I tend not to leave required reading to take in one of my posts, but this LA Times article by teacher Ellie Herman had me nodding my head and scratching it in equal measure. While the settings of our respective classrooms are very different, there are many things in Ellie’s classroom that we will all have experienced – the keen student with additional needs so significant that they preclude him understanding the notes he so dutifully takes down, the students suffering as a result of poverty, the angry ADD-fuelled (or Ritalin-addled) kid… they’re in my classroom too.

The general feeling in my former staff room was that the incredible melting pots that are modern classrooms are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to the huge amount of variety in our students that was either not present, or not identified, in decades past. Teaching is becoming harder, and there seem to be no signs of it stopping.

A couple of months ago, we had an excellent bit of INSET training on the topic of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome – well worth reading up on for anyone who hasn’t heard of it, but here are the Cliffs Notes:

• When a woman drinks during pregnancy it can cause significant problems in the development of the baby.
• The amount of alcohol does not matter, nor does the point during the term of pregnancy.
• As a result, some women are unaware they are pregnant and continue drinking.
• The main effect of FAS is damage to the central nervous system – especially the brain.

This isn’t a particularly new condition, but only in the last ten years have significant numbers of children with the condition survived early infancy. As a result these children are now filtering through into our high schools, adding to the already simmering pot mentioned above. The issues caused by FAS can manifest as lack of impulse control, retention of memory, and inability to focus, and like autism, FAS is a spectrum disorder that can range from mild to serious.

We live in complex times, with few simple problems, and yet we as the professional at the front of the classroom are expected to be the ones with the answers. Armed only with a data sheet that may (though may not) have more detail than the occasional scant word or acronym – SA, SA+, STAT, EAL, BEH – isn’t hugely helpful.Also, FAS and other developmental syndromes including autism, Asperger’s and others do sometimes go undiagnosed, so we are also to be on the look out for students with problems that haven’t yet been identified.

Okay, so I realise I started out with reference to an article entitled “the myth of the extraordinary teacher”, and now I’m talking about special educational needs, but my point is twofold:

1. Teaching is hard. Anyone who claims anything different either doesn’t know enough to form that kind of opinion, or aren’t particularly good at it. It’s a constant balancing act, rarely with fewer than 25 variables sat before you, plus pressure from different sides when it comes to measuring outcomes of whatever stripe.
2. In answer to the original article, I don’t believe these settings do preclude excellence. We perhaps have to alter our definition of the word – academic excellence is not the only kind, after all.

Measuring time, by aussiegall on Flickr

Quantifying success

In order to gauge the relative success or failure of anything – a movie, a car, or a school – the first step is to select an appropriate yardstick. None of these three examples can be definitively compared with other movies, cars or schools using one criteria alone. Using box office takings alone would place Avatar comfortably at the top of the list, while The Shawshank Redemption & The Godfather share the top spot on IMDb’s Top 250 chart (Avatar rolls in a little later at #184). Low fuel consumption may be a perfectly reasonable criteria in the desirability of a family car, but is unlikely to be at the top of the list of priorities for a Formula 1 team. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on the idea that quantifying & measuring the relative success or failure of a school, or a teacher, is any simpler than either of these examples.

I used to teach a truly exceptional boy with Asperger’s syndrome whose fixation was politics, but for him at that time the sum total of politics was contained in the history of the Labour party from the 1960s onwards. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert when it comes to politics, but I knew enough to have some incredibly entertaining arguments with this young man who put every bit of his highly-specialised knowledge to good use. After a few conversations I wanted to see how well he could write, so I asked him once to write me an op ed piece on anything he liked. Approximately 500 words, on any topic provided he cared enough about it to form a compelling argument.

He came back to me a couple of days later with a short essay on the unfair system of education in the UK entitled “An argument in favour of abolishing British grammar schools”. As the benefactor of a grammar school education myself, I was delighted with the topic. I went off to read it, scrawling notes in the margins ready to lock horns with him when we next met. In this extremely well-written but entirely one-sided diatribe, he explained that wealth was no basis of selection for an education, and that rather than having a selection of centres for academic excellence scattered around the country, the focus of the government should be on encouraging the same standard throughout.

