#DLchat as a Slow Chat

Most people who know me know how passionate I am about having digital leaders in schools and the benefits they can have. I have been known to nag folk about hosting #DLChat - and posting on the digital leader network. #DLchat and the Digital Leader Network are a collaboration between like-minded people and not owned by any one person; it's the energy shown by a great community of professionals that keeps them going. 

I'm not quite sure exactly how long #DLchat has been going, but over the past few years we have had some really successful chats on a Thursday night. Some weeks have been quieter than others and lots of regular chatters have had major commitment changes over the past few years, though remain as passionate as I am about digital leaders. A couple of years ago I asked people if we should change the chat to a different night as many people had other commitments on a Thurs. It was felt at this time that it should remain the same. I do now feel that a different format is needed, to keep the chat going and to include more people. If you check out the # each week, tweeters have shared photographs, blog posts and events with their digital leaders and more of these people might like to host if they weren't tied to a Thurs night. 

When @Bekblayton proposed that we trialled a slow chat, I thought this could be a great way of keeping the chat going, whilst involving and including more people. A slow chat happens when someone poses a question, then it is responded to throughout the week. An alternative (thanks @clcsimon) is whereby the host posts a different question each day throughout the week. We can find it by searching for #DLchat and following the threads.

So now that it is more flexible, there is no excuse! Here is the document you need to sign up for hosting! When you sign up, you can state whether it is one (or more) questions / ideas / topics for the week, or whether a new question will appear each day. It's entirely up to you!


I think that this way we will include more international digital leader advocates and we can learn from each other. It also might just tempt those who are put off by the fast pace of the chat as responses can be slower and more thought out. 


So to kick off this week's slow chat, tomorrow I will be asking: 

Q1: What are the benefits of having digital leaders? 

Q2: How have they contributed to school improvement? 

Q3: What difficulties have you encountered when supporting digital leaders?

These will hopefully appear throughout the day ... 

I'm relying on others contributions, as I am now attending an an unexpected meeting on Thursday from 6pm. But that's ok, because the slow chat can continue for a whole week! So please do join in. Don't be shy or feel you can't contribute because you haven't before - all views and ideas are welcomed! We can learn a lot from listening to one another and sharing oue good ideas. 

How can digital leaders have an impact on the computing curriculum?

A post for #DLChat on 17th September at 9pm

I confess that my work with digital leaders has been sketchy over the past couple of years. I left the role of ICT coordinator two years ago, but that doesn't mean I have lost my passion for what I believe to be an asset to any school. We do have digital leaders at East Harling and I am fortunate to work with some of them in our code club, but I am not directly involved with what they do for the school. I have tried to get KS1 digital leaders going (mini DLs as I like to call them), but this has proved difficult despite their excitement about the role. Time is a problem. I aim to try again this year! The reason I am telling you this is that the following is based on experiences that are over two years old. They are still very valid and I actually feel very proud of what we achieved as a school before the computing curriculum became statutory. 

My digital leaders met at least once a week and had different areas of expertise, depending on their interests and what they wanted to learn. A couple were responsible for blogging and they updated their digital leader blog independently. They had lots of ideas, many of which came into fruition.

They hosted an open event where teachers and technicians (spot @kevin_sait!) came along to learn about the impact they have in school. I know that this had an impact as the ICT coordinator from my current school attended - and subsequently advertised for digital leaders. He has been supporting them in school for over two years now. 

So what about computing? Well I like to think that between the digital leaders and I we left a legacy of good practice. I was always quite hot on teaching the computing elements of the ICT curriculum as I knew that it was the part that teachers shied away from. Being an AST meant I had to know. I also wanted to find resources and ideas that would inspire children to engage and teachers to develop the passion to deliver confidently. So my digital leaders learned how to use - and become experts in - a range of resources such as:

• Kodu
• Mozilla thimble
• Hackasaurus
• Scratch
• BYOB
• Probots
• Popcorn
• Sherston resources
• A range of ipad apps

I'm sure there were more, but these were the ones I remember most. I did not teach them, they learned by exploring, breaking things and through trial and error. Pretty much the same way that I have learned. It seems to stick better that way. 

