When John Sutton asked if I would take a flyer and set up blogtheworldcup.net, I was happy to oblige. His idea was a collaborative World Cup site with schools ‘adopting’ a competing nation and developing a blog around that country’s performance in the tournament,  as well as other aspects such as its geography, culture and sporting heritage. The World Cup would present a  great opportunity for teachers and learners to explore and the blogging medium in a purposeful and engaging context.

Momentum in the ‘Wings’

The site was set up using a multi-user WordPress install (pre WordPress 3.0) with the BuddyPress suite of plugins to add some social networking features to the mix. A little competitive spice was added through Ian Haycox’s World Cup Predictor plugin for WordPress. It did not work fully out-of-the -box with multi-user sites but with just hours before the first match, Ian was kind (and talented) enough to hack the code to make it work. It worked perfectly throughout the tournament and provided another common purposeful element to the project. It was really exciting to see teachers pit their wits against students right up until the final match, only to lose out to a young student from New Zealand.

The prediction competition was not crucial to the project’s success but did help to build some momentum in the ‘wings’, providing informal connection points and fun common experience away from the centre-stage. These ‘side-shows’ undoubtedly add to the community feel of any project and can generate a beneficial motivational buzz.

The same principle was demonstrated in the set-up of individual country blogs by teachers. Sites were customised to display engaging multimedia content and widgets showing comparative weather statistics or latest newsfeeds. Designed initially to engage and motivate the local learners, the appeal was not lost on the wider project audience. Effective design ideas and content were emulated by teachers across different blogs, with effective mutual support and encouragement being freely available via blog discussion, using Twitter and on the project’s ‘closed’ teacher’s group.

This ‘window’ into the dynamic preparatory and collaborative processes adopted by teachers in the set-up phase was fascinating and generated a sense of expectation that the project would be well-received. In short, more was accomplished together than could have been reasonably been achieved when setting up in isolation.

Tight-loose Freedom

Despite the tight focus of the project, there was considerable freedom for teachers to engage with the project to fit in with their own context, interests, or curricular constraints and freedoms. Some teachers dropped everything, re-jigged planning and made BTWC a significant curricular focus. Some tied the project to a particular class project, while others took it extra-curricular in ICT Clubs or Study Support sessions. A small number signed up to the project and did not make any significant use of their blog. The ‘tight-loose’ nature of BTWC allowed schools to develop their own space and enjoy the outcomes of their work in its own right – without being reliant on others adopting the same approach or investing the same amount of time. Furthermore, it fostered a ‘light’, collaborative climate without coercing teachers and students to comment across blogs.

The custom use of BuddyPress was also instrumental in this regard, providing students and teachers with an authentic social networking experience for lightweight communication and collaboration. More importantly, BuddyPress provided a real platform and opportunity within school to discuss and engage responsibly with the real life issues that students face using social networking site outside the school gates.

Professional Development Showcase

As a lasting professional development showcase, BTWC demonstrates a whole range of approaches to making effective use of the internet technologies for better learning and teaching. It has a ‘teachmeet’ flavour to it but allows one to ‘poke around’ the processes, outcomes and reflections in a helpfully ongoing way. John Sutton’s seven-minute  Teachmeet introduction to the project was simply an invitation to explore further. The opportunities to easily emulate aspects of this project – in isolation or in their entirety – are amplified by the evaluative and sharing approach of many of the teachers and learners involved.

For example, Simon Widdowson’s Web 2.0 + Interest = Enthusiasm and David Mitchell’s ‘Around the World in 28 Days‘ provide welcome insight into how they practically tackled the project, and a crucial ‘head start’ for others considering the development of  similar ideas in their own contexts. This evaluative willingness-to-share embodies a ‘Teachmeet-style’ ethos, a way of working that is not only crucial to the replicable success of online projects in the 21st century, but also to continuing professional development in general.

The project appears to have been a success from most angles. Statistically, there was a lot of interest and traffic – 645 members, 500,000 hits, 7000 predictions and hundreds of comments. From my perspective, working in the wings, the project was a joy on many levels. However, the learners and teachers must take the most credit for their beautiful efforts centre-stage. It is only fitting that they have the last words, with their own views on the BTWC Reflections blog as to how much they enjoyed the limelight.

Brian Coates, our Becta Regional Advisor, visited the HT team in Northampton today to encourage us to extract the maximum benefit from the remaining time of Becta’s remit to ’inspire and lead the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning’. It was uplifting to see how Becta really are focused on making the most of their notice period.

We will be running a development event for Northamptonshire schools in September to help them to make the most of ICT within the new Ofsted framework. The Self Review Framework – wherever it ends up – will continue to provide a useful means of benchmarking the effective use of ICT while planning a path towards further progress. Combining these two elements, with Brian’s input, will equip schools to plan and implement better learning using technologies – with the resulting positive side-effect of better Ofsted inspection outcomes.

In what is probably a first in the history of Northamptonshire County Council Continuing Professional Development (CPD), the event will also be streamed live to interested staff in schools, and recorded for later reference, review and discussion. Our Better Learning using Technologies (BLT) Network will also interact with Brian via video-conference early in September. Making the cultural shift to exploit these types of communication and collaboration technologies is no longer an optional luxury. It seems to me that this sort of flexibility and expectation of sustainable value and impact should become the norm in this climate of providing ‘more for less’. In fact, higher expectations of CPD should always have been the norm!

