Steps reunion

How often do you see teachers giving up their precious weekends to spend time learning more about their work? Not often, because most teachers spend what little free time they have marking, preparing lesson plans and generally trying to catch their breath. And yet this weekend I was very privileged to take part in a weekend away with teachers from Saltash.net Community School at the Engage and Inspire staff development event in Bedruthan Steps Hotel, near Newquay.  The hotel plays host to the event every year, and I recall with fondness being invited last year by Dan Roberts (aka @chickensaltash) to keynote the event alongside the likes of  Sugata Mitra. Well, Dan Roberts has moved on to warmer climes, but the campaign to aspire to better pedagogy continues. Saltash.net is a remarkable school and quite unique in the ways it harnesses technology to engage and inspire. That is one reason why Microsoft has decided to sponsor the Bedruthan Steps event time after time. This year at the Steps the invited speakers included Stephen Heppell and Steve Bunce, both of whom challenged their audiences to reach further using technology to inspire and engage learners. And what an inspirational weekend it turned out to be.

Stephen Heppell, in his inimitable way showed his audience a range of innovative new ways to engage learners in school, including shoeless education, olfactory schools, sound scapes, mirror walls and 100 faces.  Stephen talked about how mood lighting can psychologically influence learning. Provide red lighting in the morning, and it wakes students up, whilst blue lighting after lunch has a calming influence. Just changing the positioning of chairs can have a positive influence on how the students respond, he said, while converting tabletops to whiteboard drawing surfaces can raise the levels of creativity in the room. Many of Stephen's ideas don't rely heavily on technology, and we were warned that technology on its own does not solve problems, but he did suggest that where technology is involved, everything goes exponential, especially the quality of learning. Many of Stephen Heppell's tried and tested ideas have been shown to transform the learning experience in a variety of different cultural contexts in countries around the world.

A session led by James Edwards (Saltash School) and Ray Chambers (Lodge Park School, Corby) exposed the many ways in which games based learning can be harnessed in secondary education. The session became a dynamic workshop where teachers were given the opportunity to try for themselves some of the non-touch, natural gesture driven tools powered by the X-Box 360 Kinect.

The session by Steve Bunce was focused on challenge and mission, and involved the teachers splitting up into several teams as they tackled all the activities they were given to complete. One mission involved the teams trying to recreate and capture a famous movie scene and a scene from history using modelling clay, tiny figurines and anything else they could get their hands on. Links to several stop-go motion movies and digital images soon began to appear on the #saltash12 twitter stream as teachers shared their fun. Another task was to create a 1-1 scale map of a beauty spot somewhere within the spectacular surroundings of the cliffside hotel grounds. Many of the missions and tasks were taken from the Mission Explore collection of learning resources.

It was great to see teachers leaving the event enthused and inspired, armed with innovative new ideas to try out to see how far they could go in enhancing and enriching their students' learning experiences. I don't think there was a single teacher who regretted going the extra mile and spending their weekend learning a little more about how to be an inspirational teacher. Thank you Saltash.net for inviting me to share your experience this weekend.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Steps reunion by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

It's grins up North

This year's Northern Grid for Learning Conference in Newcastle was a great experience for the 230 or so education professionals who attended. The day long professional development event was hearty, encouraging, inspirational and highly entertaining - not something that can be said of every conference I have ever attended. I won't go into too many details of the day, which has already been covered quite well by the likes of Bill Lord and Martin Waller, but I will say this: There was plenty of smiling time. In a time when education is being squeezed and where there are not a lot of reasons for teachers to be cheerful, this event was quite a tonic. Russell Prue, in his inimitable, hilarious, and ever so slightly camp style, opened the proceedings with a barnstorming keynote. The humour was at times sledgehammer stuff, with Russell poking fun at inept government ministers, and parodying rigid school systems. We need a new model of assessment he argued, and it should not be based on 'guess what's inside the teacher's head.' He severely criticised the manner in which standardised tests and exams are conducted and gave us several OMG moments - as he exposed some of the differentials that are evident between what teachers teach and what learners learn. Shift has already happened, he remarked, and the world is not turning back to where it once was. When we ban mobile phones in school, he asked, who are we trying to protect? The learners, or the teachers and the school? Warming to his theme, he received one of the biggest laughs of the morning when he said: 'No pillock in London has the right or the expertise to tell you what to do in your own school'. It was indeed an impressive start to the day, and many delegates went to coffee with grins all over their faces.

The workshops following the break were varied and fast paced, including sessions on digital storytelling, new tools and web applications, school blogging, using tech to support language learning and learning platforms from a whole host of familiar Twitter familiars, including Ian Usher, Dan Roberts, Lisa Stevens, Steve Bunce, Joe Dale and Bev Evans (all of whom are great value to follow on Twitter). Ian Addison's session on 15 ideas in 15 minutes was one particular highlight for me, because the ideas were wide ranging and far reaching in their potential. Jan Webb's session was equally eclectic, as she took us on a journey through a number of useful ICT applications, and showed the memorable and delightful video of twin babies holding a conversation about a lost sock.

I won't go into details of my own closing keynote, but Russell Prue referred to me as a 'Dynomutt' (I assume by this he meant I was barking, but I will take it as a compliment) ;-) I will say that I probably had the most difficult job of any the conference presenters, and that was to try to summarise and consolidate on the back of so many excellent presentations, as well as attempting to follow them when they had been so inspirational. I guess one of my main contributions to the conferences was to call all those teachers present to make a difference, be champions and agents of change, and to never, ever give up, even when the odds appear to be against you. If you are fighting a gorilla, I told them, you don't rest up when you are tired. You rest up when the gorilla is tired.A big thank you must go out to Simon Finch and the rest of the Northern Grid for Learning team for organising a very enjoyable and thought provoking event. Simon's images of the event can be viewed here.


It's grins up North by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.