They taught their peers during class ICT sessions, provided staff workshops and 1:1 support (depending on the teacher's year group), provided computing workshops for teachers in our cluster, presented e-safety sessions in assemblies, hosted kidsmeets, attended kidsmeets to learn new things and participated in cluster livewriting sessions to share expertise with other children. I have no doubt about the positive impact that they have had. I am very proud of one of my digital leaders who, after two years of campaigning to get her high school to employ digital leaders, has taken on the role herself. At the end of last year she had 20 year 7 digital leaders turn up! Wow! 

Of course the impact they have had is only measurable by the anecdotal evidence from other staff members, but I know that many felt more confident to try things out after they had received training from a digital leader - or they had them supporting in class. The laptops were being booked out more, staff were becoming more adventurous with what they were teaching and the children were leaving school with a greater level of skills.

I know that schools rely on passionate staff (or young people!) to keep any digital leader movement going. As a deputy, SENDco and year 2 teacher my time is very limited. My experience with year 6 digital leaders though was that they almost managed themselves. Some of them came more than twice a week and I was quite frank that they had to work things out themselves - and they did! At times all I provided was my room, meagre tips (and only when I could sense frustration) and the fact that I was available (often marking). So if you really want to get started but are concerned about protecting your time, promote an ethos of self-learned expertise. 

In #DLchat I would love you to share your successes and struggles. Maybe we can persuade others to employ them this year and find out for themselves what impact they can have.

Why should we employ digital leaders in school?

I asked the question below ready for the keynote I am delivering at the Shropshire computing conference next week and got lots of helpful responses. Then someone asked if I would storify it to help others. Erm ... yes! It's always good to learn something new! I've seen them and been mentioned in them before, so tried it straight away. It's simple to use and a great way of collecting tweets. I'm sure this won't be the last time I use it!

The digital leader network: At the Norfolk ICT conference

Good morning conference attendees! I hope that you will find some useful posts on this blog, but in the meantime get involved! 
Get involved 1: Why not place a digital leader pledge to the linoit below! You can see examples of what other teachers have pledged here at the Naace hothouse last year. 

Get involved 2:
Add your answers to the answergarden.

Get involved 3:
Check out my name-dropping list too for links to marvellous digital leader/ICT work going on in the UK. 

Get involved 4: Impact of digital leaders
Read about the impact of digital leaders, according to the schools that employ them, here. Find out why Tom likes being a digital leader too.

Get involved 5: Badges If you are looking for some of the digital leader badges, you will find them here. If you would like to see some of the slides from my presentation again, you can view them here. 


If you start nodding half way through the keynote, try doing something from this blog post. Appshed is a fab challenge!

Free screen capture tool

ScreenR is a free screencasting tool for PCs. To show what it does I have made one of my digital literacy project. I usually use explain everything on the ipads, but had trouble showing prezi through that. Excuse the audio - it was done of the cuff and I hadn't realised how noisy my right click was! It does show the possibilities for digital leaders to use this as a method of tutorial creation though.

How we are using ipads at Roydon

Yesterday my digital leaders led a staff meeting to show off some new (and some not so new) apps. They started the staff meeting by showing what can be achieved with some of the apps with the offer of 1:1 support sessions with teachers straight after their demonstrations. They were marvellous! Our HT is relatively new to the school and will admit to not being particularly techy. She considered it to be a brave act on both parts, to let our digital leaders take control and teach the teachers. Eloise live-blogged about it on their digital leader site during the meeting and the whole thing was a great success.

Why was it successful? Well there are a few of us at school that get enjoyment from playing with tech and trying out new things. I'm not saying it's a hobby, it's more of a desire to create awe and wonder in the classroom and to ,learn new things so that we can teach children to try new things. There are more teachers at school who don't want to take (more than necessary) work home with them. So whilst some of us have used most apps in the classroom, others are sticking to a familiar few. They wanted time to explore apps with experts on hand, hence the digital leader workshop. Here are the apps that my digital leaders showed:

• Comic life - a great app for comic creation, newspaper reports, posters etc
• Notability - useful multimedia app
• Smart office - for making and sharing microsoft office documents
• iMovie - create movies in minutes. See my DL's Train of Doom!
• Monster Physics - a great little problem solving app
• Twinkl phonics suite - a really useful app for targetting specific phonemes as well as letter formation
• Pocket phonics - as above
• Book creator - Great multimedia app for creating your own e-books
• Puppet pals - Animate cartoon characters or yourself! Multiple uses for this simple app.
• Blogger - my year 2/1s are blogging, so it's time our Headteacher did too! She had a personal tutor called Eloise to help! 
• Drawing Torch - a wonderfully creative new app from the Night Zookeeper people

So how am I using the ipads? Here is a quick reflection of how I use them in my practice.

