Selected Newsletter

News | Diary | Newsletter | Newsletter Archive | Seminars

19 May 2013

Might be Spring Newsletter 2013

Contents

Whatever the weather...

As you will know the publication of a MirandaNet newsletter depends on two key factors; the English weather and whether there is anything to say. Hence two newsletters in this indifferent spring because so much has been happening about the design of the Computing Curriculum, my travels and the next event in Bedford from July 8th – 10th.

Marilyn Leask and I returned from unusually good weather in the Australian and New Zealand autumn to a glacial Easter weekend in England. I still yearn for the beauty of Hobbiton - a sunnier version of the English countryside on North Island, New Zealand.

Hobbiton

"Poor Bilbo Baggins...at Thorin's words, 'may never return' he began to feel a shriek coming up inside and soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel." (The Hobbit, Tolkein).

I felt much the same! My vegetables will never be as perfect. A pity, on the other hand, that the graphics of the journey going East in the recent Hobbit film were not as convincing as the reality of the set for Hobbiton Village.

For more about the reasons for our Antipodean Tour, called a Call for Collective Professional Action, see below..

MirandaMod dialogue about the Computing curriculum July 9th

The next MirandaMod will be on July 9th because MirandaNet are sharing the coordination of the Information Technology in Teacher Education (ITTE) conference from 8th -10th July in Bedford. We expect the debate at ITTE to get quite heated from time to time because Gove in the Mail on Sunday called teacher educators were ‘Marxists’ and ‘enemies of promise’. So this letter from the Department of Education about the result of the consultation about the ICT curriculum should have been expected.

"I am writing to let you know that the Secretary of State for Education has today announced that, following the recent public consultation, it remains the Government’s intention to replace the national curriculum subject of information and communication technology (ICT) with computing when the new national curriculum takes legal force in September 2014". Phil Bannister, National Curriculum Review Division, Department for Education

Further details follow about the debates on ICT (or is it now Computing) issues on June 9th.

MirandaNet symposia and MirandaMod - July 9th

LockIf you are considering attending the ITTE 8th-10th July conference in Bedford you will want to know that we are aiming to have a strong MirandaNet presence on July 9th. You can attend for one day if you wish. This ITTE conference is being held just when many of us need a face to face forum to discuss the policy and practitioner issues that have emerged in the last couple of years.

The conference themes are:

Anyone can submit a paper on these themes. However we are concentrating on developing symposia in 3 areas: the 'Computing' curriculum, creative practice in the curriculum and ICT and inclusivity.

Three Symposia

SwansWe want to run three symposia if we have enough takers, a debating form that involves 4-5 speaking on a theme for about 15 minutes each leading to a discussion with the audience. We have invited members of Computers at School (CAS) and Naace to join us in the debate.

 

Submitting Abstracts

After this from 16:00 - 17:00 we plan to run a MirandaMod before the conference dinner on the canal boat trip. What we have in mind here is that practitioner members might give a five-minute debate-starter, describing some creative classroom practices that you have used yourself, or observed in others; and participate in the debate.

If you want to be part of this collective MirandaNet submission please send your 150 word abstract to me by 28th May so that I can get the organised for a joint submission. I can write invitation letters if you need them.

Please encourage your colleagues to come to the whole conference.

A Call for Collective Professional Action

Why were Marilyn and I touring the Antipodes thanks to the hospitality of MirandaNet members, Peter Ausbusson, Eva Davich, Niki Davis and Noeline Wright? Well the answer is The Education Futures Collaboration that has led to the Mapping Education Specialist knowHow (MESH) project. Over fifty topics are now being tackled but several of the MESH pathways provide access to subject-specific research-based knowledge about barriers to students’ learning and interventions most likely to dissolve barriers. The MESH approach uses multimedia mindmaps, as a way of presenting complex knowledge, each node providing a link to an annotatable display of more in-depth fully referenced knowledge.

