How do you go from wanting to do it to doing it

A dilemma for many senior leaders in schools is how to secure the vision for E-learning. How do you get staff to buy in and ensure e-adoption rates. I don't think there is one universally accepted answer to this but I am firm believer in getting everyone involved at one level or another to secure at the very least, a basic understanding. Systems driven by content and collaboration are only ever going to be as successful as the people that drive forward innovation and their use within a lesson, hopefully embedding it into the culture of the school. Systems have to be sold to teachers and the best people often to do this are the students themselves. Let's face it, students these days are all digital natives and could pretty much do what the teachers may want them to do through an online learning environment. The challenge is how to engage teachers to want to get involved and engage with, what for many of them is an alien way of learning. Here a Costello we're no different than any other school, yes we're a technology college, but like every other school we have a diverse mix of staff. Some of whom are chomping at the bit to delve into a digital environment along with others saying - what's the point - I don't teach in an ICT room every lesson.

Getting all staff to understand the vision of where the school wants to take E-Learning and buy into it is such an important process, yet I think it is one that sometimes gets overlooked as staff implementing systems want to see a return on their investment so quickly. We launched our Learning Platform with a full staff meeting that was really put in place to fuse together the vision and wrap it up in a way that was accessible to all staff - ensuring that there was the chance for open and honest discussion along with lots of questions. This alone though is not enough - staff need time to process what they have seen and listened to so what we have done at Costello is to actually use the learning platform to educate staff about the learning platform.

Within FROG I have set up a sub-portal within the main staff portal that staff can go to find out about the E-Learning vision at the college, access the multimedia presentation with voice over that was delivered at the initial staff meeting where FROG was launched. They can watch a 7 minute virtual tour of the learning platform that explains all the main functionality - certainly enough to get them started as well access to a getting started guide. There are pages where staff can access video tutorials as well as training documents. There is even a page written specifically for subject leaders that sets out the road map as to how they will need to engage with E-Learning over the next few months - even including a generic action plan for them to use as the basis of shaping their own departmental plan.

What better way to sell the technology than to use it! It's not rocket science - just about using the technology in an innovative way to secure an outcome.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

PODCASTS

GCSE Media Studies initial run of five podcasts went live today - total set up time by teacher - 5 mins. Students already subscribing to feed through iTunes/podcast catcher and the like. Great result and 110% from the Media Studies department - "Distributing engaging digital content to students could not be easier."

Part of the college's vision for E-LEarning this year is to really push engaging revision content and support materials for Y11 to access - we've perceived this to be a relatively easy short term win that will have a really positive impact on our student population. Am going to put a post up later in the week about how we have tackled the issued of securing an understanding and ownership of the college vision for E-Learning through our E-Strategy.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Press Coverage

Photographers from both the Basingstoke Gazette and Hampshire Police were in school today covering the college's use of FROG to develop positive relationships between our students and Hampshire Police. Our PCSO (Alex Wheatland), two of our Y7 sudents who have used the discussion forum to ask Alex questions along with myself were involved in the photo shoot. Should be in local press within next few weeks.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Hampshire Police and FROG

Have been asked for a press release by Hampshire Police on FROG and how we are developing it's use with our local Safer Neighbourhoods Team. Looks like this will get Hampshire Wide coverage within Hampshire Police internal publications as well as an article in the local Basingstoke Gazette. I had a meeting with Lee and Alex (PC/PCSO) yesterday and they are both really excited about the potential that the discussion forum is going to open up and came in bristling with lots ofnew ideas. Alex wants students to be able to send her private messages and both are keen to develop content and make themselves available via online discussion forums to parents once we go live with the parent portal.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Initial thoughts for the New Year

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post, so, let me start by wishing you all the best for 2009. If it is anything like mine has started it's going to be a great one! Two weeks off from school allowed for a great deal of subconcious thinking and visioning, I've come back with lots of good ideas to start rolling with in the new year. So look out for new posts that will start discussin these ideas in more length.

At the end of last term I started development work on our transition portal. Work began with a meeting with Matthew Frape (Transition co-ordinator) to secure the vision of what we want to do with the portal. Matthew worked hard last term getting feedback and thoughts from Primary headteachers and staff as to what content should be included. We're keen that this be driven by content and be exciting and engaged for the Y6 students to use, setting the tone as to the ethos behind the day to day working in a technology college. As a result of the meeting I sat down and set up the portal skeleton - have based this on our existing student portal template. Time taken - 1 hour, bonus! Now have skeleton pages set up. I'll be putting a post together as to how the transition portal is structured and what content is going into it in a post next week.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Safer Neighbourhoods

It has now been a week since the launch of our safer neighbourhoods area on FROG. The students have really engaged with it so far, with a number of posts being put on the forum - mainly asking about our PC/PCSO who come into school every week - who they are/why they come in...