Guided work

I have four ipads in my classroom at all times. Quite often I have more than this and occasionally I have a whole class set. We use them to research and answer questions and I use them every day for guided and extension activities, as folllows.

Maths - I mostly use the primary games apps, maths sumo, pop maths and puzzle maths as brain breaks, rewards or to compliment work in class. Occasionally I will use an app as an extension activity. I have also used the ipads as whiteboards for children whose M+O work I want to monitor more carefully. They take screen shots and can email these to me, or blog them. I have recently asked one of my TaG children to create a screenchomp explanation of how to do partitioning. I will get her to create a bank of these maths tutorials.

Guided reading/writing - I have 2 groups of children who use the ipads regularly for phonics/handwriting work. I have assessed where they are and so then can find the right sounds quickly that they need to practise. We use twinkl pop suite, Mr Thorn does phonics and pocket phonics for this.
For a small group of children who need support with their writing, I use the Collins Big Cat apps. They can read the story first, then there are enough visual cues in the way of scenery, characters and objects to scaffold their writing. We do have some good reading books on the ipads, but not nearly enough, so this is an area that I would like to expand next. 

Whole class work

You can see how I have used ipads for whole class work by looking at our class blog. It shows examples of using book creator, puppet pals, art apps and writing with Collins Big Cat apps amongst other things. The ipads are often used for TaG children to publish their written work in a different way, or create impromptu animations.

I am using my ipads most lessons in class and it is my aim to get others to do the same. One way to encourage this is to have 20 minutes at the beginning of a staff meeting where all teachers share a way that they have used the ipads in class. Like a mini staffroom teachmeet!

Don't forget you can see all the apps we use at Roydon Primary on my ipad apps site.

Network failure ... DON'T PANIC!

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a twilight training session for SNITT students and was really looking forward to working with them. Although we have ipads at Roydon I was very aware that the students needed time to look at resources that many Norfolk schools have, like IWBs, textease, Espresso, visualisers,  beebots and free resources like photostory3 and movie-maker. I also thought it important to have a practical session, but point them in the direction of theory/paperwork. I wanted them to have a positive experience with ICT

Unfortunately, like one of my OfSTED observed lessons a few years ago, the network had a meltdown. Fortunately I didn't. I think that my defence mechanism of not feeling responsible for  out-of-my-control technical failures is one of my strengths. Still, it was a bit embarrassing and a bit disappointing - especially as I was wanting to give them a positive experience. 

Luckily, there is always a plan B. The beebots and probots just came out earlier than expected, easi-speak chatterboxes and microphones were modelled and played with and I recounted my digital literacy project. The ipads were used as an example of where schools can go next with their tech (and showed perfectly how versatile and practical these 'shiny things' are). I was very grateful that I had them and they filled a gap whilst the laptops were slowly logging on. 

So what have I learned from this? Well I will definitely check the network during the afternoon next time. I will also ask my digital leaders to be on hand, to accompany the students to other rooms to support them individually to use the IWBs and visualisers in case my room crashes again. 

I was very grateful for the loveliness of the students - and that their mentor Jayne said 'Beebots' when I was having a 'blank moment' of disbelief about the network fail! Maybe this experience has shown the reality of ICT in school? It will definitely be better next time!

Digital leader kidsmeet at the Night Zookeeper offices

This morning two excited adults got on the Diss to London train at 7.19 with four excited digital leaders, to travel to the Night Zookeeper Kidsmeet. We were the first school to arrive, so Roydon DLs took the time to explore the offices and practise their presentations. When they realised that the prezi presentaion that Emily had created hadn't been saved to the net, they didn't panic, but problem solved ways around it. They very much enjoyed being interviewed about being a digital leader, then minecraft and tried out a few comfy chairs!

