Electric Chalk

I was a little taken aback this week after talking to my sister-in-law who is a primary school teacher in the north of England.

The LEA she works with has provided an LP which is great but she was saying that her head is keeping tabs on teachers by checking their lesson plans for the week on a Sunday night.

In itself, not a problem - visibility of work can lead to sharing, collaboration and all that lovely stuff.

What gets me is the secretive, Big Brother approach where the staff only found out the head was doing this after the head dropped hints in casual conversation.

Has anyone else had this sort of experience? Are you a head or head of department who sees this as a valuable management technique?

Speak your brains!

Cards on the table: I don’t think so.

Fiona Miller in the Guardian this week says it better than I could.

I’ve worked in a large telecoms organisation with a very well run IT services team. The hoops that I had to jump through to justify the procurement and installation of something fairly standard (Macromedia Flash) were numerous and fiddly (fiddly hoops?).

Picture a teacher. She has just found an IT resource that will transform a difficult lesson but she’s only found it at the last minute. A school-based IT team is more likely to be negotiated into getting it installed at 24 hours notice than a outside provider with a central call centre working to a 2 week service level.

Make IT more complicated and less people will use it as a tool. Teaching’s hard enough as it is.

The boss has sort of given the nod to me and my line manager going to BETT this year.

If you are involved in ICT in education in any sort of planning or strategic sense in the UK then BETT is a worthwhile trip. Just make sure you have a game plan before you turn up. Don’t expect to wander round and discover stuff although some explore time is recommended. Pick exhibitors that have something to do with your plan for the year and build a route map round them.

Also, pick some decent seminars.

I didn’t go last year as I failed to do the above in 2007 and came away demoralised and exhausted.

I’m going to try and blog/vlog/twitter my experiences this year partly to share the chalk-love but also ‘cos I’ve never tried blogging from the field and that’s quite a useful educational tool.

It may becoming apparent that I spend most of my web time on the BBC website but it is rather good. This brought a smile to my face.

I was beginning to worry a while back that if someone asked me what personalised learning was either I would have difficulty explaining it or someone would just say, “well, duh!” 

Its the comment in the 3rd paragraph that personalised learning is what teachers do so long as they are given the freedom that I particularly like.

ICT can play a big role in this but it’s just down to good teaching skills. Also, students should be given the skills so they can “personalise” their own learning experiences, in other words to become aware of their own capacity for learning.

Lets just stop pretending that personalised learning is some great revolution. It’s like saying retailers should engage in “person-centred customer service”. What customer service isn’t?

If you are responsible for the shape of your school’s curriculum development or working at a strategic level here’s some good bedtime reading.

It’s by George Siemens and was published a while ago in the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (phew!).

A lot of the recent developments in the UK national curriculum  seem to reflect his line of thinking but I’m still aware that the way that schools are driven and measured here revolves more and more round a narrower set of skills. Schools “succeed” or “fail” on their A-C’s in Maths and English. 

Surely schools will naturally focus resources on avoiding “National Challenge” status or “Special Measures” rather than equipping their students to become effective “future-proof” learners.