Passing the technology baton… to grassroots networks.

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