Throughout the day they blogged about what they were doing, on their own digital leader blog and the kidsmeet blog.


Digital leader presentations

The first presentation was Scratch, which was presented very well by Lauriston Primary School, who showed us how they have made games in their lunch time. Galliard digital leaders arrived at the offices just in time to present 'A minute of listening'.

Next up, confidently talking about blogging, 100wc, Skype and Night Zookeeper was Springwell Junior school.

The last presentation of the session was by Oakdale digital leaders, showing how gaming can help their learning. A very persuasive presentation.

We watched some presentations from some of the people who share the Wayra space about pollarize, makelight, mychoicepad and pixelpin.

I was very proud of Roydon digital leaders presenting about Sketchnation without the safety net of their prezi. Other presentations included Mersea Island's fantastic animating - led by the unforgettable Jack! - Morfo booth (which my digital leaders love) shown by Elm Park Primary and some great free online tools from Brunswick house.

There was no rest for our busy digital leaders at lunch time, but time for a bit of livewriting organised by Michelle.

The workshops

These can all be read about on the kidsmeet blog, but our digital leaders joined some great workshops.

Oliver Quinlan led a progressive RaspberryPi workshop and Jo Neale got them creating vegetable animals. They were able to play with the Drawing Torch and Mychoicepad apps, create an ocean without the colour blue, join in with a Makey Makey, play pingpong, learn with Nintendo DS, blog, interview others, lounge about on cushions and chairs and play with photobooth in a phone booth! Marvellous!

At the end of the day our digital leaders were given a choice about where they went. Mine all chose the vegetable making, which didn't really surprise me. In a technological world we must always remember that there is nothing quite the same as creating things with real objects.

Many of the digital leaders were flagging at the end of the day, but Roydon DLs seemed to get a second wind. They voted on a MaccyD tea, where Emily proved that small children can eat adult-sized meals, then a trip to Claire's accessories to browse shiny things. 

On the train on the way home they carried on with their creativity by creating a great little imovie called the Train of Doom! What a wonderful day!

  

BYOD

I did a learning styles questionnaire on the NCSL site many moons ago and it told me things that I already knew about myself, but also made me think about significant weaknesses in the way I approach things.  I scored 2/50 under the 'realistic' tab. I needed to do something about this. Whilst I believe you need teachers who can see endless possibilities, you also need practical teachers who can see the problems. I had a new found respect for teachers that I had previously considered to be blinkered. It was a huge learning curve for me, but really helped me to understand why our school is successful; we have a good balance of personalities.

 How does this relate to BYOD? Well I have realised that my excitement at trying new things has sometimes meant that I haven't thought about the potential risks. We started started blogging over seven years ago at school without any worries about having policies in place. Of course we had consent forms for photograph use, but no guidelines for actual blogging. I want to make sure that I don't do this with BYOD.

Roydon digital leaders

 The need for one has arisen because my digital leaders have wanted to bring their mobile devices into school for our digital leader sessions. This has made things so much easier for me and it enables them to carry on learning at home. The games that my digital leaders have made in their on time are amazing and they have set up their ipads/ipods to be able to blog from them. The first couple of times they brought them in, we just had verbal agreements with the pupils and parents. They understood the risks and rules, but this needed putting in writing.

Ruby's sketchnation game

So last week I searched the internet for exemplar policies. I found very little. Eventually I found a forum where  a policy written by Mount Erin College in Australia was praised. The wording was very clear, so as a starting point I have adapted this slightly and sent it home with digital leaders. As a school we can adapt our policy accordingly as we continue our BYOD journey.

I would love to hear from others about BYOD policy and practice, so that I can carry on learning!

Sack Mabel and Doris?

This post has been a long time coming - I didn't want to rush it (like I normally do), but needed to give it some thought as it is an issue that I want to address. I know that I risk getting publicly shot down for my views, but they are mine and I would hope that they are respected. I am coming from a primary viewpoint here, so would appreciate the reader remembering that we are not employed to teach one or two subjects, but are (mostly) responsible for delivering all.