The MESH project is supported by the Educational Futures Collaboration (EFC) has been set up to respond to the OECD observation that,

….in many countries, education is still far from being a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are not yet being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of those practices. OECD 2009 p.3

MirandaNet is an associate of the EFC that aims to:

Professors Marilyn Leask and Christina Preston are two of the EFC founders who have been working to harness the energies and knowledge of educators worldwide to address these issues. The tour of universities in Australia and New Zealand was an effort to gain more support for independent ownership of professional research and to begin the collaborative authorship of MESH pathways. MirandaNet members are developing several pathways including creativity and visual learning. For more information or to enquire about leading a pathway email: christina@mirandanet.ac.uk.

The price of beauty and usefulness in learning

MirandaNet research into learning spaces

Community Playthings, a MirandaNet associate, is a well-established company that has been making furniture for nurseries in Robertsbridge, East Sussex since the 1970s. They also provide a free design and training service for teachers who can visit the community in Robertsbridge as well as a variety of free design guides and educational resources that cover the philosophical and pedagogical approaches that underpin the furniture design.

Community Playthings

The company has a reputation for listening to their customers, and the products and their variations are a direct result of feedback. However, the quality of the wood and the exacting design and production processes makes Community Playthings furniture more expensive than other products in this field. Ever keen to listen to customers the company commissioned research to investigate what customers thought about the value for money issues.

The MirandaNet research involved visits to settings and interviews with a range of educators: heads, teachers, purchasers for nursery chains, a local authority adviser, a design consultant and two academics. It concluded that the purchase high quality furniture had a positive impact on OFSTED ratings, occupancy rates, and a cost benefit in that furniture does not need to be replaced for years.

Some excerpts from the study are:

Further details and download the full report here...

For more details contact Dr Preston at christina@mirandanet.ac.uk.

Eating Raspberry Pi with custard

Thanks for the helpful suggestions about how to help my grandson use his prize Raspberry Pi. Even I knew that suggesting he eat it with custard was a joke. However, José Ramos, Portugal, had a solution involving bananas:

I propose to begin with the very interesting concert computers + bananas + fun proposed by Jay Silver, a young scientist at Media Lab in MIT. See the video and product here. This will be very interesting to see how you can stimulate the curiosity of your grandson, in this case, using just fruits, as bananas, lemons, apples and everyday objects. Then, after the concert, “bon appetit!” Please note that you have to buy the bananas … and the kit....

Jenny Hughes listed all the kit he would need to make it do what a laptop does, and ended up admitting. "Actually, by the time you have done all this, you will just end up buying him a laptop because it's easier!" MirandaNet Fellow, Geoff Scott Baker, suggested an interesting article to help with coding competence. This might be a useful set of resources for teachers who want to come up to speed through self-learning - see here. Amongst the many other useful replies Glenys Hart sent a very useful Raspberry_Pi_Education_Manual from Computers at Schools. I hope they will be presenting on this on July 9th at the ITTE conference.

If you want to look back on the detailed MirandaLink debates we have had recently you can search the members' archive. Everyone's comments are there. Just log in to the Members' Section on the MirandaNet Site.

MirandaNet LogosMirandaNet LogosMirandaNet Fellows articles, case studies and books

MirandaNet is free to join but we are always delighted when members decide to submit a 2,000 word article or multimodal equivalent to gain a Fellowship, a Senior Fellowship and after that ambassador status.

Anyone who receives an award can apply to Christina Preston for a certificate. Do not forget that your students can also gain a World Ecitizens certificate for their web publications as long as members have approved them. We also now had badges that you can attach to websites and email signatures.

Over the years we have collated about 250 case studies and articles that our redoubtable web editor, Francis Howlett, has made easier to search. In this newsletter we have several submissions to celebrate:

James Abela: MirandaNet Fellow

James Abela has contributed his knowledge about the use of computer games in Economics. What he found was that students were not consciously learning during gameplay, but the reflections brought out a lot of economic theories and helped their understanding.

For his Fellowship he is one of the few members who have submitted ideas in multimodal form. I hope we will receive many more submissions like this one. Creativity is a key MirandaNet interest this year and this fits the bill. James' full dissertation that included the bibliography is based on a lot of research can be found here. He has also provided a Digital Leaders list of resources and the link to the CAS resource bank and support network.

