeing the sights before flying home.
I had a great two days with my friends Stuart Ball (Microsoft), Ian Stuart (Islay High School) and Gareth Ritter (Willows High School · Cardiff). We did many geeky things which pretty much consisted of talking about technology, getting up early to take digital photos of the sunrise, a skegway tour of the city, a trip to Space Museum (where we got to pretend to be astronauts) and a quick visit to the dinosaur museum!
Anyway here we are watching Hubble 3D at the IMAX - It was amazing. But it also reinforced to me how ridiculous you look with 3D glasses on.
Just one of the reasons why I think 3D TV is still a long way off catching on at home!
Above: [from left to right] - Ian, Gareth and Stuart.
ChronoZoom is an open-source cloud based community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything. Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life and humanity. Importantly it aims to bridge the gap between humanities and sciences.
ChronoZoom uses the theme of Big History as a storyline and provides access to learning materials in an easily understandable and navigable way. On the site you will also find links within the tool, tutorials, user guides and lesson plans.
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