Rethinking ICT

I had an interesting time at the rethinking ICT conference earlier this year and met some hard working people who I have a lot of respect for. With the exception of a few that I had met before, they were nearly all twitter acquaintances, many of whom are doing inspirational work in education (and special mention must be given to Chris Leach who put this event together). At the end of the conference an expert panel answered questions from the audience. During this time I was stunned to hear the opinion that teachers should be sacked if they did not engage with new technologies*

My initial reaction was that it would be very uncharitable of educational establishments to sack teachers for finding an aspect of their learning difficult. Would we exclude a child who struggles or refuses to learn, or would we try our hardest to find a way of engaging them? Teachers get paid to do a job, I understand that, but technology does not come naturally to everyone and teachers have to keep abreast of  a multitude of new/recycled educational ideas each year. There is a lot to juggle. I thought about some of the people I have supported over the past few years, people who I have heard (and seen on twitter) being referred to as the school's 'Doris' or 'Mabel' (a derogatory term given to those who shy away from new technologies) and the opinions at rethinking ICT hit a nerve. A big nerve. So big that I felt compelled to challenge it by stating my disagreement of the expert panel's view. I was told that we wouldn't accept it if a teacher continuously failed to learn how to teach fractions*. My response to this was that fractions don't continuously break.

If I were told that I had to embed the Polish language in each curriculum area, I know that I would find it time consuming to learn and stressful because I would not always know if I were teaching it well. Imagine how I would feel the next year being told that the language had changed, to Bengali. One of my colleagues has no trouble with technology, but if he were told to include art in as many lessons as possible, he would probably not appreciate it! Likewise, I can read music and have always aspired to play the piano, but have not been able to devote the time to it. I played (one-handed) in assembly once and it was one of the most stressful things I have ever done. I know that these examples are not the same as embedding technology, but I am trying to make comparisons of the 'fear factor'. This is a fear of the new, the unknown and the things that could lead to public ridicule. Children as well as adults can be intentionally and unintentionally cruel with their frank opinions. Some teachers lack the confidence to put themselves in that position.

I myself never wanted to be an ICT coordinator; I find many aspects of technology quite dull. I have developed a passion for it because I am a curious person; I see the creative potential and the awe and wonder technology often brings and I want  slice of the action. Maybe it is slightly easier for me than some over 40s though, because I did computer technology at school (yes, it did exist in the 80s!) and I am not afraid of breaking things. I also had two children at a very young age and they had all manner of gaming platforms, remote control toys and then computers when they were older. My youngest son collected eggs at the weekend so that he could buy himself a laptop. I am not an advocate of the term 'digital native', but our children now have many more opportunities to engage with technologies than I did when I was young and the fear factor of 'breaking it' only arises when they are told by an adult things such as 'don't touch, you might break it'. Is this why they seem to learn more quickly? They are not afraid to try something new.

Yesterday I sat and watched Ruby, who is only just two, use an ipad. She had no fear and no anxieties and was happily expressing herself through mark-making. She was delightful! Conversely, trying to teach my 68 year old dad how to email and access the internet was incredibly stressful. He would not experiment, because he did not understand and his frustration quickly led to acute grumpiness. His fear was preventing his learning; he needed a lot of practise and repetition. So why do we expect our teachers to pick things up quickly and use resources straight away? I would challenge anyone who believes that teachers should be able to do just that, to attempt the same by learning a new musical instrument.

So what can be done about it? I would suggest that the negative opinion of sacking them be replaced with a more positive offer of support. Two methods immediately spring to mind: digital leaders and RiskIT.

Digital leaders.

Digital leaders are the best free resource at school to keep abreast of ICT. For example, when I introduced scratch and kodu at school, I knew that our hard working year 6/5 teachers would want their children to use it. I am ever aware of the hours that they put in and do not wish to add to their workload. Digital leaders are the perfect compromise. The teacher gets to join in the lesson, learn with the children and develop their confidence. Why not make a pledge to employ digital leaders and join our supportive network.

RiskIT

If you want your teachers to use new technologies, adopt a whole school approach such as  RiskIT. This strategy encourages and empowers teachers to explore ICT in a safe environment without making them feel pressured or ridiculed. I will definitely be promoting this next year in our cluster schools. I will not explain it any further here, but please read Jan's post by following the RiskIT link.