Feedback from Hampshire Police has been excellent - PCSO Alex Wheatland views the developments here at Costello as an excellent way of engaging external services with our students and helps to support the delivery of the Hampshire Children's Plan. She is particularly keen to use the forums as a way of communicating with our wider student community to develop supportive relationships and get key information out into the community. Alex has already posted on the forum in response to student postings.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Developing stronger Community Partnerships

Over the weekend I wrote a page to be embedded in the student portal to develop our already strong relationships with our local safer neighbourhoods team. Currently our local PCSO and PC come in to school every couple of weeks to chat to students and make themselves known, developing good relationships with students in the process. We've talked about the idea of putting an online presence for them. Basically the PC and PCSO have logon's to our learning platform - they can only see the page shown here and cannot access anything else. This will enable them to put notices directly out to our students and to enter a dialogue with our students through the online forum.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Community Policing meeting online community at Costello

I've just spent the past hour putting together an online community within our student portal for our local safer neighbourhood team - PC Lee Stanbrook and PCSO Alex Wheatland.

Both officers are able to log onto the specific community policing page which will allow them to engage with our students (and vice versa) through a discussion forum. The Hampshire police webpage for the local area is also embedded for students to access. We hope that this will provide our local police with a forum to get notices out to our student community and allow our students to engage in a more open discussion with the local police service - allowing them to ask questions of interest.

I am getting feedback from Alex and Lee next week, system will be going live to students before then end of term.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Feedback from Parent Focus Group Meeting

The inaugural parent focus group meeting took place last night at the college and was a fantastic event from the college perspective. It will prove extremely useful in shaping where we move developments with the parent portal. What also became evident was that parents are engaged by becoming engaged - if that makes sense!

7 parents attended the evening that ran from 7pm until gone 9pm - I was only expecting to go on for about an hour and a half, but the discussions we got into were extremely interesting - for everyone! The parents represented a cross section of the college community with parents from all year groups being represented and the number present was just right to get some good discussion going. We started by giving parents an overview of FROG from a student's perspective and this immediately confirmed the need to run some sessions on this alone for parents - to develop their understanding of FROG and what it can do. I will be arranging some parent insight sessions on FROG in the new year.

It was clear that parents want more than just an online presence they can visit to get key information. Parents do want to be able to interact on many different levels and get involved with the broader community life at Costello. We started by unpicking what key data/information parents would like to have access to, the following was identified as important:

Student Progress/targets - Parents want access to targets, current working grades/levels but some sort of trend analysis. What is really important is communicating back to parents current targets to facilitate improvement (text comment).

Behaviour - Rewards/Reprimands, along with other positive comments. Not huge amount of detail -just an overview.

Attendance - Pretty much what I thought it would be. Have already discussed this with Jonathan and Craig at FROG. When parents view attendance data they would like to have flagged dates that have unexplained absences so they can send this info to the school via an online form. I.e. parents see exception report and can deal with sorting out reasons.

Key dates for homework assignments/coursework deadlines

Information on Examination courses - exam boards, specifications, past papers etc..

Student timetable

College Calendar - parents would like to be able to export the calendar in different formats (iCAL etc...) so that they can important into their own diaries - thought this was a cool idea.

Interestingly parents are not interested in accessing actual lesson content but having access to project/lesson summaries is more appropriate. For example, a couple of parents talked at length about being able to view student assignments on their diary - when they click on it a simple 2-3 sentence summary of the task is displayed - ideal when the student has not written the task down properly in their diary (HW). Some felt that having access to additional support materials was important to supplement this.

We got into the discussion about different styles of parenting and that actually having some information available to parents could have a negative impact on students and teacher/student relationships. The group felt that students could have access to some privacy settings so that they can decide whether parents can access some elements of content. For example - the discussion that takes places between a teacher and student in terms of feedback is quite private, but a student could decide to allow their parents to see this. Parents agreed that things like attendance/behaviour/grades/progress data would not have privacy settings.

All parents want good quality TWO way communication between themselves and school, a number said that this is one of the key differences between education in the primary and secondary sectors. They want the facility to send notes to students tutors. Ability to contact tutors/teachers directly through the portal - but without necessarily knowing the teachers email address. Parents felt this was important to safeguard staff. To keep things simple they would like to be able to click on a contact subject style button that would bring up a message dialogue box and then send info directly to the relevant teacher (linked to student/subject via MIS). This can open dialogue between parents and staff.

Extra Curricular Activities

These came up on a number of different levels. Parents would like to see an online database of all the clubs available (managed by teachers with basic info) that students can then subscribe to, to attend. But FROG is then used by whoever is running the club to take a register so that parents can check attendance. They felt this was important when some activities might be paid for by parents.

