Improving teaching and learning with Now Technologies (not New Technologies). That’s the gist of my approach for my contribution to my school’s strategic plan for the year ahead. How to get staff confident with using the technologies they already have effectively rather than throwing a hundred new possibilities at them every five minutes. Let’s do a few things really well rather than a lot of things poorly.
We had OfSTED last week, which was a blast. No, really, it was. I mean, apart from all the extra preparation making sure that all the evidence for all the statements in the SEF were in place, what else was there to do? We were convinced we had a good school, and the challenge was simply to make sure that we told our success stories as clearly and eloquently as possible.
I was thinking about it over the Easter weekend, and as I did so I came across this video from a marketing drive by London Transport about cyclist awareness for drivers. It seemed so perfectly apt. I realised in that moment that our job as a school was to make sure that OfSTED saw our moonwalking bears.
It goes further than that of course. It’s about how we market our school within our community; how we market our community within the county, and so on. All of us have our moonwalking bear stories. And we all need to make sure people see them.
As for OfSTED, the report will be out in a couple of weeks and I am sure it will be positive. I know, however, that as we listened to the feedback on the day we all recognised the school that the inspectors were talking about. We felt sure that they had seen our moonwalking bears.
Interesting discussion over on CIF in response to the boy Macintosh’s piece about what it might mean to be teaching literacies in the 21st Century. The thing that hits me time and time again when this kind of discussion takes place is the polarising nature of it, or at least the deeply dug-in defensive positions that the ‘traditionalists’ take up. For them it appears to be a question of defending the replacement of ‘old’ literacies with ‘new’, when actually it is about broadening the definition of what we mean by a ‘text’. I would argue that you cannot teach about blogging, for example, without reference to the broader literacy context - the vernacular of blog writing is constructed on the same basic language as a novel or a poem, for example. It’s just that the codes and conventions are different. Recognizing, defining and refining those codes and conventions is what really matters. At the end of the comments, Ewan posts a link to a YouTube video. It’s a Second Life construction of a 3D environment based on the famous Van Gogh ‘Starry Night’ painting. Ewan suggests that this video might act as a replacement for a traditional essay where a student analyses the artwork in question, but I’m not so sure. When I watch it I find myself thinking that it’s a vaguely interesting response to the work of another artist. However, on the level of being a personal response, it doesn’t include anywhere near enough of the (digital) artists’ own ideas, and as a analytical response, it merely shows that the student can extrapolate a 3D world from 2D data. There is no evidence that the student understands anything about the contextual reasoning for why the painting looks the way it does. There is no hint as to what the student thinks about the emotional impact of the painting. To use the ‘content, form, process, mood’ model, I think it needs a great deal more to really work. Perhaps a spoken word soundtrack with the students thoughts and opinions, for example, rather than the cliched use of that damn Don McLean song… Of course, I don’t think that the video was even made in an educational context, and Ewan is merely lifting it out of context and making a suggestion as to how technologies and specifically gaming technologies could be used in a learning environment. I’m just not sure that he’s necessarily picked the right example. Or maybe, given that he’s made me think about it, he has.