Other methods of support that are commonly used in school could also prove useful: 1:1 support, small group work, peer tutoring, modelling, lesson observations.

And finally - we need to stop negatively labelling our teachers! Self-fulfilling prophecy? Does our low expectation = low output? It's a hard enough job without people in the same profession being negative and knocking you down. Instead of questioning their 'inadequacies', maybe we should be asking ourselves if we have been teaching 'Doris' and 'Mabel' properly and giving them appropriate support. I don't just mean chucking a manual at them (could you learn to play the saxaphone that way?) I mean proper, personalised support. I feel that it is my duty as ICT coordinator to find out what our teachers know, what they need to learn and how best they can be supported to do so. Spending a little time reassuring them and ensuring that appropriate support systems are in place is essential. At our school it works well, because it is a supportive team. If someone struggles, we pull together to help them.


* that was the gist of it, I cannot remember exactly what was said. 

Digital leaders at the Naace 3mhothouse

The digital leader network

Like many others I filled in the online form to attend the Naace hothouse, hoping to network and extend my ICT knowledge, skills and understanding. I was asked by Jan to provide a 'workshop' on the digital leader network and, apart from being a bit stunned, was delighted to be given the opportunity to spread the word again. The reason for this? In my view digital leaders are the best free resource in schools - a resource that could potentially have a huge impact on ICT development. I am passionate about this; passionate about creating sustainable solutions for keeping up with developments in an ever-changing area of education.

The workshop proved to be popular and became fully booked, leaving Nick Jackson (whose digital leaders recently led a teachtheteachers meet) without a place. This turned out well for me as it was a great way to get him up front and sharing his expertise. When I realised that Chris Mayoh was attending the workshop, I decided it would be silly preaching to an expert, so asked him to come and share his wisdom too. It proved to be a good idea as we were able to show how digital leaders are being employed in both primary and secondary. We each brought different experiences to the session and of course a change of pace is always good. You can view my prezi here, watch @ChrisMayoh's digital leader interviews here and @largerama's prezi and one of his films here. Of course these do not capture the discussions that went on, but they paint a picture of the work that is going on in our schools.

Before the session I had the idea to ask others to leave a pledge on the digital leader linoit. This would give some indication of the impact of the workshop. Incidentally, at the end of the session I asked how many teachers already had digital leaders in their schools. Two hands went up. The response to 'Who will employ digital leaders now?' was quite overwhelming. I am not surprised though. I think between us we showed the impact of a free resource available in all schools.   

Please add your pledges!

The digital leader network collaborative blog has grown in a very short time and has proved to be a good place for teachers to showcase their digital leader's great work. That is the whole purpose of the blog- to showcase, support and inspire others so that they may too employ digital leaders in their schools. Although my initial ideas about the network were very grand (linking schools across the UK and beyond) this is a solid start to spreading the benefits of having digital leaders.

So my pledge is to try and emulate Chris Mayoh's success in Bradford, in Norfolk. I would also like to host a digital leader 'kids meet' (this should have happened last year) and hopefully get our children to the Bett Show. This can only happen with support from others - and once again my twitter PLN come up trumps with their enthusiasm and drive to make this work. Yes there are a few 'negative disruptors' out there (see a great post by Jill Duman), but they are a very small minority and are easy to ignore. Nobody in this project has claimed to be the owner, initiator or leader. It will be a successful project because of its collaborative nature and because it is a good idea!

If you are interested in learning more about the digital leader network, come and join in #DLchat on a Thursday night at 9 during term time. You will meet inspirational tweeters who have been there right at the start of this project: @ICTevangelist @ChrisMayoh and @MrsMeeks64. You will also come across hard working tweeters who have given up a lot of time and put a lot of energy into this project - @aknill @largerama @traceyab1 @gr8ICT @ashmrkenyon @mbrayford @mikeyjohncarr amongst many others.

Acknowledgement must also be given to @ICTmagic and @eslweb who often help out with archiving, @JenniH68 for her hard work with edmodo and @kristianstill, @MrStucke and @bobharrisonnet for their continued support and inspiration. Thanks also to @janwebb21 for giving us the opportunity to spread the word further.

Please add your pledges!