John Galloway: MirandaNet Fellow

Since e-safety seems to be, inexplicably, a casualty of the new Computing Curriculum, MirandaNet member, John Galloway, has gained his Fellowship by reporting on Allison Allen’s presentation about e-safety in the MirandaNet lounge at BETT13. Responsibility was the key theme of Allison Allen’s MirandaMod “Digital Literacy, Digital Safety; getting the balance right,” that everyone who supports a child – whether it is at school, home, or somewhere else – has a role to play in helping them to stay safe. What Allison wanted to avoid was the problems that e-Safety if there is not enough training - creating a state of FUD in schools – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Read more about Allison's views here.

Daniel Needlestone: MirandaNet Fellow

Daniel started a debate on MirandaLink that happened to coincide with the MirandaNet research publication into the value of nursery furniture in the aesthetic education of small children (see above). For his Fellowship he summarised what members have said in this debate and reflected on his own experience.

“The end of the computer room is nigh” or so the experts have said for at least the last 10 years. But the fact remains that, despite laptop trolleys, tablets, mobile phones, BYOD and cross curricular approaches, ICT computer rooms remain in demand: sometimes in non-traditional forms, and, unfortunately, too often in forms that are not ideal for teaching.

Maybe this demand is because these rooms are important or maybe we’re just scared to think outside the box? No doubt many want to get out of the box they teach in but, despite the desire, can’t climb up the edges to make the change. Well I have some stories to tell about good room design... read more.

You will find the debate on room design in the members' MirandaLink archives.

Haldor Lønningdal: MirandaNet Fellow

Haldor, a Norwegian member, became in interest in the debate about the Computing curriculum and has contributed his own thoughts about what should be taught to children in this subject. He presents 5 basic digital skills that should be taught cross curricula:

The framework makes interesting reading for those of us who are struggling with a Computing curriculum written by a committee.

Keith Turvey: MirandaNet Senior Fellow

Keith Turvey has provided us with a word summary to explain the main content of his book which is currently rather expensive and will be bought by libraries. There may be a softback soon.

Called, Narrative Ecologies: Teachers as Pedagogical Toolmakers, the context is the significant investment by policy makers in recent years in the potential of technological tools to transform learning and teaching across a range of professional practitioner groups; education, nursing and social care. There remain, however, outstanding issues concerning the ways educators and professional practitioners harness the potential of technologies to innovate and develop pedagogical practice. With so much attention focusing on technologies themselves, the complexity of what it takes for practitioners to innovate and develop their own pedagogical practice can easily be overlooked.

Keith has paid tribute to the MirandaNet Fellowship in the book because he says, "My experience with MirandaNet 12-13 years ago played a key role in my journey in academia so thank you."

It is very pleasing when members like Keith and John Potter who started their interest in digital technologies as teachers have now published their own books. We are keen to promote books and theses of other members too.

Luk Vanlanduyt: MirandaNet Fellow

We met Luk, from Belgium, at BETT13 and he has submitted a study of the work he has done on BOYD.

"I am responsible for EduBIT, IT-coordinators and managers in education in Belgium and I’ve already seen a lot of advantages of using a central framework for discussions. EduBIT is a Belgian non-profit professional organization like the MirandaNet Fellowship that supports schools in integrating IT in the educational sector. We developed a central framework and are happy with this. In this contribution I discuss two points from the framework: swapping to BYOD on level of infrastructure, and secondly swapping to BYOD and the impact of the skills of teachers".

Naace Lifetime Achievement Award

I was honoured to receive a Naace Lifetime Achievement Award from Naace that I have belonged to since the 1980s when women were still a rarity in this profession. From outside of the organisation which was mostly Her Majesty's Inspectors (HMIs) we women used to call the members 'the men in grey suits'. Not so now of course.

I wondered if a Lifetime Achievement Award was a signal to stop but the committee assure me that this is not so. In these trying times all the organisations are working even more closely together which can only be good for our profession.

Terry Freedman, a MirandaNet Fellow, wrote a generous article about MirandaNet achievements.

A Critique of Govean Strategy

On his blog Paul Bernal has written a masterful critique of Govean strategy.

Our Associates

Many thanks to our associates who support our activities with enthusiasm and generosity.

Looking forward to seeing some of you in Bedford, July 8-10th.

Book before June 1st for Early Bird Prices.

Christina Preston

christina@mirandanet.ac.uk

Sponsors' Logos

[Back to the top]

[Back]