Several opportunities have been taken to use the research associated with this project to influence other colleagues both inside and outside the school. Presentations have been completed with the following groups within the school
SLT
ELT
ICT Strategy Team
Whole Staff Meeting
Governors Finance Committee

Presentations for others beyond immediate sphere of influence, beyond the school.

CAMSTAR (Cambridge School Teachers and Research)
www.cam-star.co.uk/index.php

SSAT Conference

21st Century Learning Allience (Three different presentations so far)

http://www.21stcenturylearningalliance.com

Written representations/Reports

School Parents newsletter, The Mitre. Spring Terms 2010
Specialist Schools Newsletter Autumn and Spring Terms
Governors report Spring and Summer term 2010
SECED Magazine article

Teachers TV item. http://www.teachers.tv/news/59971

For colleagues who would like access to some of the materials to support their own work, perhaps in the form of further research or for projects within their own school, some of the presentations and resources can be found using the links below.

SSAT Presentation

Camstar Presentation

http://www.teachforever.com/2010/04/ipad-is-future-of-edtech-not-present.html

in particular,

“Schools must also realize that the iPad signals what should be the death of the netbook.  The netbook was supposed to be the bridge between handheld devices and full-size PCs, but tablets are that bridge.  Spending money on them because they’re cheaper and smaller than regular laptops is foolish and short-sighted.  Save your tech dollars for better tablet computers in the not-so-distant future.”

This is an interesting demo by the CEO of penguin books, this is how they see the future of “books”.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdExukJVUGI

Over the last few weeks (since the last ICT strategy meeting) we have been looking at the devices on the market that might provide a different form factor, touch screen, instant on and a more convenient experience, one of the key pieces of data that we have discussed at Leading Learning meetings is the fact that the students seem to prefer to use the fixed machines at home. This has led us to consider devices that are not “very small underpowered” pcs but to consider it from the “other direction” ie slightly larger phones with some computing power that will allow students to get onto the internet almost instantly and it gives the possibility of downloading educational applications. (Of course school WIFI permitting) This has in turn led us to consider with great interest devices running the android operating system. As a result of this we purchased in a couple of Archos 5 units to test. The demo given at the last meeting suggested that there was a lot of possibilities here and at a very “low risk” price. The downside? well at the moment we are having trouble getting a reliable wireless network connection. The team are working on this but it is a fly in the ointment so to speak. Next weeks ICT strategy meeting might be interesting.

At the ELT meeting this evening, a thorough discussion was held about the progress of the project, ARH made a brief presentation looking at the data that has been collected so far, the blog comments were an invaluable help here, the discussion covered a huge range off issues but primarily the focus was on the ways in which teaching and learning could take advantage of the technologies. I think it would be fair to say that there was cautions optimism as to the benefits that could be gained, we created a checklist of “I would like it to do …. this included, Research, Simulations, Analysis, Collaboration, Data collection, Organisation, Constant/instant comms, Design. There was recognition that a key to the success of this would be to support staff with modelling good practice and providing staff the support to embed some ideas into regular practice. Decisions on the actual device will be made within the next month.

A survey conducted my Microsoft provides an interesting comparison to some of the results returned from the work that we have been doing with our year sevens. When it comes to our write-up it will be interesting to make some comparisons between the bigger picture and the results in our surveys.

With the launch of the Apple Ipad, we watch with interest how this might affect the personal computing devices debate in schools. The early signs look promising and there is some movement on this around the world, one of the first stories to come to light related to schools in Australia. We will keen a close eye on these sorts of stories and indeed the hardware manufactures as they manouvre in the market place.

Update; Interesting that there have been several mentions of the fact that one of the key markets that the ipad is aimed at is the education market, in particular with the inclusion of e-books within the itunes store means the possibility of e-textbooks being a real opportunity. Adding weight to this are stories concerning textbook publishers seriously discussing these possibilities.

The leading Learning team running the netbook project met again in January. There were a number of items under discussion. The first was a series of updates on the different parts to the project that included the IMPACT 09 project, being conducted by Nottingham University, arrangements for the away-day INSET.

Of particular interest was a discussion about whether the use of netbooks had fully supported the learning in classrooms or perhaps, to our surprise, in some ways it had hindered it. The observations started to prompt us to think about the learning processes that were taking place, for example it made us think about the extent to which collaboration and group-work in music composition had a more powerful effect on the levels being achieved or whether access to more specialist computers helped students create better musical compositions. In geography it was interesting to observe how a very experienced teacher rose to the challange of attending to mutliple requests of help from a very enthusiastic year seven group!

The discussion also considered what was the best technology for the future? The netbooks being based on microsoft technologies that rely on access to high volume electro-mechanical storage or whether the future was more likely to involve portable devices with lower volume solid-state storage that had reliable internet access to that application could be accessed anytime anywhere any device.

It was felt that we should continue our efforts to find devices that might provide access to these sorts of technologies but it was recognised that the key to these developments would be good quality high speed internet access. The meeting agreed that these views would be passed to The ICT strategy group at a later date and would form part of the findings from the study.

The Year 7 Computer Use Survey was completed by 128 Y7 students and included a section for the students with net books.

The results are in graphical, spreadsheet (detailed) format and the responses to a number of essay type questions.

The survey is being repeated by 4 schools who attended the recent ICT Mark meeting and these results will be compared with the TBSHS results.

Graphical results – Y7 Survey.doc

We have also been working on a survey of parents views to the project. We are just putting the finishing touches to the survey. We hope that we can get most of the year seven parents to participate on academic review day 27th November. Combine this with the work the SJA has done with the students views, a quantitative study, we should be getting a really clear picture of what is happening.

Other activities that we have been involved in are an invitation to go to Perins School in Hampshire, they have netbooks for their students, a moodle installation and a series of other open source solutions that would be very interesting to see. we are hoping to get a visit organised for 22nd Jan INSET day.

We are also hoping to get a couple more controlled observations completed before the end of term, I hope that PLI will oblige in this respect. Further aspects of data collection that we are considering, is to ask the boys after they have had the laptops taken away and given to other boys what the effect of not having the netbooks has been to their learning. This might be an interesting approach.

We are also considering the software applications that might need to be installed, there is some thought that perhaps we should be installing Google Chrome and giving this a try. This would avoid the need for certain software licences. This would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps we could do this with the new cohort of boys to get the netbooks in January.