Teach42

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This session is being presented by Paul Bradshaw (p.bradshaw@liverpool.gov.uk). I met him last year at BLC and have been looking forward to hanging out again this year. I didn’t even know he was presenting, so this was a pleasant surprise.

I love the fact that he has CD’s for everyone with all the class notes and documentation. Very nice little perk.

Paul’s actual position is Senior Effectiveness Office -ICT for Liverpool schools. He looks at how ICT is being used there. Love this, he’s whipping out Google Earth and showing exactly where we are right now (Regis College). He’s typed in Liverpool and we are all watching it zoom out from Boston, travel across the ocean and move onwards to Liverpool. Too bad there aren’t any high rez photos of the area (just a bunch of pixels).

We’re getting a nice little geography lesson as he shows us the area that he covers. About a 9 mile radius, composed of 900,000 people or so. They’re losing population though. Estimates are that the school population is dropping dramatically as people move outwards. He’s really using Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Maps satellite view very effectively to paint a rich picture of Liverpool.

BTW, my laptop is dead, my ipod is dead, and I recorded the last session by using my digital camera as a voice recorder. Sad, eh? Jon is bailing me out here though by loaning me his laptop and iPod for blogging and recording. Thankya Big-Big (which makes sense if you’ve read Stephen King’s Dark Tower series).

While he’s introducing the videos, I’m exploring the CD. It has a great layout to it, created in Inspiration. It has several articles and videos on it, including an article by Prensky that I haven’t read before. he’s the one who wrote, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants“. This one is called, “The Emerging On-Line Life of the Digital Native“. Can’t wait to read that one. Hey! Bonus! I just looked up Prensky to put in those links and discovered that he’s blogging! That’s going in the blogroll. Looks like he’s been doing it for quite a while, but it does say “New” next to the link on the main page. It’s amazing how much is going on that I don’t know about. Doesn’t everyone know that the world is supposed to revolve around me?

Ok, back to Paul. In 1998 they introduced the National Grid for Learning. It was their initiative to put tech into schools. The emphasis was to put the equipment in and to connect them all to the internet. Sounds like a familar story. If you airdrop it in, they’ll use it. Sheeya, right. The intiative lasted around 4-5 years. Actually, now that I think about it, sounds an awful lot like what Paul Vallas is looking to do. I feel queasey just thinking about it.

They’ve given that second Prensky article to every teacher in Liverpool. Prensky was at NECC? Must have missed that one somehow. That’s one of the wonderful problems about NECC, it’s just too large. Thankfully there’s a webcast of it! Now isn’t that fantastic? I missed a session that I would very much have liked to attend, and now I can go back and virtually attend. We really need to do that for every session. Ok, I’m not going to go off and rant about that one right now, done enough ranting lately on that topic.

Just saw a promotional video for ICT in Liverpool. It was as good as you could want a promotional tool to be. They want to foster a greater use of equipment to promote learning. First of all by realizing that the learners of today are different than we were. Interactive whiteboards are big. He says it’s taking an extraordinary effort just to get teachers to use the whiteboard for more than simple projection. He’s talking about professional development problems and they sound very similar to here in the states. They’re in school for 185 days, teachers have five additional inservice days and then every week there’s built in inservice time during the afternoons. However, most of that time is spent doing general work or professional development, not ICT specific. Sounds familiar.

The government throws a lot of money at schools for equipment to get to a specific computer ratio (primary, 1:8 computers:children). So they can be in the classroom or a lab setting so long as they meet the ratio. He’s dead set against children just sitting at a computer and learning by rote. He wants to see computers being used creatively.

Ok, here we go. This is good. They’re talking about rebuilding 32 schools from the ground up, but it’s not just about modernizing. They’re also talking about redesigning the curriculum to accomodate 21st century learning and building the schools to accomodate it. What should a 21st century classroom look like and what goes on there? I think I have a pretty good understanding of what 21st century information literacy is comprised of, as well as what 21st skills are. However, what I’m still at a loss for is the most effective way to teach those skills in our oh-so-traditional schools. We know where we are, and where we want to go. What does the road in between look like and how do we get that trip started?

National Grid for Learning. Huge database that schools can dip into. Any school wordwide can take advantage of it. NorthWest Learning Grid is a consortium of schools. Some of the material is created commercially, others are done by teachers for teachers. Another one for you. Becta: The British Educationa Communications and Technology Agency. One last one, National Whiteboard Network, resources for people using interactive whiteboards. That one sounds like a fantastic site. I haven’t seen much specifically targeting teachers using whiteboards. Once you get trained, you’re usually on your own.

Singapore is fostering a notion that as they’re educated, if they have opportunities to move off and work elsewhere, they should always remember where they came from and bring it back to Singapore. Liverpool is trying to do something similar and they’re using ICT as a means for doing so. They’re trying to create a sense of identity, to make sure that they’re community doesn’t forget their heritage when they move on. I totally understand this one, coming from a Jewish background. Hmm… I wonder what life would have been like if more Jews in the diaspora were blogging. So far as I can tell, the largest online Jewish communtiy is probably J-Date!

Time is about to run out and he’s just getting to some specfic examples of what schools have been doing with distance learning. Too bad we couldn’t have gotten to that earlier. It’s really valuable to hear concrete examples. I intend to pester him for more information over a table of food at some time during this trip.

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