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Learning Score

Monday, June 14th, 2010

I confess, I have only recently watched this video. I cannot believe that I have not heard of or seen Learning Score before; I can only say that I must have had my head buried deeply in the sand.

Learning Score appears to be a fantastic tool for devising lesson plans. These things had been the bane of my life as a teacher and I’m sure the same is true for many other teachers.  Hours would be spent drawing up lesson plans either by hand or on a word-processor; it was probably the most tedious of all teacher tasks. Also, as John Davitt says in the video, you were never really quite sure how the lesson would appear in reality (and there were many times when the reality hardly matched the plan!)

What I  immediately like about the software is that it looks appealling; it’s not a word-processed grid or template that the teacher has to squeeze everything in. It’s interactive and it links dynamically to other resources. What made it appeal further for me is the potential to link  to resources on a VLE. So if you’ve been spending hours days uploading content onto you’re VLE now you have an easy way to make use of them instead of just letting them lie there. Or if you’ve not yet started loading content onto your VLE, now you have a good reason to start!

I’ve not used the package as yet but if you are able to save the Learning Score files onto the VLE then I can envisage further potential arising. What I’m envisaging is having a Learning Score containing links to other Learning Score files. Each of these Learning Score files would represent a lesson plan and the Learning Score we’re adding them into would be a Scheme of Work. Hey, if we then save the Scheme of Work as a Learning Score file and link in other scheme of work files, aren’t we creating a syllabus, then a curriculum etc..?

At points in the video, John alludes to collaborative lesson planning; with the learners having a say in how much time is spent on a particular part of each lesson. I very much like this idea, not least because it helps the learner have a bit more responsibility for their learning and having a say in the way the content is being presented to them. It also, of course, could help them manage their workload.

How about going a step further and having the learner draw up the learning score themself? Each learner could have their own individual Learning Score setting out what they are going to do, how long they are going to spent on each part of it and what resources they are going to access, possibly also indicating what ‘output’ (essay, video, discussion etc) they are going to produce. Let’s then say that they each present their Learning Score to the teacher for approval. The teacher examines each one and approves it or suggests modifications such as extra resources that could be used or alterations to timings.  The learner then takes their own Learning Score away and embarks upon their own learning path.

I’d guess that another beauty of the package is that it needn’t be confined to class lessons, the Learning Score could cover time spent on activities at home. As I started writing this paragraph, I was thinking of learning activities from home and thinking of supporting Home Access but I guess the term ‘activities’ could well include social or leisure activities … mind you I don’t know if the package has icons for some of these ‘activities’ ;) Nevertheless, the possibility of using the package to include home learning is intriguing.

Overall, this looks a great piece of software that I’m sure many teachers would love. It has great potential for supporting innovation or transformation in learning. I do feel that not just teachers but also learners would love to use it. Maybe this resource should be made compulsory for any school involved in BSF or Primary Capital building programmes?

 

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Posted in BSF, Classroom Technology, Transforming Learning | 3 Comments »

ICT : Education on the cheap?

Monday, March 1st, 2010

1412355940 5a0d537dde m ICT : Education on the cheap?

A few weeks ago I took part in an online discussion led by Stephen Heppell on the Vital website. Stephen Heppell is a very highkly regarded figure in the world of education and if you ever have a chance to listen to him speak or present, then I’d certainly suggest you do so. He is a speaker who inspires and provokes thought.

In the online discussion, Stephen asked why was it that ICT had not reduced the costs of education? Apart from Health and Education, ICT had been deployed and used to reduce the overhead costs or running costs of their users. I cannot speak for Health but I can for Education and I felt at first that this was an unfair question. After all, we started introducing technology into the classroom we did so not to reduce costs but to expand and improve the resources and experiences offered to learners. So to criticise us for not using ICT to reduce costs when that had never been our aim, did seem unfair.

Was it unfair, though?

A few days after the online discussion, I received in my inbox an email linking to this article about ICT for students with disabilities in developing countries . In this article it suggests that students need ICT partly because it is cheaper than training and paying for a teacher. The inference being that ICT is a cheaper resource than a teacher and one which, possibly, better addresses the need of the students.

