The Case for Print-On-Demand

Terry Freedman's PoD books

The article below was first published on 20 December 2006. It still stacks up now, but I have one or two additional comments to make at the end.

What could be better than receiving a box of books? Receiving a box of books that you wrote, of course! Is there a place for self-publishing in schools?

The books I refer to are the two booklets I wrote, on Every Child Matters and Boring ICT lessons. These were produced by print-on-demand, through Lulu, but published by, an therefore assigned an ISBN number by, Terry Freedman Ltd.

I ordered 10 copies of each in order to be able to comply with the UK requirement to send 6 copies of a newly-published books to various libraries and agencies. And that, of course, leaves 4 copies of each for me to send to reviewers and casually leave lying about when guests come to the house....

But isn't this just a case of vanity publishing? Well, yes and no. "Yes", in the sense that you pay the costs of having it printed and bound, whereas in mainstream publishing those costs are borne by the publisher. And "Yes" in the sense that if it's a niche product it would be hard to find a mainstream publisher that will take it on, which leaves doing it yourself as the only option. But "No" in the sense that if, as in my case, you have been approached by mainstream publishers and declined their advances and therefore made a free choice about whom you want to publish your book. And also "No" if the book has virtually no market at all (cf The Long Tail), which is what I should like to consider now.

Print on demand is a very good option when you need  very few, perhaps even just one, copy of a book. The origination costs, ie the fixed costs of setting up the book, are not spread over a large number, and so the fixed cost per book is relatively high. On the other hand, you don't have the twin problems of trying to find (a) start-up capital and (b) room to store hundreds of copies. In the case of Lulu, it's easy to amend the text of your book very quickly too, which in education, and especially the educational technology field, is a must these days.

So, what does all this mean for the ICT (Educational Technology) leader in a school?

I have long believed that if you want people to take something seriously and treat it with respect, it has to look good. What can look better than a publication which looks like it just came from a bookstore? Most schools do not have the facilities to be able to even begin to compete.

So, if I were a Head of Department or subject leader in a school now, I would use Lulu for a number of purposes:

  • The staff handbook
  • The 3 year strategic plan
  • Information about assessment
  • A year planner or calendar with important internal events (like report deadlines, term dates) and external events (like conferences) pre-filled in.
  • Students' completed projects (added Dec 09)
  • Students' leaving portfolios (added Dec 09)


If you wanted to produce your own textbook to distribute to all your students, it may be better, because cheaper, to go down a more traditional self-publishing route. That means, finding a printer who does short print runs, ie 500 or 1000. The biggest barrier to this avenue is the advance cost.

I'm not convinced that such a strategy would be cost-effective: On the one hand traditionally-published books are much cheaper as a rule. On the other hand, it's hard to beat the cost of a ring-binder and handouts or, of course, an online collection of resources.

But for the purposes of boosting your team's morale and creating a great impression with inspectors, having a dozen each of a few publications printed is hard to beat.

Reflections, two years on

Having read this article again, two years after I wrote it, the question arises: do I still agree with it? Broadly speaking, the answer is 'yes', but it's not quite as simple as that.

It is definitely the case that print-on-demand works out more expensive per copy than going to a short-run publisher. However, the issue for me would be: how many copies are required, or are you likely to sell? In other words, the more narrow the niche, the more attractive becomes print-on-demand. So if, say, you want enough copies for your ICT team and perhaps a few more to hand around, I would think that print-on-demand is the way to go.

However, I would not recommend print-on-demand for fiction writing if you can possibly avoid it. Self-published fiction is still associated with rubbish that is not good enough for mainstream publishers to bother with. I think that perception is slowly changing, because most new writers simply do not get a look in these days, and there have been some notable self-published successes. (Update: I accidentally referred to 'non-fiction' in this paragraph in the original version; I have corrected this, although hopefully the context, and the following paragraphs, will have indicated that I'd made the error, which was a slip of the pen as it were.)

In fact, if you have the stamina and the time, there is probably a case for saying that the best thing you can do is self-publish your novel (say) and market it incessantly in the hope that it will come to the attention of a mainstream publisher. But don't count on that happening, not least because you will be hard-pressed to even get it reviewed.

There's another caveat here. The CEO of Lulu didn't do anyone any favours when he said earlier this year that Lulu publishes the worst collection of poetry in the history of mankind. (See this article for a report on that by Angela Hoy, and this article for a follow-up.) I should not go so far as to say that he did a Ratner, because everyone knows that Lulu does not edit manuscripts (you'd have to purchase that service as an extra), and that many, probably most, self-publishers have received 'critical' acclaim from nobody other than themselves and their families and friends, who for the most part are too caring and too polite to say, "Sorry, but you just can't write. Take up painting instead."

Even so, I don't think comments like that help the general perception, based on a bygone era which possibly never existed, in which manuscripts were either eagerly snapped up by publishers willing to invest money and time into them, or were taken to a vanity press.

People's perception of self-publishing is better in non-fiction, certainly in the UK, possibly because people recognise that a lot of non-fiction would not be commercially viable for a mainstream publisher. Also, if you are recognised as an expert within your field, people in the same field are almost certainly not going to be deterred by your book's self-published status.

Of course, these days you can easily avoid physical books altogether and go down the ebook route. But why not do both?

I'd be interested in hearing about your views and experiences in these areas.

 

My BETT 2010 Seminars

I have been invited to give some talks. Two of them will be at the BETT Show in January 2010. Here are the details of the presentations I will be giving, in case you would like to book for them online at the BETT Show:

Amazing Web 2.0 Projects

What are ordinary teachers doing in ordinary classrooms with ordinary kids to raise their achievement in and with ICT? This presentation will give an overview of projects which have used Web 2.0 tools to bring excitement back into the classroom!

Date: Saturday 16 January 2009

Time: 12:30

Duration (mins): 45

Room: Club

Venue: London Olympia

Session Code: CL43

Click here for details of how to book this seminar.

Driving Your ICT Vision: what can advanced motoring techniques teach us about achieving our goals?

People talk about vision and strategy in relation to ICT, but how do you go about achieving what you want to? Ideas developed in the field of advanced motoring can provide a practical way to lead ICT in today’s schools.

Date: Friday 15 January 2009

Time: 13:15

Duration (mins): 45

Room: Club

Venue: London Olympia

Session Code: CL33

 

Click here to see how to book this one, and here’s a challenge. A large part of advanced motoring is being able to spot and anticipate hazards. A hazard is defined as anything that is actually or potentially dangerous. Have a look at this photo, and see how many hazards you can spot.

 

Now check your answers against the annotated version of this photo.

 

A Visit to Oakington Manor Primary School

I was recently invited by Becta to a round table discussion about the use of technology. (Becta is the agency that is responsible for implementing the educational ICT strategy in England and Wales.)

Note the 3D glasses!Shopping was never like this!It was nice to be invited to that, but what especially caught my attention was the information that the primary (elementary) school in which the meeting was due to take place is using 3D technology in its ICT suite. That sounded fascinating, so I asked if I'd be able to interview some of the children and their teacher afterwards. Nina House of Shiny Red, Becta's PR company, asked on my behalf, and Ophelia Vanderpuye, the school's ICT Co-ordinator and Advanced Skills Teacher for ICT agreed.

In terms of technology, there is much to talk about: the computers that rise out of the desks at the touch of a button, the enormous interactive whiteboard which doubles as a movie screen, the natural air conditioning, the low-heat computers. And, of course, the 3D films for which you need special glasses -- unless you watch them on the smaller interactive whiteboard at the back of the room, in which case you don't.

But I think what is even more interesting as you listen to Ophelia and the children talking are the vision and planning that lies behind all of these developments.

Ophelia Vanderpuye

The event was filmed, and the result should be appearing on the Becta website in due course.Lights, camera, action!

Oakington Manor welcomes visits from educators. I said in a recent article that to be an innovative teacher you need to see what other schools are doing. If at all possible, I should add Oakington to your 'must visit' list. To arrange a visit, phone the school on +44 (0) 208 902 2871.

