Only a short while back, I wrote a blog post entitled ‘Working with what You’ve Got’, little did I realise at the time that, with the possible curtailing of BSF and other capital projects, working with what they’ve got might become the only option for schools.
I still stand by what I wrote in that post. The starting point for any transformation in learning must start with what facilities or provision a school has already. To a small extent, this may be an indictment of the BSF programme where huge amounts of money and effort has been put into supplying and equipping schools with new ICT equipment and yet no or little transformation in learning has been evidenced as yet. I’ve heard it said that this was because the transformation was laid at the doorstep of the change agenda, which had a different budget. Hence this may have allowed more money to be spent on ICT infrastructure but it also led to a divorce between the ICT and transformation. Perhaps it is now time to remarry the two!
I also feel part of the problem is that ‘Learning Transformation’ is a vague concept. It is a concept that is positively received and you will find few people who argue against it. Sadly, though, our previous government seems to have been masters of spinning positive phrases that nobody fully understood. ‘Personalised Learning’ was a classic of the genre; again nobody was prepared to argue against it and it seems everyone was in favour of it but there was no clear consensus as to what it meant. This culminated in the infamous government committee meeting where senior officials in the department had to admit that they did not know what it meant. After that, things became very quiet on the personalised learning front as the concept seemed to gradually fade from our radar; will ‘Learning Transformation’ go the same way?
Ironically, I feel there is a link between personalised learning and learning transformation. For me, the heart of learning transformation is putting the learner in charge of their learning and I see this too as being the ultimate in personalised learning. But more on that another time, for now let’s just try to keep Learning Transformation on our radar despite current difficulties.
Related articles by Zemanta
- ICT and the changing role of the teacher (slideshare.net)
- Where We Sit As A School (slideshare.net)
- Pupil and Parent Guarantees, and ICT (ictineducation.org)
- Brave New World pt3 (mrkp.edublogs.org)
- Computers in Classrooms Post-BETT Special (ictineducation.org)

Possibly Related Posts:
- Flipping Textbooks
- Lesson Plans or Learning Plans?
- Using a Visualiser with the Visually Impaired
- World Book Web and Virtual Libraries
- What Matters Most in Educational Technology
























One early evening I found myself recently giving a presentation about ICT and improving learning to a group of school teachers as part of their INSET training.






