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28 February 2008
February Newsletter
Plans for the MirandaNet Fellowship's sustainability
Over recent months, the MirandaNet team has been thinking carefully about a sustainable future for our community of practice. In January the team met to discuss how the Fellowship can achieve its vision as it moves forward into the digital future.
We would like to enlist our 800 members in 43 countries in the creation of a three year strategic plan designed to evolve the purpose of MirandaNet to become one of the most highly-regarded influencers in the use of digital technologies in education both in the UK and internationally; and to provide a forum where the profession can all think about how these new technologies are best used and share expertise and experience with each other.
This is our current mission statement. Do you think that it needs to be updated?
The MirandaNet Fellowship, which was founded in 1992, strives to span national, cultural, commercial and political divides to provide an innovative and inclusive forum for professionals.
Partnership with industry and Government is at the heart of the research, development and evaluation processes that underpin and support good practice. Individual learning patterns are celebrated through action research strategies and peer ementoring.
Dissemination and publication are central to the Fellowship process. Fellows who share their experience and expertise are building a professional knowledge base about the use of advanced technologies in transforming teaching and learning.
So, firstly please send your amendments to our mission statement that make your thinking clear about our purpose.
Secondly, we are looking for sustainable income streams that will allow us to provide more services for members. We do not charge a membership fee. At the moment we have sustaining company partners and we also support the web team from our projects. But you, our members, are expert in all kinds of fields. Can you suggest ways that you would find acceptable for us to raise money for the running of our charity, World Ecitizens and our not-for-profit professional organisation, the MirandaNet Fellowship? For example, should we use advertising? If so what type of advertising? Should we charge non-members to read your case studies? What ideas can you suggest so that we have enough income to ensure better services over a longer period of time?
Send your suggestions to
The MirandaNet Oscars
Yes, it was London not Hollywood for the MirandaNet Awards ceremony. I will be happy to provide a list of the labels on our anoraks for any of the fashion spotters amongst you. My fashion antennae detected a sprinkling of M&S and Milletts with the occasional edgy Asda☺ (International members may require translations for these quintessentially English shops). Enough nonsense.
Many thanks to Doug Brown who handed out the certificates at BETT 08. We presented Fellowship awards for the first contribution to our knowledge base and then Senior awards for further contribution often as part of a workshop or in an exchange like the Prague workshop. It is easier to record these contributions now we have more access to podcasting and vodcasting.
Theo Keuchel, Dai Thomas, Jane Finch, Lawrence Williams won their award for the contribution to the Naace/MirandaNet Visual Learning Knowledge Base. The work is continuing in the pilot course we are now running for the TDA in partnership with Naace.
Anita Bjelica and Maka Baramidze have submitted a TPID Report on the Effects of ICT on Personalised Learning, describing a visit they made from Westminster Academy School to a school in Prague, Czech Republic. You can read their report
Also Ian Mursell who contributed his website about his Mexican work.
Find Ian's case study here.
Many congratulations to Christina Howell Richardson, my co-editor, in our latest volume of Reflecting Education, ‘Fascinating cultural objects': multimodal concept mapping in teaching and learning. In this volume we worked to gain a balance between academic writing conventions and studies that teachers find more approachable as authors and readers. Avril Loveless and Di Mavers showed enormous patience in this exercise in which we all learnt much.
The authors in this volume who also won awards went through many revisions: Jane Shuyska, Sylvia Rojas-Drummond, Nigel Riley and Wilma Clarke.
We would be delighted to have some members' reviews about this volume in which we have tried to break new ground in teachers' academic writing. What do you think? Does it work for the teachers amongst you?
Dr. Marilyn Leask receives her award for being the first academic to work closely with MirandaNet practitioners so that they were able to publish their case studies in her seminal Routledge series on How to Teach. She has continued to be a key influence in developing theories with Sarah Youngie about communal constructivism and e-communities of practice.
Erin Antonius gained her award for her paper about graphic organisers in the MirandaNet Mapping Inspiration e-journal. Many thanks to Inspiration for funding the workshops.
Robin Bevan also offered an interesting paper for this e-journal that he has summarised here.
Other authors in Mapping Inspiration were Steven Coombs on scaffolding teachers' learning, Nigel Riley on an outline of the researchers in this field and Jane Finch with two key articles about the uses of mapping in the classroom and on PDAs. Jane also gave a star performance in our IWB and Visualisers workshop. Mark Bennison, Michael Smith and Dai Thomas gave presentations about their use of ICT in teaching for the members of Naace at the annual conference last year that were warmly received by the advisers. Alastair Wells for the exciting developments he has sustained in this school with the learning platform, Oracle's Think.com, over the last eight years.