The discussion with Ophelia lasts around 15 minutes, and that's followed by a chat with the children of around the same length of time.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ophelia, the children and the school, Becta for inviting me, and Nina Howse for expediting my interview request and for chatting to the children with me.

The jingle on the podcast was produced by Hanson Radio. Read about my visit to John Hanson School for the full story behind it.

The music is Simple Soulman by the Groovechasers, and is podsafe music. Listen to the full version on the GarageBand website.

The photos were taken by myself and may be viewed on Flickr.


 



ICT in the Rose Review of the National Curriculum

I wrote this document in May 2009. Since then, the proposed Level Descriptions have been changed. Here is a summary of the differences between this document and the revised changes, not in terms of the descriptors themselves, but my comments on them. Basically I have taken the view that a difference is only a difference if it makes a difference, so if the proposed level descriptor has changed, but its import hasn't, I haven't commented on it. In fact, as far as I can tell only two of the level descriptors have changed, and then only slightly.

Although this post is clearly aimed primarily at colleagues in England and Wales, it may be of interest to teachers from other countries too, as it shows what we're expecting young people to be able to do at different ages.

Also, it covers the whole of the programme of study for ICT, not just primary.

Anyway, here is a summary of the changes:

Level Changes in New Descriptor? Comments on Changes
1 Yes - shorter None
2 Yes - shorter None
3 Yes - the reference to editing and formatting has been removed It's now quicker to read, but I think it has lost some of its clarity
4 No Not applicable
5 No Not applicable
6 No Not applicable
7 No Not applicable
8 No Not applicable
Exceptional Performance No Not applicable

The level descriptors are © 2009 QCDA Copyright. I have reproduced them here in accordance with the QCDA's terms.

 

 

 

15 Ways To Make an Educational Technology Project Successful

How can you make an educational technology project successful? In a sense, the fact that it's to do with ICT in education is irrelevant. There are some generic 'rules' which ought to be abided by.

By ‘project’ I do not mean work given to students, but the kind of research or experimentation that all good institutions should encourage.

It's always good to have an end date in mindFor example, you may want to see how using a ‘voting system’ might help to increase children’s capability in mental arithmetic.

In my opinion, your project must:

Address at least one aspect of your school development plan

There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, as a matter of principle, if the school has a development plan then all school activities should be related to it in some way. If the school development plan doesn’t address things which some people think it should, the ideal situation would be to change the plan over time rather than just ignore it.

However, there shouldn’t be too much trouble linking any ICT-related project to the plan, because ICT can help to achieve almost any educational goals!

Secondly, anything that is perceived to be irrelevant to the school development plan risks losing support, be that financially or otherwise.

Be cost-effective in both financial and economic terms

One of the big problems with technology in education, as I see it, is that it’s very easy to get carried away with the technology. Here’s a case in point. There’s no doubt that a video conferencing system costing many thousands of pounds or dollars will yield much better results, and be able to do far more, than a webcam that comes built in to a laptop. But are the benefits good enough to justify the additional financial outlay? That’s the key issue: not whether the system itself is good, or even whether it represents good value for money (which is mainly a financial matter), but whether the additional benefits of the superior system justify the additional costs.

Be cost-limited

What I mean by this is that it’s very easy for educational technology to suck up more and more resources. Suddenly, the amount of paper being printed out has doubled, because everyone ‘must’ have a manual. Or there’s an optional extra that would make the project so much easier to carry out. Or that free software bundled with the equipment is OK, but the premium upgrade does so much more.

Because of all these – very good – arguments, I would strongly advocate setting a ceiling on the amount of money that will be spent on the project, and stick to it, unless a compelling case can be made to exceed the allocated budget. Because it’s hard to make a compelling case to yourself and then reject it if necessary, you need to have a group of people overseeing the project rather than just yourself. This is covered next.

Have more than one teacher involved

I think all of us have a tendency to get carried away on a pet project, sometimes to the extent that you can start to lose sight of what you’re actually trying to achieve. That’s why it’s good to have two or three people involved, and preferably not all teachers of ICT.

Have a named leader

Even if you don’t like the term ‘leader’, someone has to be named as the person who can account for the money spent, report on the outcomes, and recommend where to go next with the project.

Be consultative, ie not doing to, but doing with

It’s important that the group of people concerned with the project have a collaborative approach. In my experience, that’s by far the most likely way to generate good ideas and, at the risk of sounding clichéd, help everyone concerned to feel a sense of ownership.

Be time-limited

Projects can sometimes have a tendency to go on and on to no discernible purpose. I think there has to be a cut-off date by which a final report will be made. At that point, the question of whether the project should continue can be addressed.

Have targets and milestones, one of which address dissemination

Personally, I think the language of ‘targets’ and ‘milestones’ is ugly – which is why one of my presentations at BETT – Driving Your ICT Vision: how might advanced motoring techniques help us achieve our ICT goals? – will be about a different sort of approach to planning; look out for an article about that soon. Nevertheless, you must be able to say things like “X will happen by such and such a date, Mrs Jones will be doing it, and therefore Y has to have been completed by the week before”.

Be properly documented

This may include reporting on a regular basis, say half-termly, and at the end of the project's life. There may also be short briefings to the senior leadership team and others, and even a supporting website.

Be reproducible

For me, one of the key characteristics of a successful project is that other people can do the same or similar thing with their own class. That’s why the projects in the forthcoming free Web 2.0 Projects ebook are so great: ideas that were used with 5 year olds can easily be adapted to work with HE students and, to an extent, vice versa. I’ll be talking about that at BETT too, in a seminar entitled Amazing Web 2.0 Projects: Real projects in real classrooms with real kids!.

Be scalable

I think the hallmark of a good project is that it can be scaled up, or scaled down. In my anatomy of a successful project which I discussed as part of my talk for Classroom 2.0 Live (and which will be appearing here as a series very soon), I made the point that all the underpinning principles applied just as much to a small single classroom project as the kind of large, multi-school project that was the focus of my case study.

And if you think about it, the same is true of the principles itemised in this article.

Have wider benefits

That is, it should benefit a wider group than only the direct participants. I’m thinking here of groups like parents and the wider community, or perhaps other teachers. Clearly, the project could be successful without addressing a wider audience, but there are usually opportunities to ensure that the outcomes will be enriched by the addressing of wider goals.

That is also likely to be remembered when you look for support for your next project….

Be manageable

It’s very easy to underestimate the amount of time a project can take up. It’s also easy to make the administration of the project, such as the reporting procedures, too onerous. I think it would be better to limit the scope of the project, or even defer it altogether, than risk having the whole thing collapse under its own weight.

Be SMART

That is, the objectives of the project should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Related. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I think there is a danger that the ‘measurable’ criterion can lead people to adopting a tick box approach in which targets are being met, but the actual overarching aims of the project aren’t. You can easily end up with something analogous to Oscar Wilde’s cynic: someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Be reported

At the risk of stating the obvious, if a project isn’t ‘written up’ in some way then it might as well have not taken place for all the good it will do in the longer term. If the memory of the school resides only in its teachers and pupils, then the long term prognosis is amnesia.

The report could take the form of a video, a case study, a more formal evaluation, a dedicated blog – or all of those and more. The key issue is that it’s preserved in some way so that others may learn and benefit from it.

Also on the web: 11/25/2009 (p.m.)

Succeeding with Web 2.0 Projects-Special Guest: Terry Freedman - Classroom 2.0 LIVE!

I enjoyed taking part in this. Unable to multitask effectively when giving a presentation (can anyone?), I am gradually catching up with the comments on screen as I listen and watch the recording in bits each day.

The presentation looks at the factors which help to make a (web 2.0) project successful, and includes (mainly) a case study of a multimedia project, and info taken from the forthcoming Web 2.0 Projects ebook. Thanks to Peggy, Kim and Lorna for their support before, during and after the session.

tags: Web 2.0 projects, Classroom 2.0 Live


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

14 Ways to Make the Most of Teaching Assistants

In my experience, many teachers make poor use of teaching assistants, regarding them as a sort of junior helper on the same level as a school pupil doing a holiday job. This is unfortunate. The teaching assistant can be a vital component in the quest to raise standards. Here are my thoughts about how this can be brought about.