We talked at some length about how his argument had some flaws, not least of which was the fact he himself went to a highly successful academically-focused high school (a former grammar school itself) based largely on his postcode, which just happened to be located well within the leafy suburb of the catchment area – a postcode his parents secured through buying a house well beyond the means of many others, while I secured a spot in a grammar school not based on the personal wealth of my parents but my performance in an entrance exam, but the point is this: the government, both national and local, is measuring the success of schools in the same terms as a then-15-year-old boy talking only from his personal experience of education.

When I compare him to our current Secretary of State for Education, I at least feel confident that the boy has expanded upon his ideas since leaving school. With Michael Gove, I’m not so sure…

A good friend of mine works in a Pupil Referral Unit, the success of which is measured using exactly the same measure as my former school – the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades at GCSE. To provide some context, the students at this PRU have been permanently excluded from at least two high schools. The traditional educational system hasn’t worked for them – twice. So why then is the last resort being expected to operate in the same way as these schools? Last year, of the 11 final year leavers, every single one of them is now either attending college or in employment.

That is a huge achievement, and a testament to the hard work going on there – they take persistent non-attenders, students with alcohol and drug problems, and often histories of violence, and educate them. Not merely walk them through qualifications and present them with a handful of certificates at the end, but teach them how to function in a world they haven’t yet managed to be a part of.

Success like this rarely happens in education. Ramparts should be added to the school building purely to allow the staff and students to trumpet their extraordinary success from them. However, the staff of this unit, and many like it around the country, have been repeatedly told that under the new Ofsted criteria they cannot be graded as anything other than satisfactory. Adequate. Passable.

Talk about a vote of confidence.

How can we be great when we don’t know what great is?

I was recently asked to be host to two enthusiastic trainee teachers who were in school for a taste of what teaching is all about, and by the end of the day I feel fairly confident that they had had as comprehensive an experience as could be expected – they were whisked from lesson to lesson with barely chance to catch their breath, they had an undue burden placed upon them by an assistant head (to corral year 7 students at the sports day in the afternoon,) had just enough time over coffee in the staffroom to complain that that wasn’t what they were here for, and were saved from it by a colleague who due to his new job no longer cared about annoying SLT. Cough.

At the end of the day, we sat for a couple of hours discussing what it was to be a good teacher. I was surprised to hear that while mine wasn’t their first placement school, they hadn’t yet seen an enthusiastic teacher – the teaching they had seen thus far had been largely “Right, carry on with coursework,” with very little further input. That wasn’t quite the experience they had with me, though I don’t usually end my lessons with a Lady Gaga song. Honest.

I remember Googling to find answers to the question “what are the qualities of a great teacher?” when I was training for part of an assignment. There are so many bullet-point lists, PowerPoint presentations and webpages on the topic, but none of them can sufficiently answer the question because of that difficult quantifier – Great. Extraordinary. Exceptional. Outstanding.

Okay, maybe not the last one, but the others are incredibly difficult to quantify, describe or explain by using anything other than excessive hand actions and descriptive terms like je ne sais quoi. For any new teachers looking for advice, I can’t help you beyond this:

A great teacher is first a good teacher, and a good teacher is first an adequate teacher. Look at the standards for an exhaustive list of the kinds of things you should be aiming for, but I’d boil it down to knowledge, communication, relationships, versatility & resilience.

Everyone has to have the first two under their belt, but the standards only go so far as to describe subject knowledge. You absolutely need to know your subject, but don’t be confined by it. The best experiences I’ve had in the classroom and out of hours in teaching students have been about all manner of far-flung things, not just ICT – my Classics Club has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my career, but you’re never going to see “Is able to teach Ancient Greek” on the specification for an ICT teaching post. If you want to be a great teacher, know as much as you can about as many different things as you can. If you don’t love to learn, how can you expect to get others to?

Communication is a big deal. Not just being able to, but being able to tweak whatever needs changing when talking to different audiences. Differentiation is all about communication – if your favoured method of imparting information isn’t working, what else do you have in your arsenal to fall back on? Discount nothing – glove puppetry, mime or interpretive dance are just as welcome in my classroom as chalk & talk.