This would be quite a contentious argument here in the UK. How many people, schools or local authorities would welcome replacing teachers with computers, even if it reduces the bill?

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Knowledge, Learning and Information – Learning Transformation pt2

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

336823369 b9f6586422 m Knowledge, Learning and Information Learning Transformation pt2
Image by everdaniel via Flickr

I want to start this post with a question;

‘What is learning?’

A definition of learning that was put forward in 1985 is that learning is ‘the process of acquiring knowledge’ (1)

So if learning is acquiring knowledge, what is knowledge?

I would offer to you the following definition that knowledge is information that has been acquired, retained or memorised and which can be demonstrated upon request or in response to a question or as needed.

So knowledge is retained information and learning is the process of acquiring that knowledge. It would seem that many decades our education system has been based upon this approach.  For most of that time, the means of acquiring knowledge and the sources of information have been few and limited. By which, I mean that the sources have primarily been parents, teachers, books, friends and some television and radio programmes.

One problem which I am sure many of us will identify with, is that some, perhaps much, of the information we retained as learning from our own time at school, has turned out to be useless or redundant. For example, I know that the capital city of Paraguay is Asuncion yet I have never needed to know or use this piece of information, it might be useful in a pub quiz but that question has yet to pop up. I also learned how to perform monetary calculations in pounds, shillings and pence (£sd), a financial system which became obsolete in the 1970s.

So, traditionally, the sources of information had been limited and we often learned unnecessary knowledge.

Taking the first point first, we have to ask ourselves whether the sources of information are still as limited as they have been in the past. I think the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’; not only do we still have teachers and parents but we also have more television and radio programmes. The internet has opened up a wide range of information sources and made access to them more readily available. Not only that but, believe it or not, we also have many more books. Even without the internet, ICT through computers and software, has opened upon a wide range of new information sources and learning opportunities.

So, with all these new and wide ranging sources of information and new opportunities for learning, can we expect the traditional approach to cope adequately? I think again the answer is an unequivocal no.

Taking the second point made earlier; that we often learned unnecessary knowledge. We need to ask whether this is still a possibility and a problem.  I think the answer is that it is still a problem, in fact I would suggest that it may even be more of a problem. I say it is more of a problem because today’s learner has more sources of information and therefore more opportunities to learn unnecessary things possibly to the detriment of important items. I would go further and say that today’s learner needs to be able to distinguish what information needs to be retained (learned), what information needs to be obtained, used, then discarded and what information needs to be rejected, ignored or possibly avoided.

I don’t think that anyone would disagree that it is the responsibility of learning professionals to enable learners to learn and to identify or use appropriate information. I don’t think many people would argue that our traditional approaches to learning and teaching, that were evident last century, would do this. We can only conclude, therefore, that our approaches to learning need to change from what we used in the past.

(1) Buchanan, D and Huczynski, A (1985) Organizational Behaviour, Prentice Hall

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School Design and Pupil Performance

Monday, January 4th, 2010

495090038 c6f407024d m School Design and Pupil Performance

A recent survey has shown that teachers believe that the design of a school has an effect upon pupil performance. This is possibly a timely reminder for those architects, designers and consultants involved in BSF.

One criticism I have had about BSF designs is that it is bringing ‘open plan’ schools back. This is despite the evidence and experience we have gained from the 60s and 70s which indicate that open plan schools have a detrimental effect upon pupil performance.

One major criticism in the report was that teachers were unable to control the temperature in a classroom. I’m sure all of us as teachers have experienced this and seen the effect it has upon our performance as well as the performance of pupils.

9 out of 10 teachers said that classroom lay-out was the most important aspect of school design. The key point here is that they have classrooms rather than teaching ‘bays’ or part of a much larger room accommodating other groups at the same time. These classrooms need to be versatile and of such a size that staff can move furniture around easily to create variable workspaces; this must be the key message to BSF designers.

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