Outside of the classroom

The work starts before even setting foot in the classroom. Generally speaking, to be most effective in the classroom, the teaching assistant ought to be involved in all stages of planning, and given the opportunity to have appropriate training. In particular, the teaching assistant should:

  • Be familiar with the scheme of work being followed. She may even have had a hand in designing it or adapting it to the school's needs.

  • Understand where the lesson fits into the scheme of work, eg it may be an introduction to internet search techniques, which are to be further developed later in the course -- perhaps next year.

  • Understand where the less fits into the current unit of work, ie what came before, and what follows. In other words, the assistant needs to know that in order to understand the main point of this lesson, the pupils need to understand X, which was covered last week, and that if they master this week's objectives they will be in a strong position to understand the objectives of next week's lesson.

  • Understand the intended learning outcomes of the lesson.

  • Understand how the ICT can help to achieve those learning outcome.

  • Be familiar with the hardware and software applications involved.

  • Be familiar with the individual children’s needs.

  • Have access to the school’s data management system (as it relates to pupils) and be familiar with how to use it.

In the classroom

The teaching assistant given the job of supporting children with special educational needs should:

  • Set up specialist equipment if any is needed, before the pupils enter the classroom.

  • Focus only on the children with special educational needs, generally speaking.

  • Not do the child’s work for her.

  • Help children, where appropriate, by adjusting the computer environment. For example, use the display options (if you have access to them) to make the contrast better on the screen, or use the accessibility features if you are using Windows (look in the Programs-Accessories menu).

  • Have a range of paper-based resources handy, in case the computer system goes down.

Awards for the best use of technology in schools

Becta has announced Inner-city comprehensive Broadgreen International School in Liverpool and independent Prospect House School in Putney, London as the top two schools in the UK when it comes to the best use of technology.

I think it's worth reading the article below, and going to the Awards website (see below), in order to pick up some more ideas about what constitutes great use of ICT in schools.

The prestigious accolade of ‘Best Whole School’ is given to only one secondary (high) and one primary (elementary)school each year. The two schools beat more than 100 other schools across the country to collect their awards at Bristol’s newest science venue, At-Bristol, last night.

Both schools have demonstrated that they have successfully placed technology at the heart of learning as well as wider school management.  This has helped to enhance teaching and bring lessons to life. It has shown how technology makes a difference, not only in the classroom, but at home within the family and across other school activities. As I will say in my talk at Classroom 2.0 Live tomorrow,

"People ask: how can I use this application in my teaching? That’s starting with the technology and hoping it will lead to the education bit. A better question is: what applications can I use to help my students achieve X? That starts with the education and leads on to the technology. I think there’s a reason our area of expertise is sometimes called ‘educational technology’ as opposed to ‘technological education’!"

Broadgreen International School impressed the judges with its futuristic technology centre and use of ICT to involve the wider community in every aspect of the school’s life including its deaf resource base and a lively ‘silver surfers’ group.

The school’s Deaf Resource Base was able to create an online British sign language version of ‘Living in the Blitz’ for history lessons. It is fully accessible by deaf pupils, allowing them to work alongside and complete the same work as hearing pupils.

Students and teacher at Broadgreen School

The school also has ‘Silver Surfers’ groups for older members of the community learning to use technology. Age is no barrier and Les, an original member of the group who is ninety next birthday, regularly communicates via webcam and has his own blog about his war time experiences.

When giving advice to other schools looking to boost ICT, Peter Banks, Assistant Headteacher, says: “Use the Becta self review framework to see where you are and how you can improve. Ensure your ICT equipment is up to date and sustainable in terms of financing. Visit schools that are using ICT well so you can learn from them.”

I would certainly agree with all this, and made that last point myself in the article 10 Ways to Become an Inspirational Teacher.

The SRF is something I very much go along with too. It's comprehensive, and at the same time generic enough to incorporate as-yet-uninvented technology.

Prospect House has students who are confident, enthusiastic and independent in their use of computers, mobile devices, digital cameras and virtual learning platforms across the entire curriculum. From reviewing their sporting performances on screen to creating animations in art lessons, technology is used in every lesson to help students achieve more. It sounds like the school has successfully embedded the use ICT right across the curriculum.

The school also posts podcasts of lessons on its Virtual Learning Environment, so that parents can see how, say, long division is taught. This has helped to raise parental involvement in their children's work.

Pupil at Prospect House

When reflecting on why the school won the award, Dianne Barratt, the Headmistress, says it is a combination of a shared vision by the Senior Leadership Team, including the school governors combined with an enthusiastic staff, all of whom are committed to developing their practice with the aid of technology. 

For more information on the Awards, please visit the Winners 2009 website, where you will find details of other winners, as well as further information about each one along with short videos. On a personal level, I was delighted to learn that The Havering ICT support service was a joint winner in the Support for Schools section.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kate Brennan of Shiny Red for information, case studies and photos. I’ve amended the written stuff (not the photos!) with permission. Thanks also to Dave Smith of Havering for additional information. Read Dave’s Havering blog for more ICT-related news.

Further information

The ICT Excellence Awards is an awards scheme open to all schools which aims to identify and reward excellence in Information & Communications Technology (ICT). The awards acknowledge UK schools approaching technology in outstanding or innovative ways.

See also the Next Generation Learning website.

 

Getting permission to go on an ICTcourse or to a conference

So, you’ve discovered a conference you’d like to attend, but there’s a real possibility that your boss will say “No”. What can you do to maximise your chances of being allowed to attend?

The suggestions which follow cannot, obviously, be guaranteed to succeed. However, they will almost certainly give you more of a fighting chance than the usual approach, which is just to ask for 3 days off. The trick when talking to supervisors is to make your problem their problem, and their problem your problem. Let’s start with the first, making your problem their problem.

Making your problem their problem

Reasons to be allowed to attend

It’s a big challenge keeping up with current thinking and research and practice, so a conference can be a very useful way of doing so very quickly. The issue is: will you get more from going to the conference than you could obtain by other means? In this respect, two factors come into play.

First, does the conference, or a particular theme or strand of the conference, deal with something you’re especially involved in?

For example, are you running a particular course, are you about to buy and implement a particular type of learning platform, are you about to enter your students for a particular examination? These kinds of needs, if addressed by the conference, are powerful arguments in favour of your being permitted to attend.

Second, do the speakers have particular expertise in the area of concern? Note that this is not the same as “is the speaker famous?” If you’re about to start a new course, and the main speaker is one of the writers of the course, or from the relevant Awarding Body, that is likely to be much more useful than an entertaining but, ultimately, empty talk by a well-known personality.

There is a need to network. Even the best schools can become complacent or out of touch, if they have no external reference point by which to judge themselves. When I used to do inspections of schools’ ICT provision I often found myself recommending to the subject leader that s/he starts to make visits to other schools to see what they’re doing. You can’t really pick up good ideas from reading about them in quite the same way as you can by actually seeing the ideas in practice and asking questions of the appropriate people.

In fact, networking is so important that whenever I am involved in organising conferences I ensure that there is time for people to meet informally, and I always try to have this billed in the programme as “social networking” or “networking”, as opposed to “Bar”. Having “bar” as a timetabled activity almost invariably elicits the response “Why should I have to pay for you to go on a junket?” The fact that it takes place in your own time doesn’t make any difference, because it’s the perception that counts in cases like this.

Making their problem your problem

1. Minimise the disruption. If it’s possible to set work that requires very little effort by another teacher, but which is still useful, then do so. For example, you could set everything up on the school network in advance.

You can also compile folders for each lesson. Imagine being a cover teacher, and handed a folder containing the instructions to the class “Log on and click on the X icon”, a list of students’ names and their login details, and simple instructions about what they have to do.

