Tag Archives: Education

iPad

The iPad for Education

Leave a comment

It’s no exaggeration to say that we love our Apple iPad. I have to admit to a little bit of skepticism when it was first announced, but having tried one out and subsequently purchased one it’s combination of superb battery life, form factor and general ease of use make it a lovely tool. Whilst iPhone apps have had to make a number of compromises to cope with the form factor, the larger size of the iPad really open up so many more possibilities. The ease of use can easily be demonstrated by handing our iPad to Lucy, who has no trouble finding her way around to what she wants – usually a video of “Big Chris” – the video of the Children in Need 2009 song.

As such, it is with great interest that I’ve been watching Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs) – probably best known as the author of the excellent FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto and Aperture – as he has prepared for and successfully rolled out an Apple iPad to every child in the school where he teaches, through his excellent blog postings.

Admittedly, the school where he teaches is a small private school, so they have a good deal more flexibility in deployment, and much less in the way of costs and issues to deploy to an average state run comprehensive, however even taking that into account a big step like this hasn’t been without issues. However reading the postings has certainly left Beth (@tahbepet) wishing even more she’d had access to Apple iPad’s when teaching, not least as an English teacher some of the abilities in iBooks!

Fraser has already picked up a bit of coverage from both specialist Mac sites and more general sites – hopefully some more mainstream media will pick up the story and highlight what is a very interesting experiment in bringing technology into the classroom.

Movies & TV, Music

Epiphany

Leave a comment
unplaced_the_choir.jpg

We’ve carried on watching The Choir over the past couple of weeks, and although it’s been enjoyable, and it’s great to see the progress, the programme has followed a familiar path with Gareth pulling together a choir. Although it’s been frustrating at times, Gareth himself summed it up pretty well this week when he said that it’s pretty straightforward to pull a choir together with a good group of interested boys.

However, his stated aim is not only to get a good choir, but to get a ‘singing school’. Back in the first episode he had a notable failure with Imran, one of the boys who although he had a great voice, was part of the playground MC’s, a group of boys who beatbox and rap, and are obviously pretty musically talented, but have no interest in the sort of conventional music that Gareth is exploring with the choir.

This week though came a breakthrough. In order to try and get the MC’s interested, he brought them along to a workshop run by Sense of Sound (you can also hear more of their music on their Myspace Page), and watching the faces of the boys – especially Imran – was great. Sense of Sound although being a choir, blended the kind of beatboxing techniques the boys were using, and really piqued their interest. They followed that up with starting another choir at the school following the kind of style that Sense of Sound had demonstrated – getting boys were were otherwise disconnected from the new singing culture in the school connected, and getting Imran to actually sing.

The fundamental point it underlines is that you need to be clear whether you are trying to get music into the lives of young people, or your kind of music into their lives. It somewhat echoes with the announcement earlier in the week that schoolchildren were being promised ‘quality culture’. Having heard the announcement, the real danger in that is although you interest some, it is very easy to disconnect others by labelling their kind of music, art or whatever as not ‘quality culture’. What the programme last night showed was that if you make an effort to connect with their culture, rather than trying to shoehorn kids into your culture, you actually get somewhere, and the young people go from the singing is boring, to actually singing and taking part.

If you missed the programme, or want to enjoy it again, you can watch on BBC iPlayer – Sense of Sound appear in a sequence that begins about 35 minutes in.

Politics

Exam Result Time

Leave a comment

So we’re now into the traditional period of the summer where the exam results are published – GCSE, A-Level and SATs – and the media runs endless negative stories. In fact you can actually write the news items ahead of the results, all you need is a “Falling Standards” article for if the pass rates go down, and an “Exams are getting easier” article for if they go up.

Having said that, yesterdays SATs results did both, with English and Science going up, but Maths falling – so guess which one is the headline…

The TV News, alongside the Daily Telegraph have also run headlines about “Four in 10 pupils ‘failing basics” (although the news went for 40%) based on a combined “3R’s” (although the Daily Telegraph writer doesn’t seem to be able to grasp counting to three as elsewhere in the article he says it is “made up of results in reading and writing”) – however when you look at it alongside the other figures there is something odd going on, as all of the individual categories are between 71% and 76%, and yet the combined result is 60% – needless to say the media organisations aren’t bothering to explain how this combined total is calculated…

The bottom line is that invariably the results are used by politicians as a stick to beat each other with – the current party in power will argue that standards are improving, the opposition that they are falling. They were doing it twenty years ago when I was going through the education system, and they are still doing it now. The only difference is that when I was at school the party in power was different.

So how do the politicians deal with improving standards? They change the curriculum, and it’s not that they change the curriculum for new pupils either, it gets changed for pupils who are already going through the process. For example when I was at school the History curriculum changed several times, putting different periods at different points, so I did some periods of history three times, and others not at all.

The whole increasing standards is crazy anyway, as by increasing the numbers of pupils achieving top grades, it has now resulted in needing A+ and A++ grades to differentiate pupils. Isn’t that just like McDonald’s renaming their drinks sizes from small, medium and large to medium, large and extra-large? The universities are interested in the top performing students, so are requiring comparison with the other pupils taking an exam – essentially they want bell curve grading – the politicians want to see rising standards, but using a simplistic measure that is easy to understand, so they go for the numbers achieving A-C grades – however the bell curve is steadily being shifted by the simplistic indication of rising standards, so in the A+ and A++ suggestion means that there would be five grade levels in the recorded band rather than the three there were when I was at school.

Wouldn’t it be easier to keep a consistent curriculum and consistent exam system? Probably, but since one of the stated aims of the National Curriculum is to “prepare all pupils for the … experiences of life” going through an education system where the rules are continuously being changed by politicians is going to be one of the most valuable lessons for life experience!

General

What’s in a Name?

Leave a comment

There was an interesting article on BBC News Online today on the fallout from a debate that has taken place on the Times Educational Supplement website over judgements teachers make based on childrens names.

On one side are parents who have complained to the Department for Education and Skills over teachers pre-judging pupils over their name, however on the other side you have the teachers with the perceptions of which children would be difficult, from their point of view learned by experience.

Although some names come up on both lists, there are some names that seem to come up more often on the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lists. The two lists of names are as follows – firstly the ‘good’ list:

Kate, Gregory, Sean, Charlotte, Jamie, Daniel, Lucy, Isobel, Ben, Sam, Harpreet, Imran, Asam, Alice and Joseph.

Now the ‘bad’ list:

Bobbi-Jo, Kloe, K’tee, Kristopher, Jayne, Wayne, Charlie, Liam and Ryan.

What is interesting is that just by reading the two lists, most people would be making a whole load of stereotypical judgements about the people, their social class, their level of education, even down to where they might live, so in some ways the teachers are only doing what anybody else would do.

So perhaps the question is whether the names are an indication of sources of problems, or whether the stereotypes many people apply as a result of the choice of name mean that we invariably push people towards stereotypical behaviour.