Meetings and discussions around ICT policy and learning technologies have an air of a wake about them at the moment. The conversation ebbs and flows between memories of the achievements, missed opportunities, present realities and future challenges. The climate around ICT in education has undoubted changed but has anyone or anything really ‘died’? The unwavering faith in government circles of the importance of ICT for learning, borne out in past budgetary spending, has petered out for now. Becta and the LA support mechanisms are being dismantled with responsibility for life, the universe and practically everything being devolved in the direction of schools.

However, the remit to ‘inspire and lead the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning’ will not be a blanket novation to schools. The baton will instead be picked up more informally by many grassroots networks of educators, forward-thinking schools that share, and other interested groups and organisations that are able to facilitate, embrace and reflect the decentralised nature of what is to come.

Yesterday’s brilliant Teachmeet in Milton Keynes, the building of the BLT- and IT Managers‘ Networks in Northamptonshire, the forthcoming Naace Think Tanks on the future of ICT in education, and the launch of eduLAIT are all recent examples on my radar that  point to ongoing future vitality in the effective and innovative use of  technology for better learning. Despite recent government announcements to the contrary, the future of technologies for learning is bright – and finally in our own hands!

Image Credit – Shenghung Lin

In these tough financial times Local Authorities are under immense pressure to provide the same for less. In reality, the very fabric and identity of the Local Authority is changing. Savings, efficiencies and cuts to services both now and in the near future mean that the scope and range of local authority activity will be dramatically and permanently curtailed. It remains to be seen whether these structural changes will prove a catalyst in translating the government’s ‘Big Society’ rhetoric into the reality of families, networks, neighbourhoods and communities with more power and more responsibility to help themselves.

Many LA employees are surely going to pay for this shift of power with their jobs. However, the brave new LA world that emerges from this structural upheaval will present massive opportunities for those who survive to provide more for less – if strategic leaders model, embrace and facilitate the development of wider collaborative networks and 21st century ways of working, listening and communicating.

Both David Cameron and Paul Blantern, the Chief Executive at Northamptonshire County Council, have asked for ideas from public sector workers regarding our current ‘Spending Challenge’ or ‘how to save money and deliver more for less’. It seems appropriate somehow, as Harnessing Technologies Manager, to blog my two-penneth worth on the subject over the next few days – adding my own views to the local and national crowdsourcing pots.

The recent announcement by Michael Gove outlining the process for setting up Free Schools, also set out a plan for reallocating £50 million of funding from the Harnessing Technology Grant to create a Standards and Diversity Fund. This is to provide provide capital funding for Free Schools up to 31 March 2011. A further reduction was announced yesterday to take this year’s funding down by a further £50m, allowing schools to reconfigure their broadband and IT infrastructure projects onto a more sustainable funding model

For the Harnessing Technologies Team in Northamptonshire, this news will almost certainly lead to cuts in services and/or personnel, the details of which will become clearer over the coming days and weeks. My own position, as Harnessing Technologies Manager for Schools, hangs in the balance but I feel reasonably comfortable with that situation. Examining budgets, projects and services in close detail is actually proving very good for prioritising ideas and projects. Job uncertainty is most unpleasant but it does focus the mind on making the most of every professional opportunity to make a positive difference to the learning of Northamptonshire’s young people.

The notion of a first “hundred days” is an artificial creation of Franklin Roosevelt after he became American president in 1932 in the Great Depression. It has become a benchmark for evaluating the early success of a president. No great depression here, but benchmarking success or otherwise in my last hundred days in Northants might prove an interesting and potentially cathartic experience.

Learning Platforms in Northamptonshire

The learning platform landscape has been changing for a number of months across Northamptonshire’s school landscape. The provision of a countywide solution by the Local Authority on behalf of schools comes to an end in August 2010. From that time onwards, the strategic and financial management for learning platform procurement and adoption returns to the decision-making mechanisms of individual schools.

By devolving grant funding back to Local Authority, schools have actually been paying for their platform provision over the life of the centrally-procured contract. However, it was the quote for next year’s provision physically dropping into the heads’ inbox a few months ago that finally drove school leadership teams to crystallize their thinking in this area and to nail their colours to the learning platform mast.

Some schools have decided to ‘stick’ and continue to build on their experience with the present provider while others are desperate to ’twist’, hopefully seizing the opportunity to choose another platform flavour to complement the implementation of their strategic school vision and aims.

A significant third group, however, does not have a clear idea whether to ‘twist’ or ‘stick’. Having not really engaged meaningfully with the learning platform agenda over the last years, some schools feel they have neither the strategic framework nor user experience to be able to make effective decisions about a learning platform in time for the new academic year.

The arrival en masse on the Northamptonshire learnscape of potential new platform providers offers choice for some schools. For the undecided however, an even thicker collective fog of information and disinformation descends with every aspirational sales-pitch.

Schools finding themselves in the valley of learning platform indecision have another option – to strategically delay making a choice. Strategic waiting is neither the same as avoiding the agenda altogether, nor is it jumping on a bandwagon for the sake of it. Learning platforms are simply tools – not a panacea for every learning and teaching challenge known to man. As such, any learning platform decision needs to be placed firmly within a school-wide vision and strategy for using technologies to make learning better. This is not an optional step. Without it, the decision to ‘stick’ or ‘twist’ learning platforms will undoubtedly lead to ‘bust’ in terms of sustainable outcomes for better learning.

So if your school is undecided about learning platforms, why not invest some time now to evaluate where ICT fits in to your vision for teaching and learning? A school community with a common strategic vision for technologies, is a school well positioned to decide for itself what is required to make it a platform for great learning.