2. Minimise the cost. While you’re away, the school may have to hire a temporary teacher. There are two main ways you can try to avoid or minimise this cost.

First, it may be possible for you to organise cover within your team, if you have one. This make sense from a learning point of view, because it means that the students will still be being taught in your absence. However, if your co-workers agree to this arrangement, you must negotiate a quid pro quo whereby they will not be asked to cover others’ lessons in addition. In other words, nobody should end up doing more cover work than they normally would.

The second is to see if there is a possibility of volunteering to assist with the conference arrangements, or to speak at the conference, in return for a free place and money to cover supply teachers. Obviously, not every delegate will be able to enjoy this kind of arrangement, but in my experience most of them never ask.

As I’ve said, these approaches are not absolutely guaranteed to work, but one thing is for certain: they mark you out as a professional who believes it’s their right to have access to continuing professional development.

10 ways to become an inspirational teacher

Yesterday I attended a Westminster Forum event on testing and assessment. It was an excellent event, not least because something I have been saying for years was validated.

It has always been my contention that if you love your subject and teach it well, your students should do well in the final exam. Yesterday, a member of the audience (whose name I unfortunately failed to catch) stated that it has been found that the students of teachers who teach in an inspirational way achieve better results than students of those who teach to the test. This chimed with Bruce Dickson's observation, based on 50 years in education, that inspirational teaching turns pupils on.

I agree. So what can we do about it? It's generally held to be true that inspirational teachers are born, not made. I am not altogether convinced by that: I think it's possible for most teachers to be inspirational. Here are some reflections on these matters.

1 Throw out the syllabus, at least one lesson a week

Some of my best lessons were the ones I 'planned' driving into work or on my way to a lesson. A few days ago, for example, there was an article in the news about the English government deciding to pass a law making it compulsory for the police to retain the DNA samples of innocent people for six years. That's too rich a story to be shelved until I'm covering databases, in six weeks' time or whenever.

2 If throwing out the syllabus for a day is too risky, then throw it out for 10 minutes

That's right. Why not start each lesson going through the news, or picking up on one or two stories that have an educational technology aspect to them?

3 Use the pupils

If all that sounds like too much extra work, allocate the work to pupils, age permitting. Assign the task of gathering news items to three pupils per lesson. Their homework will be to spend a bit of time together deciding on the best two or three items. Assuming you have a class of 30, by the end of term all of them would have done this.

Think of the skills they will be learning and honing in the process: news spotting, collaboration with each other, discussion with each other as they each argue the case for ‘their’ item to be included, and presentation skills.

They will also, of course, be demonstrating their understanding of ICT itself. Otherwise, how could they select an item for discussion at all?

4 Use a photo

Try taking a photograph (or finding one on Flickr), and then asking your pupils to identify what educational technology they can see, or which is implied.

Where's the ICT?

Image by Terry Freedman via Flickr

 

5 Turn the tables

Ask your pupils to take photos and then explain where the educational technology is, or why they think the photo is relevant to the subject.

You could do this every couple of weeks. Alternatively, ask each student to take and print off a photo, and put them all on the noticeboard. Where there is a spare five minutes at the end of a lesson, select a pupil at random and ask them to explain their photo. Or somebody else's.

6 Work with other teachers

One of the things which I took away from yesterday's conference was the following, from Professor Mary James, of the University of Cambridge:

"Teachers who 'get' Assessment for Learning,

are themselves reflective learners;

collaborate with colleagues;

go to see good practice in other schools."

So how about getting together with your English colleagues and set up an extended writing exercise involving educational technology - as the subject matter, not just the means of producing it? For instance, how about a short story or a haiku on the theme of identity theft, virtual friendship or technology going wrong?

7 Invest time in reading

There are lots of interesting blogs to read. Just set up a Google alert for 'ICT in Education' or 'educational technology' and you'll find them. A few I really enjoy reading are Paul Blogush's blog, Shelly Terrell's blog and Di Brooks' blog. I like them for different reasons. Try them out for yourself.

I have already made the case for maintaining a (small) educational technology library at school. There are some really interesting books around, not all of which are to do with educational technology as such. For example, I am currently enjoying Howard Gardner's Five Minds For The Future (listed on http://www.ictineducation.org/books-from-amazon/).

8 Definitely visit other schools to see what they're up to

When I was inspecting schools' ICT provision I had to say to the ICT leader, on more than one occasion, "You need to get out more." Even the best provision can often benefit from the injection of fresh ideas and perspectives.

9 Go to conferences

You may pick up new ideas, and get to make new connections with like-minded others. There are at least three interesting conferences coming up in the near future:

Transforming Learning Through Creativity and ICT, Liverpool 27 November 2009. Features Keynotes by Sir Ken Robinson, Tanya Byron, John Davitt and Ben Johnson. Phone (+44)151 233 3901 to book a place.)

Or there's the 140 Character Conference in London on November 14th: check http://london.140conf.com/for details.

School won't let you out? Then how about the K12 Online Conference, which starts on November 30th. See http://k12onlineconference.org/ for details.

And don't forget Mirandamod for some serious seminar-style discussions via FlashMeeting (and in person, if you can get there). See http://www.mirandanet.ac.uk/mirandamods/for topics and dates.

Also, Classroom 2.0 takes place on the internet every Saturday at http://live.classroom20.com/(I shall be talking myself -- hopefully not to myself! -- on November 21st.

Finally, you ought to try to get to a Westminster Forum conference now and then. As well as featuring speakers who are experts in their field, they last only for a morning or an afternoon.

10 Join a club

I think it's important to get involved, or at least belong to, offline communities too. That's why I'm a member of Naace, the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of Arts. Attending events is another way of meeting new people and being exposed to fresh ideas.

Once someone starts to feel inspired, they're more likely to inspire others. By adopting these sorts of strategies, and encouraging (and allowing) your colleagues to do the same, you're helping to create the conditions in which inspirational teaching can flourish.

I doubt that I have covered the whole range of ideas here! I'd be interested to hear your ideas for encouraging inspirational teaching.

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership 03: Frederick Herzberg

This is article 3 of a series of 3.

Frederick Herzberg was a psychologist in the USA who
developed the hygiene theory of people's
productivity at work. What is the theory, and how
can it help the ICT (educational technology) leader?

Herzberg can be placed in the Abraham
Maslow
school of thought, in that he believed that
people's motivation could be explained in "human" terms
rather than "scientific" ones. He distinguished between two
kinds of factors: hygienic and motivational.

The hygienic ones are those which help to prevent job
dissatisfaction, but do not in themselves promote job
satisfaction. In other words, they are like good hygiene: it
does not in itself create good health, but its absence can
lead to ill-health.

Examples of such factors include, working conditions,
salary and working relationships.

Motivational factors are those which positively promote
job satisfaction, and include achievement, recognition and
responsibility.

So how can you, the ICT manager, make use of these insights?

Hygiene factors

As far as the hygiene factors are concerned, you consider
the following:

Working conditions
Staff should have access to the best equipment, not the
worst. In other words, if you find yourself being offered a
sum of money to spend on educational technology, ask
yourself how it might be used to make teachers' lives
easier.

Make sure that the environment is kept pleasant -- and
hygienic. For example, if you have a technical support team
ask them to implement a schedule of keyboard cleaning.

Working relationships
There is not much you can do if two people dislike each
other, but that is not the point. As a manager you need to
be seen to be above their differences, and to be completely
impartial. That means, for example, being prepared to give
everyone a chance to give their opinion in team meetings.
It also means not going out for dinner or other kinds of
socialising with just one or two people. Team means are
fine -- a good idea, in fact -- but anything else could be
seen as favouritism or at least a lack of impartiality.

What about motivational factors?

Clearly, you will probably not have the power to promote
people to a higher position -- but you can make sure that
members of your team are given opportunities to take
responsibilities that may help them gain promotion in the
future.

Also, giving them some degree of control and flexibility
over what they do is a very good way to motivate people,
and to harness their natural desire to do the best they
can. You may think that in these highly prescriptive times,
that kind of delegation is impossible. not so.

