(In Parenthesis

On my day off, just before the start of the Easter holiday, I spent part of the day virtually attending the BectaX conference, and making the occasional contribution via twitter. There have been plenty of excellent blog posts reflecting on the event from delegates who were there in person, or online, and I don’t think I  have anything significant to add in relation to the event itself. However, the dominant theme of BectaX was rammed firmly home on my return to school after Easter.

Most of my classes are homing in fast on A-level exams, and I want to ensure that they have easy access to good revsion materials and  support both in school and outside of lesson time. There are several excellent blogs that I regularly point students towards (for example englishlangsfx.blogspot.com, and david-crystal.blogspot.com), and I have successfully used wordpress blogs in the past (eg. mcauleyenglish.wordpress.com, which I abandoned, intending to use our new school VLE, but that has not yet lived up to its promise and I find it awkward to use). So, I set up a couple of new wordpress blogs with the intention of populating them with resources and blog posts, intending them to be immediately useful for my current students, but also with an eye on making them valuable for students and teachers elsewhere doing the same courses, rather like this one for the English Language (A) specification; I do Spec B and hoped to build something similar.

The key, recurrant theme of BectaX that I alluded to earlier was the importance of opening up the use of technology for learners (and by learners I include teachers, of course). I don’t think anybody could have put it better than Nicola Mcnee, a school librarian (how inadequate that by now rather quaint term seems for what she is doing) , whose presentation can be seen here.

You can imagine my dismay then, when I returned to school after Easter to find that without warning or any announcement, the filtering system used for our students’ internet access has been changed so that, in addition to previously blocked content such as twitter and youtube, all blogspot blogs (including ones I had previously requested to be unblocked), and previously unblocked content including all wordpress, posterous and typepad blogs are now inaccessible to our students within school.

The simplest and most practical response to BectaX that I saw came from Tom Barrett. Point 4 of his plan for a quiet revolution is “Write a blog post about your ideas. (Or even start a blog for your ideas!) Share your experiences, frustrations, successes and hopes for your work.” So here is my blog post about my frustration.

But it strikes me that what we could do with to carry the argument forward positively is some kind of ‘arms cache’ of references to research, policies, polemic and good practice in effective management of more open access to the web and learning technologies. I have already pointed out the Ofsted report from earlier this year that students are safest using the internet when trusted to manage their own risk. What else could I use to make the case against indiscriminate blocking?

(Perhaps you could share anything you’ve found useful or persuasive on this matter in the comments.

Last Friday night I went to my first TeachMeet at Doncaster South CLC.

Yes, that’s right: Friday night.

I was with a bunch of teachers and other education professionals from 6 until just turned 10, then joined a few of them to continue the conversation in the pub afterwards.

On  a Friday night.

Now, I’ll be honest, it’s not long ago that I would have guffawed at the idea of doing ‘schooly’ stuff on a Friday evening, and the fact I’m starting this post in this way shows that I still feel the need to be a little apologetic about the fact. After all, nobody likes a swot.

But as teachers, surely all but the most jaded and wilfully cynical of us (and believe me, I’ve been both) prefer kids who at least show a bit of enthusiasm, and are prepared to take an interest beyond the bare minimum required of them in lessons. And if we hope for that from our students, surely it makes sense to live it ourselves.

So that’s what I was doing there. Over the past year and a bit, I’ve learned an awful lot from developing what I’ve learned to call a PLN (Personal Learning Network), largely via Twitter. It’s not been a uniform upward curve, and the re-enthusiasm for teaching and learning that has been ignited has stuttered and guttered at times, but when I saw that there was to be a TeachMeet so close to home I decided I ought to overcome my reticence at throwing myself into unfamiliar social situations and just go.

I’m glad I did. Even the most techthusiastic and socially maladroit of us benefit from real live human interaction, and there is a degree of attention you can give to people standing in front of you explaining what they’re up to that is difficult to sustain for such a long time if it’s only on-screen. Another advantage of throwing yourself into the pot-pourri of people such as those few dozen who turned up on Friday is the discovery of ideas that you might not otherwise have chosen to give any further thought to.

I have no direct reason to use some of the particular tools shown to us by James Cross, a music teacherfrom High Storrs school in Sheffield, but I was left thinking about his reference to a ‘folk tradition’ of peer learning and teaching, and how social networking tools and online publishing can help to tap into the creativity that kids naturally have, but which is often exercised in ways that formal schooling fails to harness.