Andree Jordan's senior award is for her inspiring project on the World Ecitizens website, The Peace Room. We hope our members all over the world will involve their students in this getting to know you exercise. We hope it will lead to some exchange projects. Caroline Hook, who has managed Think.com for Oracle, gains her award for the support she has given to the activities of World Ecitizens as a Trustee over many years. Jan Lepeltak has also developed our connections with The Netherlands over more than a decade.
We have also given awards to our international colleagues who have been working with MirandaNet for many years. Professor Niki Davis has been an active influence on MirandaNet thinking since the start. Niki and I are now publishing two papers that revisit the NOF statistics that were the subject of my NOF evaluation in 2004. In these papers, that will be in the British Journal of Educational Research this year, we explore a wider range of the 47 Approved Training Providers to see which ones the teachers and the quality assurance assessors thought were the most effective.
There are opportunities to make new exchange projects at the What Works Where workshop, 12th, 13th March with our US colleagues and our Czech colleagues, Bozena Mannova, Mirka Cernochova and Lenka Zernanova. We hope some of you will be able to attend Barnfield Academy in Luton on 14th March, hosted by Mark Bennison when we shall be planning these connections in detail.
Our colleagues from the Czech Miranda have been working with us since 1994. We have had two memorable workshops in Prague and some of us will be meeting at the IFIT conference in June.
Download the .PDF leaflet here.
Pedagogies for interactive technologies: IWBs and Visualisers
Seminar held on 7th and 8th February 2008
Workshop Report
As you will remember we recently ran a joint workshop (in partnership with the WLE centre at the IOE, London and Steljes) for researchers and practitioners about the deeper practice that is emerging in teaching and learning using IWBs and Visualisers.
Follow this link for details of the seminar and for a link to vodcasts of the presentations. We are planning to publish a fuller report later at the same location.
Video conferencing at the Museum of London
The Museum of London currently offer a range of video conferences for primary, secondary and SEN schools that reflect their museum-based and outreach programmes. The programme has been running for two years and reaches around 1500 pupils per year. They want to build on the programme and have recently invested in improved video conferencing equipment.
Nicky Boyd is part of a small team of consultants undertaking research to inform the development of the programme for the academic year 2008/09. The museum is particularly interested in gathering feedback about the use of video conferencing from secondary schools as this is an audience they would like to increase.
Her role in the team is to contact Secondary School ICT advisors (UK wide) in order to find out to what extent videoconferencing is registering at LEA level. She will also be speaking to members of regional broadband consortia, Global Leap and JVCS.
Nicky thought you might be able to help! She's looking for interested ICT advisors who may have 10 mins spare to chat on the phone or to fill in a questionnaire to help inform the research. She has a big box of big bars of fair-trade chocolate as a thank-you for all participants!
See sample questionnaire
She looks forward to hearing from you
Nicky Boyd
The Education Resources Awards 2008
29 February 2008
We would like MirandaNetters to apply for these awards next year. If you are eligible or you want to suggest someone please get in touch so we can start on an application for 2009.
Events
12-13 March What Works Where? WLE Centre, IOE London
plus an optional visit to Barnfield School, Luton, March 14th
A joint venture between MirandaNet, WLE and Steljes
ICT CPD programmes as a focus for changes in policy and practice
The view from the UK, the US and Eastern Europe
Download the PDF leaflet here.
19 - 20 June 2008 International Conference in London
Multimodality and Learning: New Perspectives on Knowledge, Representation and Communication
A call for papers and registration details can be found here. Carey Jewitt, Diane Mavers and Gunther Kress are on the papers committee.
23rd - 26th June 2008
Valuing individual and shared learning: the role of ICT
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic IFIT
Christina Preston will be giving the keynote address.
More details here.
To attend contact:
Mirka Cernochova, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education
International Conference on Information Communication Technologies in Education (ICICTE) 2008
10-12 July Corfu Holiday Palace Hotel, Corfu, Greece
Keynote speaker: Dr Gilly Salmon, University of Leicester
ICICTE 2008 will seek to address the many challenges and new directions presented by technological innovations in educational settings.
All proposals and papers are peer reviewed by members of the Scientific Committee. If you wish to present at ICICTE 2008 submit your proposal to Nancy Pyrini by February 21, 2008. Each proposal will be double-blind reviewed by the Scientific Committee. Notification on whether the proposal has been accepted will be sent by February 28, 2008. More information
ALT-C 2008: Rethinking the digital divide
Leeds 9-11 September
*NOW OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS*
Submission guidelines, including details of the conference "dimensions". Submit your proposal on the new submission system.
Keynote speakers
* David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for One Laptop per Child, and
Head of the Future of Learning Research Group at MIT Media Lab;
* Dr Itiel Dror, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the
University of Southampton;
* Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institute,
Sweden, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation.