One of the things I used to do, for example, was to ask each team
member to take responsibility for a particular unit in the
scheme of work. That meant devising the lesson plans and
the resources for the rest of us to use, and making sure
that we had received training so that we knew what we doing
and how to do it. The only non-negotiable element in all
this was the set of objectives that had to be achieved. The
result was not only a well-motivated team, but also a much
richer set of lesson plans than I could have devised on my
own, or which could be found in a book.

Job enrichment
This article would not be complete without considering job
enrichment, which is an extension of Herzberg's hygiene-
motivation theory. It includes factors such as giving team
members more control, and using more of their abilities --
and extending the ones they have through training.

You will immediately recognise that the example I gave a
moment ago of team members taking responsibility for a
unity of work can be seen as an example of job enrichment.

But we can also learn something else from Herzberg's job
enrichment theory, although you probably know it already,
and that is the importance of professional development.

It is probably also crucial to extend what team members do
to areas that are slightly beyond their comfort zone:
everyone needs a challenge, if only to prevent boredom in
the long term. But this option can be fraught with
difficulties, and so will be covered in a separate article.

As you can see, it is possible to take the theories and
findings of a clinical psychologist and apply them to the
leadership and management of ICT.

14 ways to make your school website better

Let's face it: most school websites are pretty boring. True, some have improved a lot in the last few years, but they're mainly the exception that proves the rule.

Looking at most school websites is like taking a trip back in time. No interactivity, no sense of community, no updates for weeks, if not months.

In short, no life.

There are ways in which you can ensure that your school's website is not only vibrant, but stays that way.

Regard the website as a publishing medium, not a technical one

This may seem a bit of a no-brainer, but in too many schools the 'powers-that-be' delegate the task of website maintenance to the Head of ICT. That's like delegating the job of producing the school prospectus to the Head of English, on the grounds that it uses words.

Regard the maintenance of the website as a collaborative process

Why should only one person be responsible for generating the content, keeping it updated and publishing it? If several people were involved, and if all staff were expected to contribute to the site in some way on a regular basis (once every half-term, say), the website would almost look after itself.

Regard the school website as the website of the school

The 'school' includes pupils, parents, support staff and even the local community, as well as teachers and the Principal. It includes more than the curriculum and sports activities. See the next point too.

Show what the school is really like

School websites often talk about what a great job the school does, usually through a combination of lists of examination results and photos of people on a sports field or at a computer. Yawn. Why not have pupil bloggers on the website, discussing what they do and why, and what they like and don't like?

Why not a blog?

With that in mind, consider having a school blog rather than a website, or have a website which incorporates a blog.

A blog can be updated quickly and easily, and lends itself to participation by allowing comments to be made on the articles posted.

You can go further than articles

How about a school Ning in which parents can get into blogging and discussions? Obviously, it would have to be moderated, but think of the dividends in terms of goodwill and excitement.

Or how about a weekly, or monthly, opinion poll to engage parents?

It doesn't even have to be about the school itself. A question like "What do you think of the new Vetting and Barring Scheme? would generate some interest, and may even provide some good ideas for the school. It should certainly give the school management a good idea of where parents stand on the issues involved.

Nice target, shame about the approach

The main aim of most school websites is to attract new pupils. They have a corporate kind of aim, but not a corporate kind of approach. Most commercial websites give stuff away. It doesn't cost them much, but gives people the impression they are not just after your money.

How come I have never seen a school website that gives stuff away?  For example, how about a downloadable sheet about keeping your child safe online? How about one explaining what the National Curriculum levels mean?

Don't have a 'latest news' page...

... Unless you really are pretty sure that you can keep it going. There is little worse than seeing that the 'latest news' is three months out of date -- which it may be, given end of term exams followed by a long summer break.

Have a publishing schedule

It makes life a lot easier if you have a good idea of what you're going to write about and when. There are key times of the year, of course: reminders of holiday dates, and parents' evenings, for example. There are also key times of the week, such as setting the tone on a Monday morning.

Blog ahead, if possible

One of the features of a blog I now regard as a must-have is the ability to write a post and have it appear at some time in the future. It means that you can bash out a few articles all in one go when you have the time and energy, and set them to publish at the rate of one a day automatically.

Another handy feature, if you can get it, is one which 'unpublishes' articles.

Write draft posts

A blog post is referred to as a 'draft' if it has not been published yet. It's incredibly useful to be able to have articles written and ready to go live, but not necessarily automatically. Why? See the following point.

Be forever timely

Taking the above three features together, it is possible to write an article called, say, 'Big basketball match tomorrow: don't forget!', have it appear the day before the match, and then disappear on the day of the match.

As well as keeping the articles timely, and therefore relevant, it also paves the way for putting up two further articles: 'Basketball match: the big day arrives!', and 'Basketball match results'. This is where the draft articles come in. True, you can't write much detail about something that hasn't happened yet, unless your name happens to be Nostradamus, but you can write something which is almost certain to be true, such as:

'The basketball team looked resplendent in their kit as they marched out onto the pitch. Nerves? Maybe, but only their coach would know, and he wasn't telling!'

All you have to do on the day is take a quick snapshot, upload it along with a caption and a bit of text about the weather or something somebody said,  and hit the Publish button.

Regard the school website as important

That means, giving whoever is responsible for putting it together and maintaining it or co-ordinating everyone involved some proper time to do it in. Or exemption from doing (some) cover/substitution.

Or even a bit of extra salary perhaps?

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership 02: Jack Welch

This is article 2 of a series of 3.

 

In this series I am exploring what the educational ICT leader can learn from business leaders and thinkers when it comes to performing the educational technology leader's role.

So what can we learn from Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric? Although schools and GE are very different types of institution, you may be surprised to discover that school leaders could benefit from adopting some of Welch's strategies.

What Welch was about

There are a some basic principles that characterise Welch's approach and philosophy:

He was not prepared to suffer mediocrity. IF GE was not number one or number two in a particular field, he would close and sometimes sell off that section.

He adopted a similar attitude to his staff. He reduced the number of employees at GE by nearly 120,000 in the course of 5 years, because he preferred to have a lean, efficient operation to a bloated, inefficient one.

Still on the subject of staff, he divided them into the top 10%, a middle 70% and the lowest performing 20%. His aim was to develop the top 10%, help the 70% achieve what they wanted to, and minimise the time, energy and resources spent on the bottom 20%. In fact, if an employee didn't shape up, he got rid of them.

Having said that, he did not punish failure. If someone made a mistake, he thought it was important to help them regain their self-esteem. He was, you might say, big on motivation.

He was highly competitive on his company's behalf, and communicated his vision to his team. This manifested itself not only in a desire to be number one or number two in each field in which GE operated, but also in terms of a reputation for quality. Unlike many educational so-called visionaries, Welch had his feet firmly on the ground, so his vision could actually be put into practice.

What it means for you

So how might we translate all this into the context of a school? Clearly, the subject leader for educational ICT does not have the same powers of hire and fire, nor does she have the same ambitions in terms of profits and sales. Or at least, not expressed in those terms. Let's go through the above points.

There is a tendency and certainly a great deal of pressure for schools to adopt new courses and qualifications, or new approaches, before they have the resources in place to make a success of them.

Taking the example of a secondary school in England, are you able to deliver excellent results at Key Stage 3, GCSE, 14-19, and, in the longer term,the ICT Diploma, and possibly A Levels? You need to identify what you are good at delivering, and why, and what you cannot deliver well, and why not.

It may not be feasible for you to pull out of the "market" -- but then again, it might be. For example, is there a possibility of developing links with a neighbouring school or college, in order to each specialise in a particular are? Or perhaps once you have identified where your weaknesses lie, you could share resources.

Sometimes, it is possible to drop courses. In one of my jobs, I decided to discontinue a low-level course in graphics that was, actually, delivering good results. Why? Because I thought the course was so simple that (a) it didn't stretch the students in any sense; and (b), because of (a), I didn't think the qualification was worth the paper it was printed on. I dropped it in favour of a much more challenging course, which proved only slightly harder to achieve the same degree of success in, because students rose to the challenge.