Online discussion forums

These were discussed in quite a lot of detail and seen as having huge potential to engage parents. Parents want to engage with a variety of different formats. Forums where they can engage with each other - parenting support etc... But also forums for feedback and advice on supporting parents. They also felt a parental forum that was Q&A between parents and the senior leadership team was a fantastic idea, with SLT response time targets. It is clear that the majority of parents want to "assist both the school and the student." Parents want discussion forums that teachers do not have access too as well.

Online Booking System for Parents Evenings

This was something that all parents said would be brilliant and would definitely get used every time. When a parents evening is scheduled, parents log on and see the time slots available for the relevant subject staff and can book slots. Print summary of bookings ready for evening - staff do same.

Online Payments

This was something that everyone said. Parents said they would like to be able to make payments for various things through the portal - such as school trips, peri music lessons - even to the extent of cashless catering systems. Parents mentioned that different payment options would be attractive such as Google checkout, paypal as well as PDQ/merchant services. The more I thought about this, the more I am convinced of the value of this service. However, online payment processing does need investigation from a school perspective in terms of how third party systems can link in with our financial systems etc...

Online satisfaction surveys

Parents are keen to support schools by providing feedback to inform strategic planning - whether it be the annual parent survey or other surveys that focus on smaller school improvement projects.

Method of dealing with forgotten password

The login page must have someway of sending a parent an updated password if current one is forgotten. Parents want the system to collect personal email addresses as they are also keen to get info pushed to them, rather than just pulling information by logging onto the portal. In terms of parental engagement this kind of tug of war is important and we'll miss out if we do not address this.

Having thought about this overnight I think parents should have a profile page (bits of which they could make public etc..) but we ensure they enter their own email address - it's their responsibility to keep this up to date. This way if password is forgotten we have an email address to automatically generate and send details of replacement too. Parents also quite liked the idea of being able to sign up for different kinds of email alert, rather than having to rely on logging into the portal all the time. This could be managed via this profile page. Think there is a great deal to be learnt from Facebook actually!

All in all a really good meeting - my head is now full of great ideas.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Film Crew @ Costello

A three man film crew has just spent the last hour at the college working with some students, a governor and myself on a project commissioned by FROG. Students did exceptionally well in terms of explaining how the learning platform is being used. Can't wait to see the results!

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Securing Culture of E-Learning

Just finished the staff meeting here at Costello that has been put over to securing the vision of E-Learning at the college. In an hour and 10 minutes I've tried to develop staff's understanding of E-Learning, where we are now and where we want to go - securing our vision of E-Learning in the process. Meetings like this are always difficult as you never quite know which level is the best one to pitch at to ensure that everyone engages. I decided to keep things really simple - started talking about national agenda, societal trends/cultural shifts, a quick tour of FROG and how the college is expecting all departments to embrace in it's development in forthcoming months into the next 18 months. It is interesting that a number of colleagues still think of E-Learning as a formal curriculum time activity and not as personalised learning outside of the curriculum. This is one are that I did stress, that the development of FROG, certainly in the short term needs to focus on creating and providing to our students, rich, high quality content to inform learning and support revision. For many departments the reality of this should be a fairly easy win and the combined effect of all departments engaging at this level will see a big buy in to the technology and start putting down some foundations.

Some questions were around broader ICT issues not specifically around E-Learning. the points made were valid and really do reflect that staff are genuine about wanting to engage in the technology.

I am going to be working on developing some technical documentation for departments over the next few weeks along with some logistical plans for moving some of our hugely over populated network shares onto FROG. It is going to be important for these to be rationalised by staff first of all and represents an ideal opportunity for some housekeeping.

Anyway - big day at the college tomorrow. We have a film crew in from FROG in the afternoon, this is being followed up by the inaugural meeting of our Parent Focus Group that is looking at parent portal functionality.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Student use of forums

One of the immediate gains and short term wins of our implementation of FROG as our learning platform is the use of forums. The school has set up a number of forums to engage students from day one and start developing a culture of collaboration, not just between staff and students, but more powerfully between students. Forums have been put in place for all subjects - creating HW help forums, forums for student voice as well as one for fund raising, FROG. Students have suggested a number of additional forums they would like. Interestingly enough these have all revolved around school related activities. We know have one for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme as well as Computers and Technology. I see the forums as a powerful 'hook' to keep students engaged whilst staff and departments rapidly deploy there own resources onto FROG, managing the momentum of FROG and keep it going is crucial over the next 8 weeks.

The forums are also proving to be a useful conduit for communicating developments and ideas from students back to me as there is a FROG suggestion forum - the posts in here are really interesting and very insightful, showing that students have a really clear grasp of the power of the technology and how they would like to see it being used.