September 22nd - 25th Third International Conference on Concept Mapping
This two-site conference will be held first in Tallinn, Estonia from 22nd-24th. We then take the ferry which is about two hours to Helsinki in Finland to continue the presentations from 24th 25th.. There is some early information on this site presented in the form of a concept map.
Christina Preston will be speaking there and hopes MirandaNetters will join her.
Members' News
David Fuller - update
Hello everyone, I have recently changed my career and in September 2007, left Oundle School to start at the Thomas Deacon Academy (the flagship Academy) as a student achievement leader. The move from the independent sector to the state one has been reasonably smooth, although there have been one or two minor hiccups as I learn about teaching in this field. I certainly am enjoying my time and relish the responsibility that I have. I am finding it very interesting and the comparison in the teaching and learning between the two sectors is fascinating.
The Thomas Deacon Academy (TDA) is a very pleasant place to teach. The Norman Foster inspired building is a nice place to work, our Principal, Dr Alan McMurdo has a vision of teaching which is pupil centric and closely aligned to my style of teaching. The students are mostly keen and interested in learning and the mix from the previous schools has proved to be working well. Unlike a lot of other academies, the TDA is made up of a very successful school and two others and this will be the reason why it will be the success is it promising to be. I am looking forward to being involved in MirandaNet and have already sent someone from the Academy on the course on interactive whiteboards and hope to do more in the future. I have been encouraged to do more in this area.
It is proving to be a very positive move and I look forward to the next few years at the Academy.
New Scholars
Christine Beedham
I have been Primary ICT Consultant to 72 Warrington schools for the past 6 years. Prior to this I was a classroom teacher, first in secondary then in primary, and I gradually developed a love of ICT.
In my current role, I support co-ordinators and head teachers with the strategic leadership of ICT and also work alongside teachers in the classroom to provide support for both core and cross-curricular ICT. I provide CPD for Foundation Stage and Primary practitioners as well as individual support.
I work closely with Primary Strategy colleagues and enjoy developing resources for use in the classroom.
Michael Hallissy
My name is Michael Hallissy and along with my colleague, John Hurley, we run a small ICT in Education consultancy company in Dublin. I trained as a primary school teacher in Coláiste Mhuire Marino in the mid 1980s and I have had an interest in ICTs in education since that time. My honours degree project in TCD Dublin was on using the BBC microcomputer in my primary classroom. Having taught for two years I then emigrated to the US where I enrolled in Boston College's M.Ed programme where my major focus was on education technology with a minor focus on assessment and learning. During this time I also worked in the Newton Public School system where I had an opportunity to work with teachers in using education technology to enhance classroom assessment. On returning to Ireland in 1994 I resumed my teaching duties. My good friend and teaching colleague, John Hurley, established the first educational portal site in Ireland in February 2006, EdNet. We managed this website in our spare time after school and it quickly launched us into the world of ICT in education. From here I was seconded by the Irish Department of Education in 1996 to assist them in developing their first ICT in education policy, Schools IT 2000. Subsequently, both John and I worked in the NCTE. Having spent five years in the NCTE we both left in January 2002 and established H2 in August 2002.
Much of my work is focused on the creative use of ICTs in teaching and learning - particularly in using ICT in a constructivist manner. I am extremely interested in how technologies can improve student literacy, particularly their digital literacy. I am currently enrolled in the international EdD programme in the Institute of Education and I hope to conduct my research in the area of digital literacy and computer games. I believe computer games provide a great opportunity to create new forms of learning, particularly for students who are not engaged by traditional methods and approaches.
David Gwynne Harries
Educated to higher degree level, I have worked for 30 years in the public sector. The last ten have been as Headteacher in a large primary school with a special unit. I have developed the use of ICT on PC and Mac platforms, developing cross curricular ways of extending the curriculum through excellence and enjoyment. I am now developing my work as an education consultant and keen to share learning through the use of ICT.
Richard Hawkins
Having worked for many years as an ICT Curriculum Advisor for the IT Learning Exchange, until its closure last year, I am now working independently, doing some of what I was doing before - Hands-on-Support, Interactive Whiteboard training etc - and hoping also to do new things with ICT and learning. I am particularly interested in mobile technologies and their use in creating interactive digital learning maps.
Sara Hennessy
Sara Hennessy is a Lecturer in Teacher Development and Pedagogical Innovation in the Faculty of Education at University of Cambridge. She has over two decades experience of conducting educational research, mostly focused on using ICT to support subject teaching and learning in secondary schools - primarily mathematics and science but also English and history. Sara is also an inaugural member of the "Interactive Whiteboards Pedagogy Research Group" which formed in 2005 and comprises 9 national teams of researchers.