Interestingly, this had a knock-on effect on some of the other issues listed above.

Firstly, the ICT department started to gain a reputation for quality, as it started to attract the hardest working students rather than the idle ones. That, in turn, led to better results which led to more "top" students choosing it in their options. In fact, in the course of two years, ICT went from being a "sink" subject to one for which their was more demand than places.

Secondly, it started to attract ICT experts to teach it. Whereas previously anybody could have taught the graphics course, the new course needed a subject expert. In fact, I managed to persuade the headteacher that the subject, and therefore the students, would be much better served by a tight team of 4 or 5 teachers, all experts in their fields, than double that number who knew just enough to get by -- and, being committed to teaching just one or two hours a week, had no obvious incentive to spend much time developing their knowledge and understanding.

This all raises another issue: how do you measure success? There are the obvious measures, such as examination results, but I decided to judge myself and my team by a harder set of criteria: how many students opted to do the subject once they were no longer obliged to; and, even more difficult, how early in their school career did they make that choice? By adopting a systematic approach, I was able to start seeing students decide to opt for my subjects a full two years before they needed to.

Developing staff is all-important. What professional development does your team enjoy? What responsibilities have you delegated to them?

Vision is important, and here are three questions for you to consider:

  1. Do you have a vision for educational ICT in your school?

  2. Does your team know what that vision is, and do they subscribe to it? Indeed, have they had a hand in shaping it?

  3. Is the vision one which can conceivably be realised, or is it all "pie in the sky"?

Conclusion

Ultimately, although the energy industry and the education service are superficially very different, in terms of what motivates people to do well, and other forces which affect performance, they are not that different at all.

The next article in this series will be published at the same time tomorrow morning.

See also: 

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership: Abraham Maslow

 

 

Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership: Abraham Maslow

This is article 1 of a series of 3.

A short while ago I posted a message in Twitter to the effect that anyone who quotes a statistic like "The number of geniuses in China outnumbers the total population of our own country" does not understand the nature of genius. I believe that genius has much in common with creativity, about which the psychologist Abraham Maslow had particular views.


He also had views about human needs. In this series I should like to explore what the educational ICT leader can learn from Maslow and others when it comes to performing the educational technology leader's role, especially that of encouraging other teachers to incorporate the use of educational technology into their curricula.

Maslow's views on creativity

What distinguishes you, me, and most of the people we know from someone like Shakespeare? In fact, writing is a good area to look at in this context, because lots of people love the idea of being a best-selling author -- yet the number of best-selling authors can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. How come?

Maslow drew a distinction between what he called primary creativity and secondary creativity. The former, which most of us enjoy, consists of having great ideas and moments of insight. But most people are lacking in secondary creativity which is the hard slog bit. That's the part where you try to hone the idea, and spend hours drafting a wonderful few pages -- only to discard them when you read them again the following morning.

Oscar Wilde was once asked to define a day's work. He replied:

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

Like most of Wilde's quotations, that seems like a throwaway comment at first glance, but has a much deeper aspect to it. What Wilde was describing, in effect, was Maslow's notion of secondary creativity as it manifested itself in practice in his own life.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Maslow stated that people's primary need was for the need for survival, followed by the need for safety and security. Other needs, in chronological order (ie each one can only be addressed once the preceding one has been met) are social needs, ie the need to be part of a group; ego needs, ie the need to be held in esteem by others and to have self-confidence; and the need for self-actualisation, ie the desire to express oneself fully.

Implications for the educational technology leader

Both of these sets of ideas have implications for the successful embedding of ICT in a school curriculum. For example:

  • Given the reality that most people lack the time, energy or motivation to fully develop their technology skills, part of your role will be to help them achieve their aims without needing to put in the effort.

    For example, it may be that the geography teacher would use a spreadsheet to chart the rainfall in different areas, if only she didn't have to spend time actually creating the graph. She might be more amenable to the idea of using a spreadsheet if all she (and her students) had to do was input the data and then play around with different types of graph -- in other words, if the process of taking rows of numbers and turning them into a chart was not necessary for her to do.

    And if you think about it, why should she have to do it? As far as I know, being able to turn numbers into a chart is not a required geographical skill, whereas being able to interpret charts, and make decisions about the best type of chart to use in a particular situation, are.

    In other words, a geography teacher who does not wish to learn how to create a chart, and does not want to spend time in her lessons doing so, is probably taking a very rational and apposite view of the whole thing.

  • There is no point in expecting anyone to use the educational technology facilities if they are scared of them going wrong. What do you do with a class of kids when the lesson you have spent hours planning has to be abandoned halfway through because something has gone wrong with the technology?You may have an answer, but that won't help a teacher overcome the fear of that sort of scenario.

    Therefore, you need to anticipate the fear and deal with it even if it doesn't explicit reveal itself. We'll discuss how in another article.

  • Dealing with people's social needs does not have to be difficult, and you can kill two birds with one stone by addressing some of their lack of confidence in their own abilities at the same time. I mean, of course, setting up a room, or a surgery, or both, where staff can come along any time they like, away from the laughing eyes of their students, grab a cup of coffee and use the facilities in a warm, friendly, non-judgemental atmosphere.

  • The need for ego-boosting can also be easily dealt with. You give the kids a fillip by putting their best work on the wall. How do you showcase the best work of teachers?

    One way is to ask them to help you deliver some training. For example, in one school I worked in, a science teacher developed expertise in using databases with her students, and taught the rest of her science teacher colleagues how to do so. It did not take a great leap of imagination for me to realise that she would be able to help other teachers too.

    And there is also another psychological benefit of that approach: like it or not, your co-workers see you as some sort of guru, which can be very intimidating for them. As soon as you step aside and let them be taught by someone who, in their eyes, is just like them, part of the psychological defence barrier comes down.

Maslow was primarily concerned with deep issues like the human condition, but it is testimony to the greatness of his insights that his theories can be applied in many contexts, including that of the drive to embed the use of educational technology in schools.

Further information on Maslow may be found here: http://www.answers.com/topic/abraham-maslow.

The next article in this series will be published at the same time tomorrow morning.

 

7 rules for ICT teachers, co-ordinators and leaders

Here is a set of rules that I hope you will find useful.

Information for tech users should be more useful than this!I think it's important to have rules for oneself, as well as one's classroom. The way I see it, as professionals, our time, and that of our colleagues, is far too precious to waste. We're made to feel guilty, or have somehow been conditioned to feel guilty, if we don't read every possibly useful report. Or every relevant newspaper article. Or if we don't get our lesson plans absolutely perfect -- and then rework them in the light of what happened when we used them.

Feel guilty no more. Here are some rules which I am gradually starting to live by myself.

The heading rule

If you can't tell from the heading what the chapter/article/blog/section is about, at least to start thinking about it, skip it. I was browsing in a bookshop a couple of years ago and was looking at a book about website usability. The author stated that if a heading or link was worded in such a way that the reader had to think about what it might mean, it was no good.

Great stuff. What a pity, then, that he didn't take his own advice. I found it very hard to tell what some of the sections might be about. I didn't buy the book.

The paragraph rule

In a well written piece you will be able to tell from the first paragraph whether you need to read the whole thing. Newspaper articles are a classic example of this technique. No time to read the paper? Then read all the first paragraphs. They contain the gist of the story while the rest of it, usually, is concerned with filling in the details.

Same with press releases. Same with Government reports -- although there the "first paragraph" might be an executive summary of a couple of pages. Same principle though.

The 90 second rule

The trouble with podcasts and video-casts is that it's not easy to skim through to see if it's worth listening to or watching all the way through. Now, iTunes lets you listen or watch for 90 seconds without your having to download it. That should be enough time for anyone to decide if it's worth bothering with the whole thing.

