From Wikimedia Creative Commons
Last week I had the privilege of attending BectaX. Becta is the government body which promotes technology in learning and BectaX (exchange) is the start of a conversation between digital media specialists, educational professionals and policy makers about the future of learning through ICT in schools.
Alice in Wonderland?
As an outsider to the workings of Becta I felt a little bit like Alice entering Wonderland when I arrived at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre. Entering a room full of 150+ people (mostly men) I felt very small indeed. There were also many participants, including school students as young as 8, watching a webcast of the event and feeding through comments on Twitter using a BectaX hashtag. (#BectaX).
Then, in the afternoon, after my 6 minute “quickfire” presentation about some of the innovative things we are doing at Kingswood I felt I had grown to such an enormous size that I was touching the ceiling! There were so many complimentary tweets being projected onto the screen at the front of the auditorium I wanted to curl up in a tiny ball and hide.
Bectax tweets
Of course like Alice, shrunk or enlarged, neither is the true picture of me!
A mad hatter’s tea party?
I’d asked to be at BectaX because, as many in school know, I’m passionate about the need to help students learn to use the web in smart ways and to ensure they have the skills for an adult life that will be very different from what my own has been.
Most of the discussion throughout the day concentrated on the way school filtering systems and very strict Internet “acceptable use policies” are hampering teachers from helping students understand the best ways to use new digital media. Many teachers are themselves not confident users of ICT and have very little time to learn. So what to do? It was a bit like the Mad Hatter’s tea party with many riddles and no clear solutions. Should teachers have a new place (learning platform) where they can be guided through the learning tools online? What about making time for all this? Could motivation be provided by the likes of Ofsted?
Curiouser and curiouser
As a librarian I have a unique opportunity to observe all the teaching and learning taking place in school. And I have great faith in good teachers. They are always using the things students are interested in to engage them in learning. For example: last week I observed many Year 9′s creating and naming their own super energy drink as part of the science curriculum. They were having great fun.
But teachers who are passionate about their subject don’t get the chance to see students using new media and so can’t get ideas about how to incorporate it into their teaching.
So I think the solution is quite simple really! Set up a good WiFi system, open up the network and allow students to use their own handheld devices and laptops in school. Teachers will do what comes naturally to them – watch, learn and assimilate! They will quickly adopt the tools that they find fit comfortably into their own teaching style and that will make the use of these tools authentic.
There are risks to such a strategy but this is where Becta can help – by providing a framework for assessing the risks and preparing a programme to help schools educate students to safely participate in the new communities to which they belong.
At the risk of stretching the analogy too far I say lets get rid of this “Off with his head” all- or-nothing approach to Internet use in school and get on with the Game!
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A good sumary Nicola, and well done for an excellent presentation btw.
Why I partly agree with the fact that school systems need to be less restrictive, I think that we have to be very careful in regards to unrestricting the network. In my professional capacity as an IT Manager for a global IT company, even doing this for corporate networks is not advisable and the same restriction, sometimes more, applies to these environments. I am also a Parent governor at my daughters’ primary school; the one that took part in the video link from the North West. I personally think that opening up netowrks for this age group is not a good idea, however there has to be a means of making the filtering systems better and easier to manage, especially consdiering that the teachers do not have the time to be mucking about with tech!
One prime example of why we need to be cautious was demonstrated perfectly only an hour into the BectaX conference. Possibly it was not notice by the delegates in the hall, but it was clear to many following the Twitter feeds. As the #BectaX tag was a top trending topic, globally at one point, this made it a target for automated “bots” to start sending messages to all who followed the tag. These bots can be marketing, advertisiing, or a little more inappropriate. In this case it was an invite from a bot with a link to an adult themes site that I guess would not be suitable for children. This worried me at the time as I knew that 8 & 9 year olds would be seeing this as they watched the feeds.
Now I know that we can be over protective these days, but I think this was a perfect example of how we need filter systems, but also we need to look at making them better.
On the whole, I thought the conference was very interesting and I will be speaking to the school next week to see what we can get out of it. I would hope that Becta would still involve the schools, even visiting them to get face to face feedback, but I am not sure that this will take happen.
If there is only one thing that I manage to get implemented at the school, then this would have to be the use of Skype. This is a no brainer in my view and allows the school to interact cheaply and easily with other school around the world. Imagine a Frech lesson, where you linkup with real French people. Very exciting.
Thanks
Martyn
I’m glad you enjoyed my presentation Martin. That’s good to know thanks.
Of course we can’t have totally unrestricted networks in school but what I’m asking Bectax to do is to help us with a risk assessment framework so that we can allow students a lot more access to web 2.0 tools than they currently have.
Your example from Twitter and the #bectax conference is a case in point and shows how complicated the situation is. As you know children under the age of 13 aren’t allowed to register for twitter (as is the case with facebook and other social networks) so the account for primary school students was presumably set up by the teacher and the risks relating to children viewing unhelpful links was assessed as being controlled by the teacher moderating the use.
What I would like to see in my secondary school is students, when they reach 13, being given education on using social networks alongside allowing them more access to them in school after all the risks have been assessed. If we don’t do this we are failing our students by not helping them learn how to negotiate the connected world out there.
We can’t just put our heads in the sand because whether we like it or not Uk government statistics show that 25% of 8-11 year olds do have facebook or beebo accounts even though they are underage!
You also talk about Skype being a “no brainer” but as an instant messaging service we need to assess the risks here too. Many women receive quite a lot of undesirable spam comments to their accounts. However, as you say it would be a school account and managed by staff, the advantages obviously outweigh the risks! We are hoping to introduce Skype for our older foreign boarding students at Kingswood to be able to contact their parents in the evenings but this will only be done after acceptable use policies and risk assessments have been completed.
In the mad hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland the time is set at 6 o’clock and so the animals keep drinking and moving round the table without getting anywhere! I sometimes feel a bit like this when we go round and round in circles discussing the issue of filtering in school. I just want us to move forward in response to the changing times and ensure our children are well educated for their role in our excitingly connected world.
I can’t disagree with you there. The key point you make here is that schools need expert guidance and assistance here. At the end of the day their job is to teach and not to managed IT systems. So it falls back to organisations like Becta to help in mt view. As you say if this does not happen we’ll just go round in circles and nothing will change.
Let’s wait and see what happens following the conference.
Regards
Martyn
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