She directed the ESRC-funded T-MEDIA project (Teacher Mediation of Subject Learning with ICT: A Multimedia Approach 2005-2007. This work (carried out with colleague Rosemary Deaney) employed digital video to analyse and disseminate teacher strategies for making successful use of projection technology resources, interactive whiteboards in particular. Uniquely, the research team collaborated with the participating teachers in critically reviewing the video and other data and jointly developing theory about strategic technology use. The findings were exploited through developing five interactive CD-ROMs characterising the key strategies emerging and containing professional development activities. The multimedia resources do not offer models of "best practice", but rather a stimulus for debate - including the "added value" of such technology in the classroom. The discs are being widely disseminated (at cost price).
Caroline Holden-Rachiotis
I am particularly interested in the role of interactive whiteboards in English language teaching. I worked for Promethean as a content designer for 2 years before coming to Bahrain where I now work for the Royal College of Surgeons. Through working for Promethean I learned the key to good content for interactive whiteboards but didn't have the opportunity to teach through them. We are shortly to have a board installed at RCSI and I will then get the chance to teach using it as a learning tool. I am interested to study the effect that using the board will have on the learning of the students and the ways in which it can be adapted to teach medical subjects.
I have an MSc in ELT Management and am planning to further my education by following a Phd in Managing Innovation in ELT. These studies will definitely embrace the use of interactive whiteboards in the ELT classroom.
Janice Hurne
I have worked for 20 years in Higher Education specialising in research and teaching in Business Information Technology. My role as head of Learning & Teaching in the School of Design, Engineering and Computing at Bournemouth University has included membership of the procurement and implementation team which introduced a standard virtual learning environment across the university based on Blackboard software.
My community work includes School Governor of a primary and secondary school, and I have been a local councillor and am currently a prospective parliamentary candidate. I have wide interests in educational and political uses of IT, particularly in using technology for modelling, communication and organisation of information and knowledge.
Brenda Lim-Fong
Hello! I am a teacher and have had experience teaching at both elementary (Kindergarten to Grade 6) and junior high school science (Grade 7-9). I am currently a graduate student at the University of British Columbia working on my Masters in Education. My interest is in science education, particularly scientific literacy and using technology as a tool. Effective implementation of technology in the classroom can have positive influences in the learning process. For my research project, I am interested in studying the effects of interactive whiteboards on teaching pedagogy and possibly student learning in the context of the science classroom.
Manzil Maqsood
I am interested in implementing the effective use of ICTs in primary classrooms of developing countries, keeping into consideration the 'quality' aspects of teaching and learning through ICTs. My research focuses on developing a quality maturity process model that could help in implementing, assessing and continuously improving the quality of ICT supported education in primary schools of developing countries.
Kara Monroe
I am the Executive Director of the Center for Instructional Technology at Ivy Tech Community College. I'm interested in how technology can be used as a medium in the delivery of instruction as well as how technology can better facilitate the demonstration and teaching of essential skills as well as difficult concepts.
Stephen Scowcroft
I have been involved in international ICT in Education for the past 11 years. I began as a practitioner, lecturing in Singapore on multimedia development. I became a web developer for RM and developed Window Box Online (WBOL) to support teachers using the RM Window Box. I then ran an Educational Technology company in Singapore developing educational resources for Kindergarten through to Teachers and running projects on integrating ICT into Education.
More recently I have been the Education and Training sector specialist for UK Trade & Investment advising UK companies how to develop international business as well as raising the profile of the UK Education Sector overseas.
I have just joined LP+, a learning platform company, as a project manager and account manager working with LA, Schools and internationally to advise and support learning platform projects.
Eileen Snover
I am new to the Education field with less than 5 years of experience, but consider myself relatively technology advanced having brought many years of business and personal computing experience into my teaching.
I am always looking for ways to use ICT to enrich my teaching, as a teaching tool, as a student tool and as a means to present evidence of learning. Although I currently do not have a IWB in my classroom, I have already found many opportunities this year to use already created IWB materials to enhance student learning. Fortunately for me, two such enriched lessons happened to be ones observed by the principal who had positive feedback on both.
I personally believe that ICT in combination with content, used as an instructional tool, must be the backbone of the future of education here in the United States - although we are admittedly far behind in this arena when compared to our education peers in the UK and AU!
Chris Stott
I work mostly with Primary education, sometimes teaching children, sometimes educators and always learning what I can about it all. I enjoy many aspects of the use of ICT in education especially when they seem directly related to learning. I alternate between feeling we are at some kind of tipping point in the use of ICT and learning and teaching, and feeling that very little has changed in real practice!
Areas that I am drawn to currently are blogging in classrooms, making interactive whiteboards interactive and exploring aspects of visual learning.
Tidiane Toure
To inform and educate myself in order to assess properly technologies in vocational teaching environment and make better decisions for schools, students, teachers in order to reduce the gap between North and South. Thanks for all your help.
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