Astonishingly, some podcasters have completely failed to understand this. There was one I was interested in, and I tried previewing 3 different episodes. All of them spent at least the first minute and a half on completely irrelevant stuff. Apart from the intro, which took up at least half the time, there was stuff about his loft, his dog, and some other highly interesting (to him) topic. By the time he said, "OK, today we're going to...", the preview timed out. I'm too busy to have other people waste my time: I can do that myself, but far more productively thank you!

The 1% rule

From what I have seen (and apparently this is a well-observed phenomenon), in any undertaking only about 1% of the people affected are active in any way. What that means is that, on average, if you work in a school which employs 100 teachers, only one of them is going to be moved by your efforts to introduce podcasting, video-blogging or whatever. With that in mind, concentrate your efforts on the people who are going to make a difference, and feel pretty good about yourself if two or three people come on board.

Freedman's 5 minute rule

I invented this rule when I was a head of educational technology and educational technology Co-ordinator in a secondary (high) school. The way I saw it, someone should be able to come into my computer suite, log on, do some work, print it out and save it and log off, all in the space of 5 minutes even if they had never set foot in the school before. I set up systems to enable that to happen, and it was highly successful.

What a contrast to an occasion in my next job. I visited a school where I was, in fact, well known, and asked if I could use a computer for five minutes just to type up some notes. The conversation then went like this:

Ed Tech Co-ordinator: How long will you be here today?

Me: Erm, a couple of hours, probably, why?

ETC: OK, I'll set the password to time out at 2 pm, that should give you an extra 30 minutes or so.

Me: Right. What is it?

ETC: Your username will be mydogisacat, and your password will be t43egi98sp97

Me: I'll just write that down

ETC: No, we don't like people writing it down, it doesn't set a good example to the students.

Needless to say, by the time I got to the computer room, which had to be unlocked, I'd forgotten all this, and by that time the ETC was teaching. I had to find a teaching assistant to help me. All in all, it took me 40 minutes to get on to a computer to do 5 minutes work. Now, I understand about the need for security, but puh-leeeze! This is a school, not the Pentagon! It is perfectly possible to set up guest user accounts which give no access at all to students' areas.

Freedman's 100% Rule

Lesson preparation should never take longer than the lesson, or series of lessons, will be.

Freedman's One More Time Then I Must Get On With My Life Rule

Lesson plans, reports, articles, chapters etc should only be revised once before submitting them. Any more than that and they lose their freshness. Basically, if you can't get it right second time, take the view that this will have to be good enough. Tough one that, if you're a perfectionist like me.

I hope you find these rules useful. If you prefer some more amusing ones, then look here.

A slightly different version of this article appeared on my Technology & Learning blog.

 

7 Reasons to have an educational technology library

This article has been replaced by Update of 7 reasons to have an educational technology library.

In my many visits to schools I have rarely seen a book library which has been built up and maintained by the teachers responsible for ICT, or educational technology as it is known in the USA.

Library

There are several compelling reasons for starting such an enterprise. Indeed, not to do so is to implicitly agree with the utilitarian view of ICT being nothing more than a set of skills. Whenever you read an educationalist 's blog or a committee report espousing the view that ICT should be taught across the curriculum and has no place in the school timetable in its own right, you are ingesting the views of people who have little or no concept of the intellectual underpinnings of the subject, or of the importance of theories of learning in relation to it.

Having a library dedicated to ICT, even if only in the corner of a classroom orcomputer room to begin with, is a way of starting to address these and other concerns.

A library is?

But first, what exactly do I mean by 'library' in this context? Perhaps perversely, I do not necessarily advocate maintaining a library comprising multimedia resources -- at least, not to begin with. Whatever we may wish to beieve, books still carry an air of authority often eluded bhy other media. Besides, it's actually much easier to pick up a book and point something out than trying to locate the relevant section in a podcast, say. So, I am firmly in favour of a library comprising mainly, or even solely, printed material.

What should the library contain?

There are several types of printed material, and I would suggest building up a stock of the following:

  • books;
  • magazines;
  • leaflets;
  • advertisements;
  • newspaper clippings;
  • official publications such as curriculum guidance, exam specifications, and government policies;
  • posters.

Reasons to have a library

Here are seven suggestions of how to make your library an integral part of the work you, your colleagues and, of course, your pupils or students do. In other words, these are the reasons to have a library.

  • To inform other teachers. There are lots of books around which detail the educational benefits of using technology, and which delve into what young people do with technology. There are also books which may not be about technology per se, but which discuss the ways in which learning takes place. It's often useful to be able to lend others a book to help them understand the subject, and your approach to teaching it, a little better.
  • To impress others. This may seem rather facile, but I don't think it is. If you want others to understand that ICT has intellectual value, you must have a visible indication of that fact. In short, a library tells or reminds everyone that there is more to ICT than being able to knock up a database or carry out a search on the internet.
  • For reference, for you and your staff. It's almost impossible to keep up with all the policies and other documentation that comes out these days, and even harder to remember what each one stipulates. Although all of it is available electronically, I think it's easier to go straight to the relevant document on a bookshelf and find the bit you need than trying to remember where you stored it or bookmarked it.
  • For reference, for everyone. I doubt that anyone has memorised every Excel formula or OpenOffice shortcut. Having a few books that go into such matters can be a godsend, espeically if they go into more depth than the on-screen or online help.
  • For research. One of our wider goals should be to encourage (traditional) reading, and one way of doing so is to set work that requires book and newspaper research. Having a collection of newspaper clipping smay seem rather quaint, but I often find that unless you bookmark a newspaper story straight away it is virtually impossible to find it later. That is assuming, of course, that it was even published onine on the first place. That is not always the case, especially if the newspaper covers only a relatively small geographical area.
  • For technical research. This is where having one or two computer magazines comes in handy. If you set a piece of work which entails 'speccing out' a computer system for someone, being able to pore over a comparative review article in a magazine can be a great help.
  • Finally, for pleasure. What can be more enjoyable than sitting down for coffee or lunch with an interesting book? Yes, yes, I know you don't have the time. I never had the time either, when I was a teacher or, indeed, in any of my other jobs, including my current one. But it's important to make the time, even if it's only 10 minutes. Time to think, and time to relax, is never wasted.

So, before throwing out that computer magazine when you've read it, bring it into school. Encourage your students and colleagues to do the same. Use some of your allowance to buy a book or two, or recommend that such purchases be made.

It won't take long to build up a small library. Then your main challenge will be getting people to use it.

12 ways of Making an event successful

Parents' evenings, ICT open days, local conferences, "away days". As a leader of educational ICT you are bound to have to organise such an event at some stage in your career. What can you do in order to ensure that it is successful? Here are 12 top tips.

1: Know what "successful" means

At the risk of stating the obvious, every event should have at least one objective. Friendly get-togethers that are amiable but also aimless simply waste people's time. But even if they are not a waste of time, they may look as if they will be, and that will deter people from attending.

2. Limit the number of objectives

In my experience the most successful events have a limited number of objectives, no more than four or half-a-dozen. Having a relatively small number of aims means that the event is kept focused.

3. Choose the right time of year

OK, there never is a right time, because there is always something going on. So perhaps this should have been expressed as "choose the least bad time of year"! try to avoid obviously difficult times such as the very beginning of term, or examination time. But equally, the slack times, such as in the last week of term, can also be difficult. Often, teachers are too tired by then to want to attend something where they need to be creative, or they are involved in activities such as museum visits.

4. Have a variety of activities

See 21 Ideas for an ICT or Technology Co-ordinators' Day for some ideas that you can adapt for different types of event.

5. Plan ahead

People tend to be very busy these days, and so their diaries get full. If you are planning to bring in an external speaker, this is especially relevant. So book the event as far ahead as possible.

6. Tell people about the event

I can never understand it when I receive invitations for conferences with a week's notice. Since the event had obviously been planned some time ago, why didn't the organisers tell me about it ages ago? How can you maximise the likelihood of someone attending if you don't tell them about it until the last minute?

7. Keep reminding people about it

I do not mean send them spam. Sending them a reminder a week or two before the conference is fine -- it's when it's the first notification that I think it's unreasonable.