I am not a primary teacher, but the energising experience of seeing David Mitchell present with remarkably engaged and engaging live input from some of his Year 6 pupils; Peter Richardson show how Voicethread can be a powerful tool for peer assessment, and Jim Maloney reveal how his Year1 kids were sharing and collaborating with each other, other classes and their parents in a variety of ways, prompted ideas that I can see gestating into my own practice in various ways.

Catherine Elliott explicitly bridged the phase-gap with a fascinating account of transition work using gps data-loggers for Y6 pupils to record a tour of their new secondary school. Continuing the techy theme, Matt McDonald, a  history teacher from the next-door Balby Carr school, impressed with his use of mobile phones as a learning and revision tool, harnessing positively a technology that nearly all the kids have, but that we tend to expend undue energy in censuring.

Lest it seem like TeachMeet is nothing but a tech-geek love-in (though, let’s be honest, there is something of that), one of the presentations I found most gripping and thought-provoking was by Julian Wood, a primary deputy from Sheffield. Eschewing the wealth of presentation technology available, Julian stood and simply spoke, softly but clearly, about a vision of education ‘in a third space‘, in which teachers are just as much learners as their students, and in which the relationships between people, and their environment, come to the fore. I haven’t summarised what he had to say at all well, but like most good stories, its impact is in the ideas it sets resonating, rather than in its reducible content.

Have I mentioned that I laughed a lot? How can a bunch of teachers get together on a Friday night to talk about ‘teachy’ stuff to each other without seeming cripplingly earnest? I don’t know; it seems implausible, doesn’t it?

(I suppose it has to do with finding learning fun.

It’s my turn again to do the prayer/reading at staff briefing. I defiantly cling (not very devoutly, it must be admitted) to the notion that the Christmas season extends through to Candlemas, so this morning I went with a festive theme:

And is the meaning that we look for in the vast expanse of space,
or in our silent inner place,
really in the screaming newborn face
of a baby, oblivious to its fate,
innocent, incapable of hate?
Is it in an epiphany that needs to wait
until, like Magi, tugged towards the East
we too will turn to face the least
likely agent of God’s grace, and feast
ourselves on that ridiculous plan:
Himself, in a tattered corner of his universe, made man.

It’s that 3-way-pull time again.

Today I spent mainly doing craft-y things with my little girl as if it were still properly the holidays, but it didn’t feel like it. With my wife back at work today,  a training day for me tomorrow, a stack of work still awaiting, and the distraction of Owen Coyle’s apparently imminent departure from Burnley filling the sports news, I feel as though I’m in no-man’s-land.

I know that – as is the case after every holiday – I’ll miss my family like mad; but equally I know that the routine will soon erase that pang and, well, it’ll be OK.

Some aspects of the first term of this academic year have been pretty frustrating. In particular, the fact that I am (as always) roomed all over the place is a problem, and I have even less access to decent ICT facilities than normal. I am making as much use as I can of the laptops my department has available in the trolleys on each site, but on every occasion, at least some of the laptops have either not worked at all, owing to issues such as dead batteries, log-in problems, or lengthy Windows updates kicking in (why are these not done on a scheduled basis outside lesson time?). When we have finally got working machines, we have frequently been plagued with internet connection problems.

(Nevertheless I’m still plugging away.

The Googlewave phenomenon is breaking over the edublogosphere and twitterverse, and I was fortunate to receive an invitation today courtesy of Greg at futurebehaviour (don’t go pestering him: he gave me his last one, Rolo-like).

I’ve only had a few minutes to start working out what it’s all about, and it’s certainly not an immediately intuitive tool, but it does look as though it’s beginning to bring together in one place some of the most useful features of many of the web2.0 tools I’ve been messing around with over the past year or three.

A directory of waving educators is being developed here thanks to Dan Stucke.

I’m very conscious of my recent neglect of this blog. I have loads of posts swirling around in my head. I’ve even got round to composing some of them in full.

In my head.

Topics include:

• Ofsted (Ofcourse)
• Edmodo
• Voicethread (http://voicethread.com/share/455140/)
• Prezi
• Etherpad & Twiddla
• The demands of students in regard to coursework and how so much of what we do and are expected to do goes well beyond the JCQ guidelines for the conduct of coursework
• Thoughts on how the energising experience of developing an online learning network might be brought into my school context

At some point, perhaps, a fully considered post about how I find it incredibly difficult to do little tasks (like writing blog posts) when I have much bigger ones hanging over me even when I’m not actually doing the bigger ones, might be in order.

In the meantime this is just a little acknowledgment that I’m still here.

(And it may be something else…