The View from the Classroom « Naace Conference Blog

The View from the Classroom

What was said in this session:

Pupils and staff from the Cornwallis School and Hugh Christie

Hugh Christie Technology College - Anything is possible

A 1170 non selective school with 1:1 ratio, many being Tablet PCs.

Would a teacher of yesterday recognise our classrooms of today?

We would like to think that the answer to this is no. We have created different learning spaces of different sizes. The ICT is in classroom and in the hands of pupils and teachers.

Our objectives:

- Personalising learning

- Creative learing

- Integrated learning

Power of personalisation, example, PDAs in Year 10 Geography. The PDA is ideal tool. Jamie said:

“Its’ portable and easy to carry around … we can personalised to our taste. There are about 20 pupils using them. I’ve using it a Geography to do survey’s and collect data. Here we use Pocket Word and Excel. We also use a GPS system to plot where we are. the advantage is that we are not using a paper clipboard. Everything is stored in one place, we can do your work on the go.”

Power of Creativity example, using Flash. Easy to make simple animations. Pupils can create animations to illustrate concepts. Teachers find it easy as well.

“I found it easy to use in Geography and other subjects such as ICT. For example, the way in which a volcano erupts. It’s much more interesting to use than paper and pencil. … Flash is great fun to use, it makes learning fun.”

Power of Integration, example, Tablet PCs.

“Global Warming presentation was created on our tablet PC using research from the internet. We worked as a group to do this. I like it that the teachers are helping us and not telling us.”

Research and Development
We’ve set up an ‘ICT champions team’ to help staff develop competencies. They run sessions for other teachers.

We also have feeder schools coming to our schools, and community projects.

Cornwallis School

We have to do more with less resources.

The lonely artisan problem - the teacher in individual classroom. A distinctive problem. They need to work together.

Some solutions:

- work on as many agendas as possible at the same time
- make it simple
- make it fast
- don’t worry about confusion
- chaos is normal

A series of 100 day plans.

Shift the budget away
Invest in technology, aim for 1:1 access
Development of a common curriculum
Develop a common communications model
Focus on teaching and learning with use of project based learning; teacher and coach model
Use of external Ofsted inspection teams
Assessment of learning every 7 weeks
Change the staff culture e-scripting
Relationship driven environment
Key Performance indicators
re-branding exercise
sell the idea of education - make it cool
data mining leads to new sub groups
offender profiling identifies those at risk

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Sessions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The View from the Classroom”

David Perry says:

March 7, 2006 at 9:15 am

Chris Gerry’s address was so rapid it was almost impossible to take it all in but I found it the most encouraging of the whole conference.

Here at last was someone who was prepared to question some of the ‘givens’ of English education that turn out not to be cast in concrete after all.

I’m so sick of hearing Heads complain that their budget is too constrained to allow then to do X or Y when Chris showed that he can go for 1:1 computer ratios from his core funding - but only if he questions radically all the holy cows that others won’t look at.

This should be compulsory fare for all involved in BSF.