Day 1 Q&A – 21st Century Teacher Training

The end of the first day saw a great question and answer session around teacher training. Particulary around the fact that many classteachers have access to levels of technology and supporting professional development that are perhaps unavailable to trainee teachers. 

A early question was raised about Colleges of Education. Are they old fashioned in their outlook? How do we bring them into the 21st Century?

Sir Geoff Hampton asked us to consider what skills we should be providing trainee teachers with in the modern age. He said trainees need to be trained for teaching in tomorrow’s world. He also advised on some approaches that are showing signs of successfully working, including how a much closer, on-going cooperation between trainee teachers and working practitioners could encourage development of more up to date skills. If the trainee and the teacher are dealing with the same issues together, then there can be effective cross-fertilizing of ideas. (a form of teaching apprenticeship perhaps?)

A higher education institution in the US commented that they had put Activboards in 17 classrooms at the College of Education. Now two thirds of their faculty are adopting the technology. A key factor in their success has been in the integration of Promethean professional development programmes into the staff and student training.

Stephen Jury from Promethean noted that Promethean are keen to partner with more Schools of Education in order to explore the industry/academic partnerships needed to address this skills gap and Tom Greaves suggested making a level of basic IWB competency an employment requirement.

A US district replied, describing their programme, “The best in everyone” – a compulsary 9 hour course in effective Interactive Whiteboard use that all teachers must take.

A quick interview with Tom Greaves on the impact of Interactive technology

We caught up with Tom over lunch. He was quick to comment on the Promethean multi-input Activboard. He had the following to say:

“The multi pen board from Promethean is an amazing beauty we have yet to fully appreciate and understand.

To me, the London study into Interactive Whiteboards highlighted how teachers, who had not got the benefit of strong professional development support, could misuse the immense potential of an Interactive Whiteboard. Examples of this included bringing single students up to work through questions and slowing down the flow of the lesson.

I think this Promethean development will literally change everything. Collaborative, shared use of the board cannot be avoided. Students walking into a Promethean Activclassroom will instantly know they can expect more than an instructivist experience.”

On the wider, long term impact of the Activboard and Activclassroom in classrooms, Tom had the following to say:

We are just starting the journey to understand how Activboards will change everything. We are perhaps only 5 years into a 30 year cycle. The whole idea of a large, group centric, interactive display system will become ubiquitous. The connection to the curriculum will migrate to it, content will migrate, assessment will migrate.

In a short time we can expect that there will be little curriculum that is not tied to the interactive whiteboard presentation. Currently teachers have to look at their state standards, look at the curriculum, look at the paper based tests and then look at the Activboard and Activote and try to make sense of it all.”

Promethean has set out to help teachers make the best of the opportunity presented by interactive technology through the creation of Promethean Planet and the Promethean Learning portals. What is Tom’s view on these?

“The huge success of Promethean Planet is because the intrinsic value of the activboard is fully understood by educators.

The teachers recognise the potential of the solution to change the outputs of their their teaching to such a degree that they are prepared to help drive the community to evolve itself to maximise it.

This is unprecedented with any other learning technology that schools are embracing.

Teachers are doing this because they feel the Activboard has the promise of doing ‘extraordinary things’ in the classroom – and in light of that – teachers are prepared to do extraordinary things to celebrate and share this…. they know their contribution will help another educator do something extraordinary.”

I asked Tom what other research could help those considering an Interactive technology purchase understand the benefits.

“One thing that has struck me in reading the research reports is that there is at least 30 different kinds of uses of Interactive Whiteboards – while many of them are highly productive academically, some are only mildly productive and some potentially damaging. What I think is missing – as far as I can tell – is that no one has made a ranked list of board uses based on expected student outcomes. For Example – one use of the board is that the teacher can create a graphic representation of something at the board in moments. Compared with using a chalkboard – each time this skill is applied – time is saved. Time is a measurable and valuable commodity in a busy classroom. If you are just using the board to help slower student work our problems – then the board has little if any advantage over a chalkboard.”

An empirical study into the 20 or 30 most common teacher activities and how the use of the Activclassroom changes them will generate data that makes clear where and how teacher productivity is actually being maximised. It is also important that rubrics are in place that measure not only time but quality, richness and depth.

We also need to capture and understand what makes for ‘the Ah ha!” moments.”

Perhaps our readers have something that needs to be on the list of existing and new teacher techniques that can be facilitated using Interactive Technology.  Please comment!

The Americal Digital School Survey 2007

Tom Greaves, Chairman of the Greaves Group and a key innovator in teaching and learning with technology, introduced this major study of technology trends in the US Education market.

So what does the Crystal Ball say? In a summary of the report, the following points were made:

• US schools are transitioning from a desktop world to a mobile world
• 19% of US computers and currently mobile – by 2010 it will be 50%
• Ubiquitous computing is growing rapidly – students already have many wirelessly connected computing devices.
• 24% of school districts are moving to 1:1 learner to computer ratios
• Professional development and administrative support are the main pre-requisites for success with IT in education initiatives. 65% of superintendents see it as ‘extremely important’
• Where technology was ubiquitous, moderate to substantial academic improvements were identified in 87% of schools/districts.
• Online learning (enrollment in electronically delivered courses) is growing – with a four fold increase in online course enrollment of 15.6% projected by 2011

Some important issues were also identified:

A bandwidth crisis is looming in the USA. Current projections only provide students with 9.57Kbs second – less than a quarter of the bandwidth needed to support effective use of web based technologies.

Despite the promise of the Internet to provide endless free content. It has not turned out to be that easy to find and integrate. New, publisher content is needed. Content that is small enough and that can be flexibly managed for educators by educators is needed.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is important and not often thought about upfront. TCO encompasses, maintenance, updates, and effectiveness. Superintendents were most sensitive to this issue. Looking at the cost of initial purchase can lead to costly mistakes in the long term.

Finally Tom advised those setting out on a major interactive education initiative need to share the experience of others and think about the ‘breakthroughs’ that technology can enable for students – not just its short term impact on SATS score

Co-located publisher event attracts large numbers

The rapid international growth of interactive technologies such as learner response systems and interactive whiteboards has led to a requirement for new forms of content to exploit the pedagogical approaches they provide.

In recognition of that, over 50 national and international publishers are attending a publisher event that is co-located with the Symposium on the 10th of October.

Some of the questions that this event hopes to answer are:

• Is there a new blend of technologies that can make the best of group teaching and independent learning opportunities and what does it look like?
• What technical support and authoring tools do publishers needs to maximise the infrastructure that is actually going into schools and being adopted by teachers?
• What options exist for a publisher or software developer to create completely new tools and services by integrating learner response hardware and multi-user interactive whiteboards into their own products?

It certainly looks like there will be many questions and hopefully many answers. Expect to see a range of interviews and comments in the blog…