ipads, (or raspberry pi) or …

Gillian Perry, ex primary school Headteacher (of twenty years) was just a warm-up for Johann: evolutionary biology PhD student, ex-dance teacher and for the last six years IT development leader at a failing school in Sweden. There had been much effort (a series of motivational speakers) & money (1:1 ipad deployment) spent on transforming the 6–16 academy from the lowest division (1100th of 1500 Swedish schools) to the top 100.

The key messages were:

Open-ness

Johann described the WordPress school newsletter that was one channel to the parents but also the continuous stream of information on FaceBook and Twitter. In passing, it was interesting that Aberdeen University’s Intranet had been usurped, to a certain extent, for information distribution to the students by FaceBook.

Assessment

His second presentation was about how testing was no longer such a chore. His point was that the traditional feedback cycle of: assignment issue (22 off), pupil attempt, handback, marking & feedback — often so long afterwards that the pupil had forgotten what the original project was about. He demonstrated an Apple LMS(learning management system) app called “Sobi” (?)where a photo-study exercise was set up by an audience member and he recorded comments on her effort orally in a timely way; she did not modify her effort but the process was clear. He said that he operated a flipped classroom: the students knew what the work was in advance (homework needed) & on the day he concentrated on the 5% who didn’t want to work (a little) and the other 5% who did not understand what was required of them. His style was to be edgy and the example class of inheritance was deliberately controversial, possibly.

Multimedia

With the latter cameras were used to take pics of people’s eyes these were displayed on OHP using Apple TV which was wireless from anywhere in the classroom, in particular behind troublesome students. Incidentally, this did not work at the Beach Ballroom & cabled connections had to be resorted to.

One benefit of a move away from predominantly paper based approaches was Inclusion. There was talk (did not demonstrate) of voice-over for documents to help blind and dyslexic students; key was such was baked into the Apple offering.

Planning

It was mentioned several times that for at least an hour a week teachers would review their progress with ipad introduction. Their lessons which were published could be critiqued and supplemented with national materials from itunesU: an example of core maths (in Swedish) was to have been shown but the network was too slow.

Pupil-centric

Though I did not stay for the Echt kids demo of Keynote (aka Powerpoint) it was clear that they were comfortable with their ipads that they carried round with them. In contrast some of the late-comer teachers struggled to log on to the intranet on their multi-coloured cased computers.

Overall

In conclusion it appeared that it was early days in deployment of such technology in Aberdeen City. There was only one piece of paper distributed which was a University school survey whose focus appeared to be electronic communication processes.