8. Give them reasons to attend

Not your reasons, but theirs: what will they get out of it, and why is that better than what they'd have gained by not attending the event? For example, how will attending help them address the new curriculum, a particular course, Every Child Matters or No Child Left Behind? If it's an event aimed at parents, how will attending benefit them and their child?

9. Bribe them!

If you can get funding, perhaps you could send each attendee away with a freebie of some kind, something useful to them -- such as a CD full of resources.

10. Feed them

People often judge the success of an event by the quality of the food they are given. Pay attention to this.

11. Park them

The other thing that people judge by is how easy it is to get to, and the parking. If possible, it's a good idea to arrange for some parking spaces or parking permits to be available, if this is a relevant consideration.

12. Create a community

This won't be appropriate or easy for all types of event, but sometimes creating a website or blog can generate and maintain interest. Before the event, it can help to generate ideas and anticipation, whilst after the event it can help to keep the discussions going, and keep the event itself alive in people's minds.

Over to you

Can you think of anything else that can help to make an event successful? If so, do tell -- make a comment in the area below.


 

21 ideas for an ICT or Technology Co-ordinators’ Day

Does part of your job involve planning and running professional development days for the ICT Co-ordinators (known as Technology Co-ordinators in some parts of the world) in your area? If so, you may find these twenty activity suggestions useful.

The activities are not mutually exclusive. The idea of this list is to use a pick-‘n’-mix approach to selecting a few activities that you could run in a single day.

A separate article to be published on Thursday morning will look in more detail at making the day a success, but for now there is one important thing to bear in mind: vary the nature of the activities in terms of what attendees will be doing. I have attended conferences where the only “activity” consisted of listening to a presenter, with the occasional 5 minute break for a table discussion. That sort of menu is ultimately not very useful for people, as they struggle to maintain their concentration after several hours of doing very little. Make your conference different.

The activities

Book an expert speaker

ie someone who is an expert in a particular area, such as assessing students’ attainment in ICT, or government requirements.

It’s a bonus if the speaker is prepared to run a break-out session or workshop to follow on from their main talk.

Book an inspirational speaker

It can be very useful to get someone in who can get people fired up. However, a lot of one-day conference organisers make the mistake of getting in two such speakers. That is too much: people like to be inspired, but then they also want to know how to translate their new-found enthusiasm in their lesson tomorrow morning.

Book a product demonstration

Schools may be thinking about buying a particular product, or a particular type of product. Getting in someone to give a demonstration, especially if it would be difficult for a school to evaluate it on its own (such as a VLE) can be quite useful.

However, if the aim of the exercise is to decide as a whole group which product to buy for all schools, you will probably need to go through a more formal process in which would-be suppliers are invited to demonstrate their wares.

Book a product training session

If schools have recently been given or have recently purchased a particular product, a training session may be quite useful. You may wish to organise a couple of parallel sessions, so that people can choose whether to go to the basic or the advanced “course”.

If there are quite a few attendees, some of whom may not need any training session, give a couple of further choices for them.

Write your ICT Strategy

Nobody in school has enough time to do things like write their ICT Strategy. You could provide them with an opportunity to do so, in a situation in which they will have access to your and their colleagues’ expertise and experience, and access to all the official documentation they need.

Write your e-Safety Strategy

As above, but for an e-Safety Strategy.

Observe a lesson, via video

Watch a video, and then discuss with others what were the good points and what the not-so-good points about the lesson (or extract from the lesson). You may want the group to focus on a particular aspect of the lesson. In fact, you might ask different groups to look at different aspects.

Obviously, you should get the video clips from a source that is in the public domain, or make sure you have the teachers’ permission to use it.

Observe a scenario, using actors

There are actors’ companies who visit schools and other organisations for educational purposes. If there are particular issues that need to be addressed, especially where relationships and choices are concerned, they will work with you to devise a semi-improvised scenario that brings out the points you want to address.

Be an inspector

Disseminate the relevant inspection framework, and a case study (anonymised or made up) and invite participants to “inspect” the school or department. What lessons can they learn to apply to their own situation?

Be an evaluator

As for an inspector, but perhaps a lighter touch, less formal or focusing on specific aspects of a school’s ICT provision.

Be a moderator

Disseminate examples of students’ work (anonymised), along with Level descriptions of the set of standards you go by, and ask participants to assess the students’ attainment, and come to an agreement with each other about it.

Be a data analyst

Disseminate some statistics pertaining to ICT attainment for one or two anonymised schools. Which students have shown the greatest attainment and improvement? Which are the areas that need to be addressed?

Be a trouble-shooter

Disseminate a case study of a situation in which several things are going wrong, and invite participants to identify the issues and suggest solutions. I used this approach to address problems being experienced in several of the schools represented at the event, and the outcome was very useful to all concerned.

Create a resource in a day

As already stated, people lack time in school. If you have 20 participants, and they get into pairs and create 10 resources by the end of the day (or the morning), everyone will have an extra ten resources they can use straight away, or which they can customise.

Share good practice, unconference style

Invite participants to take turns sharing good ideas with each other, or resources they’ve discovered, or things they have tried out in their own classroom.

Have a mini-exhibition

Bring in vendors to display their wares around the room or hall. Invite participants to provide examples of work they’ve been doing. Then allow time in the day for people to wander around looking talking.

Have a primary-secondary (elementary-high) school get-together

These two phases of education often do not know what the other one does. Getting them in the same room to discuss what they’ve been up to can be quite revelatory.

Collaborate with a partner school

If some schools are in partnership with a neighbouring school, or for a particular project, make time available in which they can have a meeting to progress some issues.

Collaborate with cluster schools

As above, but involving schools in a cluster, which may be geographically-based or based on a different criterion, such as participation in a government-funded project.

Plan your district’s policy

An ICT Co-ordinators’ Day is a good opportunity to thrash out issues such as the local area’s internet safety policy, or other issues of general local interest.

Have an away-day

This works best with a relatively small number of people, but can be very useful. For example, I once arranged a visit to a major software and hardware supplier. They gave us a tour, showed us products in development, a training session on an existing product and a nice lunch!

Conclusion

One day conferences do not need to be boring, or follow the same old tired format of a couple of keynote presenters and a workshop. Be imaginative!

If you have any other suggestions, please let us know in the comments section below.

 

Checklist: 9 Guidelines for Managing a Technical Support Team

You don't necessarily have to be a "techie" in order to be able to manage a technical support team effectively. These guidelines explain how.

  • Recognise that output is more important to most people than input. In other words, what matters is not so much how long or how hard the technical support team works, but whether the systems are reliable and functioning well most of the time.
  • Most technical support problems have non-technical causes, and therefore non-technical solutions.
  • If you have just started in the role of managing a technical support team, undertake a fact-finding exercise, to determine what the technical support experience is for various groups of people in the school -- including the students. I have undertaken this work for schools on several occasions, and the findings often come as a surprise to the technical team.
  • Introduce reporting and measurement procedures. How many faults were reported this week? How long did it take, on average, to resolve them? What has been done to reduce the risk of the same fault occurring again?
  • Insist on the proactive involvement of the senior management team. In the work I've done with schools, a consistent message has come through that a passively supportive attitude, while better than an unsupportive one, is not enough.
  • Invite the network manager to your department or curriculum meetings, both to listen to what's important to you and, perhaps either briefly every time or, say, once every 6 weeks, to give a report about the network and any matters of concern.
  • If you are the educational technology co-ordinator or manager, work towards having the line management of the technical support team taken out of your hands. The technical infrastructure and support of the school ought to be regarded as a maintenance function, not part of a curriculum area.
  • In the meantime, allocate some of your budget for training purposes for the technical support staff, especially if they will be asked to implement or manage a new network system, say.
  • Ensure that there are clear guidelines for responsibility in place. The role of the technical support team is to advise, implement and maintain. It is your role to ensure that learning takes place. When new computer facilities are being planned, both parties will need to be fully involved in the discussions from the outset.