The way that forums are implemented works in a fool proof way, but the more we use them the more potential we can see within them to enhance engagement through ICT. Developmental points for FROG for forums:

• The most important - once you have added to a thread you get emailed when someone replies. This is crucial particularly for staff. For example, our governors are starting to use the forums really well. Unless they check the forums regularly they do not get prompted when a new post is made. Likewise if a student submits a new topic for homework request, they need to get notified as and when someone responds.
• Embed URL's into posts, rich html formatting of posts, including smilies, images
• Can see number of posts made by user - number of posts could equate to credits that have some value? food for thought.
• Can quote a previous reply as part of post
• Nested forums / sub-forums

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Lead Learners

Just a quick thought to park. We have already established students as FROG Wardens to moderate posts to the student areas. One set of forums that we have created is for the explicit purpose of students supporting each other with homework. There is a different forum for each subject. It is our aim to get a group of students to monitor each of these forums and support other students by offering support and guidance. We are going to call them lead learners.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement

At Costello we are at an interesting crossroads with regards to the development of a parent portal. We have something waiting in the wings, ready to go public, but are currently working closely with FROG to develop some of the key functionality that will help us to realise the 2010 targets quite a bit earlier.

The Becta toolkit suggests a normal of key milestones to manage this change: allocate responsibility within your school leadership team (guess that's me), assess where your school is regarding online reporting using the Becta framework, consult all stakeholders including governors, staff, parents and learners to agree the strategy and vision that suits the context of your school, consider how progress could be made in each of the four framework strands and plan accordingly, contact your local authority to discuss specific plans, initiatives or partnerships that may already be in place, consult ICT suppliers, advisors and consultants to investigate possible solutions to support your school vision.

We we have got to so far is this, our whole E-Learning procurement was really based on a wider E-Strategy remit, with full stakeholder representation to shape the broadbrush vision. I am currently going through the Becta framework to see where we are, more out of curiousity than anything else as I know we have the capacity to incorporate enhanced parental engagement and have the capacity for change management.

One of the key drivers at the moment is the establishment of a parent focus group that is going to focus on unpicking what parents actually want to see and be able to do with regard to the education of their children. I put an article in the current newsletter (went home Friday to all parents) and have already received a few emails from parents expressing an interest in working with the school to shape our vision for the parent portal. The other driver to get this group established is that I want to be able to feedback this information directly to FROG. I am really excited about the opportunity to work, once again with a third party to develop what I am sure will be a product that can lead the marketplace and well ahead of its time in terms of key functionality.

I am hoping to get a meeting set before the christmas holidays so that I can bring the group up to where we are at the moment and give them the opportunity for some blue sky thinking. I am hoping that much of what they will be saying and requesting has been scoped already but it is important to get people involved and take some ownership of new developments.

I am toying with the idea of going live with our current portal soon - something that I have been running through in my own mind for a couple of weeks now. On the one hand I recognise the advantage of going live with a fully fledged product but on the other I could be using the forums within our current parent portal to get more feedback and keep parents informed as to what key developments are next on the horizon. Decisions, decisions. I know that I would get far more feedback from the masses by doing this than holding a meeting, but it would be a very different kind of feedback. That parent focus group will be the forum to ask lots of probing questions to shape ideas. I think the two approaches can compliment each other.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!

History of E-Learning at Costello

Costello Technology College is a specialist technology college now in it's third phase of designation. We had an OfSTED inspection at the beginning of October 2008 and we are just reshaping our SDP to resubmit for re-designation. This is my third year at the college and the main thrust behind my appointment was to bring technology to the forefront of our ethos. I do pretty much all the normal things that an Assistant Headteacher does but I am also Director of Specialism, Director of Community Learning and shape the colleges IT strategic vision - something that is so important if we are going to get buy in from everyone.

There's quite a bit of confusion of technology status from both staff and community stakeholders. Our specialist departments are Maths, Science and Technology. It is interesting that ICT got dropped from the list of these specialist departments, although it is still an important element of the work that we do with our wider community. We've found it difficult in the past to develop projects that can see our specialist departments taking a big lead in developing whole school improvement. The development of E-Learning stuck out as something that would really address this. I joined the school on the back of a large capital investment in IT infrastructure (£150k+) - the college had just procured a big overhaul of their infrastructure and had installed an RM CC3 network. In terms of access to E-Learning this was pretty minimal, students could access their network areas from home using RM's Easylink (Webfolders) and staff could place documents for students to access through Learning Resource's. The college had made the right decision not to try for anything more at this point as incremental change is the key to embedding technology, getting buy in from staff - taking ownership and moving developments forward. At the time they neither had the staff expertise or capacity to move things forward any further.

Staff at the college are receptive to technology and change, so long as this is managed very carefully-within 4 months of me joining the college we had pushed email as the standard form of internal communication - which has had a huge impact on whole school efficiency. I facilitated the introduction of a digital signage solution around the college to (a) communicate with students and (b) have a media rich forum to showcase their successes. Investments was also made into a permanent IP Video conferencing facility.

• Digg this
• Add to del.icio.us
• Stumble It!