Tag: Technology

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involver blog

Student voice in your SOLE

In 1999 a group of educational researchers put an internet connected PC in the wall of a New Delhi slum. Then they left it alone. Children from the slum gathered around this ‘hole in the wall’ and, with no direction, taught themselves how to use the computer and browse the internet simply through their own curiosity.

When Dr. Sugata Mitra presented these findings online it was so compelling that his lectures went viral and Mitra was propelled to the status of a minor internet celebrity.

Now, after a decade of follow up research into the effectiveness of child led learning, Sugata is inviting educators from all backgrounds to take part in a wider experiment. By providing groups of children with a Self-Organised Learning Environment (SOLE), the experiment aims to find effective ways of encouraging students to embrace their innate curiosity and use this as their incentive to learn in a broad range of environments, be it in the classroom or the home. This works by posing stimulating, profound or weird questions and letting the children approach the subject in their own way, with minimal outside interference.

At involver we are very excited about the ideas behind this experiment and we think it could potentially have far reaching implications for student voice. By allowing children to take charge of their learning it promotes a culture where they are not only encouraged but expected to contribute and be listened to. A SOLE might, for example, be a great way to get students to prepare a proposal to the school council: students would be responsible for the questions asked, and they would be free to answer them in innovative and exploratory ways.

Imagine the feedback you could receive by posing questions like, ‘why do people from all over the world come to our school?’, ‘who is school for?’, or even ‘what is learning?’, to a group of children, and then leaving them to discuss, explore and discover their own answers. We strongly encourage educators to participate in this experiment so education systems all over the world can benefit from the insights we may find in the results.

If you would be interested in learning more about Sugata’s research you can find his profile at TED.com, or to get involved with the SOLE experiment you can download the toolkit available with directions and advice on how to set one up.

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involver blog

Online student voice course – free places

We just received an email with an opportunity that you may find interesting:

TakingITGlobal for Educators (TIGed) is offering scholarships for our upcoming professional development e-course for educators: “Empowering Student Voice in Education”. This graduate-level, accredited course is designed to help educators understand the value of cultivating and engaging student voice both inside and outside the classroom. Course material draws on the experiences of educators who have incorporated student voice in their teaching practice and designed experiences and projects that empower students to have an equal say in the decision-making processes that shape their education. Educators will critically examine the current state of student voice in their educational contexts, work towards designing a project that enables and enhances student voice and create meaningful connections with their peers worldwide. Microsoft’s Give for Youth campaign has sponsored 20 scholarships for this e-course. For scheduling and more information about TIGed’s e-courses, visit tigurl.org/ecourses. To be considered for this opportunity, please take a few minutes to fill out this survey.

Not having been part of the course, we can’t say anything about how good it will be, but we’d be very interested to find out what it’s like from anyone who takes up this opportunity.

If you prefer your training face-to-face, there are still spaces on our secondary Smart School Council Masterclass course.

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involver blog

Schools: don’t block blogs

Over the last few weeks we’ve been into a number of schools for different reasons, and each time we’ve needed to get online and go to our website.  In every case it has been blocked: the schools’ filtering systems saying this is either because it is a blog or ‘webchat’.

As you can see from looking around our site there is nothing here to concern anyone, and (we hope) much that would be useful to students, teachers and other school staff.  The same is true of most of the blogs I ever visit. Here are just a few that I’ve visited recently that Netsweeper who through LGFL provide filtering for most London schools would categorise as blogs that many schools then choose to block en masse:

By blocking these sites not only is that valuable information lost to the people who would find it most useful, but, more importantly, an opportunity to educate students on how to use the web intelligently and safely is lost.

Rather than simply blocking these sites, the same filtering systems could be used to offer advice and tools in an overlay or sidebar.

When a blog is blocked, students get frustrated, use a proxy to access the site, or access it on their mobile phone.

When a site is blocked, these are the three things a student can do in school. None of them offer the school the chance to educate or supervise the student.

A far better alternative would be to allow access but to provide warnings about the risk of trusting certain types of sites, information and guidance on how to work out what is trustworthy and give people the chance to report problematic sites and content:

How a browser might look with a clear warning about the risk of blogs (or other types of sites) without blocking the site itself.
How a browser might look with a clear warning about the risk of blogs (or other types of sites) without blocking the site itself.

Schools could create their own warning and guidance or use default ones provided by the same people who currently do the web filtering.  This would teach safe and sensible use of the web, which young people need as they will be using it unsupervised at home , work or (increasingly) in the palm of their hand.

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involver blog

Ashley School – using school councils to teach Citizenship

Ashley School Council's great slogan
Ashley School Council's great slogan

Yesterday Greg and I went to Ashley School in Widnes to do some testing for a big project we’re doing with the Parliament Education Service (PES).

It’s such a great school to visit because they really seem to get the links between the school council, Citizenship and the happiness of everyone in the school.

How do they do this:

  • Ensure everyone who wants to participate can. There are elected councils but also groups people can volunteer for.
  • There are groups that reflect a variety of interests to engage different students, to name just a few: Sports, Eco, Anne Frank (community and human rights).
  • All staff take responsibility and get involved with groups and committees that interest them: the PE teacher runs the Sports Committee, the Science teacher runs the Eco group, etc.
  • The school council is structured with a purpose, they decided to reflect the Houses of Parliament and use this as a teaching tool to help students understand the wider political system.
  • Pride of place is given to the pupils’ various councils and groups. They have their own committee room and displays in the reception area.
  • The school council is designed to be completely inclusive. Although there are no pupils with physical disabilities as Ashley School their committee room is designed to be accessible and usable by all, it includes a whole range of assistive technologies. There is even a CCTV system to meetings can be viewed all over the school.

Anyway, here’s a little video of their council chamber. Obviously we couldn’t get the kids in because of child safety issues, but you get the idea.

This is no new thing to Ashley School, they’ve been doing this work for years as this great article in the Guardian testifies: Friends, pupils, citizens

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involver blog Resources

Some cool tools from the BBC

Choose from four different visual tools on the BBC's Pinball site
Choose from four different visual tools on the BBC's Pinball site

A teacher on Twitter (@dannynic) pointed this out today:

bbc.co.uk/pinball

It’s four great little tools for decision-making and coming up with creative ideas:

  • Firing out ideas
  • Making quick decisions
  • Mixing up ideas
  • Playing with images

I just had a little play with them and it seems to me they could be great tools to use in your school council meeting or action group, especially if you’ve got an interactive whiteboard.

Have a go!

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involver blog

Case studies, Slovakia, and next steps

Good news 1:

Hard work (and many late nights) over the last week has meant that we are pretty much done with the pupil voice case studies that we are writing for the SSAT/DCSF. The schools and LAs that took part (thanks!) are receiving them to sign them off. Be good to get it all wrapped up soon, and we hope it will be helpful to schools./LAs.

Good news 2:

At the start of October, we’ve been invited to Slovakia to take part in a three-day meeting about pupil voice in Europe.

They have been working on a school council project called ‘It’s your choice, use your voice’, and want to hear more about how things are approached in the UK. There’s potential for future cooperation too. Should be a great experience, and lots of fun – full blog to come – take a look at http://www.rcm.sk/en/news.

Also had interesting meetings with NCB, Send for it/Portland (the company who have bought School Councils UK) and our friend Jem (http://twitter.com/_jemima) on Search Engine Optimisation stuff. 95% of this went over my head but in a stroke of luck, Asher is a web geek, and he managed to follow things.

In other news, working at home in the kitchen is difficult – I keep eating EVERYTHING.

Hope all is good.

Greg