Jan

27

Informal learning Wordles

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My first experiments with the Wordle site were with children’s reports: these were great, would make brilliant report covers, but alas pupil confidentiality prevents me posting them here!

The survey Terry Freedman and I conducted last month of children’s use of technology outside school produced some great, if non representative, quantitative data, but also a fair number of qualitative responses which a former mathematician such as myself struggles to analyse. Wordle to the rescue! Here are the clouds generated from the five main write-in questions. I think they make very interesting reading. Do note the significance of games in all these!

Give examples of things you have learnt using technology that are not related to school work.

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Jan

22

My interview with Tessy Britton of Thriving

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Tessy Britton interviewed me about my own and my school’s use of social media for the thriving too blog. The original is published under a CC by-nc-nd licence at http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2009/01/miles-berry-headteacher-talks-about-social-media.html

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Jan

21

What are your kids learning when you're not looking?

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It was an honour, once again, to be asked to present alongside Terry Freedman for the BCS Education and Training Expert Panel at BETT this year. Our previous presentations had looked at the e-strategy, web 2.0 and personalised learning through technology, so how to follow that? We’ve both become increasingly interested in the area of informal learning through technology, ie that beyond the formal school curriculum, an area which we’d touched on briefly last year but had failed to do justice to, so that looked like a good area to focus on, especially as it would provide an interesting contrast to much of the curriculum based resources on sale outside the seminar theatre.
Terry had gleaned some statistics from his wide ranging reading, had some results from his own social networking survey and a few illuminating case studies. I’d done a fair bit of reading round the subject over the past few months, which remains a fascinating one, and had dusted down my statistical background to number-crunch the results of our own google based survey from the end of last term, which collected close on 1000 unique, valid responses. Although our sample was far from representative, it was interesting to see some of the differences between the ways boys and girls use technology, as well as the enthusiasm with which children engage with technology for communication and entertainment. We concluded with a few thoughts on the implications of our findings for work in schools: moving children from communication to collaboration and from consumers to creators of culture.

What are your kids learning when you're not looking?
View more presentations from mgberry. (tags: filtering networking)

Jan

20

Open Source Schools Presentation at BETT

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The Open Source Schools presentation at BETT on Saturday 17th January was very well received, with good numbers joining the team in Olympia’s Club Room, despite the early start. I introduced the presentation, outlining what open source means as well as exploring some of the advantages which it offers to schools; I also spoke about Moodle (much to Ian Usher’s surprise) and the Open Source Schools community. Michelle Walters talked about Open Office and some of the ways which teachers could get started with open source. José Picardo talked about the Audacity audio editor and Doug Belshaw discussed some of the many ways in which he’s using Linux powered netbooks in his school. It was  a great pleasure to work with such wonderful people on this. Audience members took Ubuntu and OpenEducationDisc CDs away with them so they could try open source software out for themselves.

The presentation was filmed in association with BBC Backstage and Learn4Life, with Leon Cych of Learn4Life doing excellent work editing this footage for the Web. Leon’s also written about the presentation over on his site.

Jan

20

My first teachmeet

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It was a great joy to attend my first ever teachmeet at BETT last Friday. Ian Usher, Drew Buddie, Leon Cych and many others had done an outstanding amount of work to make the evening the success it undoubtedly was, not least through securing some significant sponsorship to keep the drink flowing freely.

The evening was a gathering of the ed-tech clan, or at least its paramilitary wing: really good to see so many old friends all gathered together in such a relaxed atmosphere, and a great treat to meet other folk, known through their blogs, tweets and podcasts, face to face for the first time. As with many a conference, the joy of the unconference was the conversations around the tables, and indeed in back channels like twitter, but that’s not to detract from the presentations themselves.

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Jan

13

Moodle and e-safety

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A couple of quotes from me in the pre-BETT Guardian. Alas, the photos they took of our pupils Moodling don’t appear to have made it in :-(

Jack Kenny’s article, ‘Get ready for the next intranet generation‘:

… Meanwhile, supporters of the open source Moodle platform have seen it go from strength to strength across primary and secondary schools. Miles Berry, head of Alton convent school prep in Hampshire, has long backed Moodle. “Version 1.9 released last March brought with it features that meet the needs of schools (or even authorities) as a whole, rather than the teacher/class focus that has been characteristic in the past,” he says. “For example, Moodle now offers a centralised grade book, competency or outcome tracking, teacher notes and ePortfolio integration. It remains very strong at providing the tools to allow social learning. It also works beautifully on an iPhone or iPod Touch.” …

Julie Nightingale’s article “Don’t Panic!“:

… Headteacher Miles Berry and ICT consultant Terry Freedman will examine some of the issues around e-safety in their seminar on informal learning (”What are your kids learning when you’re not looking?” Saturday 17 January). Fears will be lessened if parents and teachers get to grips with the role technologies such as social networking can play in learning, Berry suggests. “Schools that provide tools for social networking, collaboration and creativity themselves, or encourage learning using such tools, are in a good place to talk to parents in a balanced, informed way about just how their children are using the net.” …

Jan

12

Open Source Schools Relaunch

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After feedback from its own community, Becta and a number of other stakeholders, the AlphaPlus team behind opensourceschools.org.uk invited me to take over the website, so guess how I’ve spent most of my Christmas holidays!

The idea now is to make it much easier for anyone to create content for the site, to reflect the community driven aims of the project. There’s a blog-like front page, which I’m hoping the community there will regularly create content for, and I’ve streamlined the original forum areas. I’ve also brought in headlines from a few aggregated news feeds, worked on the navigation and set up email notifications, although this latter has not been without its problems. All feedback gratefully received. Read more