For me, the final three are where the real differences lie for me between okay, good and great.

Relationships are the cornerstone. The first thing to realise is you’re teaching kids, and you’re going to get some fooling around from time to time. A solid teacher-student relationship based on mutual respect is a sure-fire way to sort them out easily, but forging that relationship isn’t easy – it takes time, consistency, and interest on your part. You can’t fake it, so don’t try – I had plenty of teachers who taught me very well indeed but could scarcely remember my face once I’d left. It’s not a problem.

Versatility is also a big deal. Delivering an assembly is very different to delivering a lesson, and it never fails to get me hot under the collar… having my colleagues lining the sides of the hall, spectating, has always put me off kilter, but it gets better with practice. I’m also no gifted athlete, but that doesn’t stop the PE cover lessons coming in… roll with the punches or they’ll knock you on your arse.

Resilience is needed to get yourself back up when you inevitably do get knocked down. Whether it’s because of a truly awful lesson where the kids just didn’t get it (we all have them), a bollocking from one of the higher-ups, or just the mounting pressure, you need to bounce back from it. Teaching kicks the shit out of you sometimes, and in my three short years I’ve come to understand why so many burn out. If you truly care about being a great teacher, the last thing you’ll let it effect is your teaching, but letting the pressure take its toll on everything else – social life, friends, family – isn’t a long-term solution.

To conclude…

One final caveat I’d add to all of the advice above is that it works for me. Not all of it will work for you, but some if it will. I’d also add I’m neither the voice of sage experience nor do I consider myself a great teacher, but some of my students do, and compliments like that don’t come along often in teaching, so take them when you can.

To sum up what has been one of the most rambling posts I’ve ever written (I’d apologise, but I enjoyed writing it too much), assessing the quality of a teacher requires the same kinds of differentiation we assess in lesson observations – by outcome, by task & by input. This is unlikely to happen while the people at the very top are so feeble-minded that they can’t look beyond their own experiences as a universal, one-size-fits-all education, but 2015 isn’t all that far away… Surely they can’t do too much damage if we ignore as much as possible in the meantime?

The idea that extraordinary teachers are a myth is bullshit. Yes, we have a lot to manage in the classroom, and nobody can do it all, all of the time. But the truth is that even the best of us have bad lessons, bad days, bad years…

When you have the respect of your students & your colleagues, you’re doing a good job. The best teachers I’ve come across don’t need to keep looking up for any further affirmation than that.

I’m currently presenting at an SSAT seminar entitled ‘How to make ICT the most popular subject in your school’, having been very kindly invited by Nick Jackson. I’m hoping to expand on this post tonight after the event, but wanted to post my presentation for anyone following on Twitter, or anyone with an interest in pushing the envelope when it comes to content in ICT lessons.

My presentation is entitled “The History of War… in ICT”, and looks to discuss how technological discoveries have often been fuelled by military research & development.

Watch the presentation online, or download it as a .zip file – needs Adobe Flash Player in order to play.

Created to map to the OCR Nationals Level 2 framework for unit 23, these video editing resources are currently in-use in my school to great effect. Students take on the role of advertisers/VJs, creating an advert/music video to advertise a Some Rights Reserved concert aimed at promoting free music. As well as teaching aids for completing the assessment objectives set out in the unit handbook (video review worksheets, storyboard proforma, testing table, etc), 380mb of Creative Commons-licensed music, images and video are available to save directly to a networked drive for students to access.

Check out the Moodle course by logging in as a guest, or download the resources for use on your own VLE. (NB: This address is different from the first originally published due to a Moodle error)

Downloads

• Assets (zip archive) 379.4Mb
• Moodle course backup (zip archive) 88.9Mb

Our World: Cracking Walls

The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

• BBC News: Visualising the Internet
• BBC News: Internet access is ‘a fundamental right’
• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on Youtube – Boing Boing
• The Economics of Perfect Software: Sigpwned
• Google gets little US corporate support in Internet fight with China – New York Times

From Now On

I really have to start the first roundup of useful links with the first site that got me really thinking about the role of technology in education. Jamie McKenzie takes a cautionary role, looking for the good in applying technology rather than evangelising. He provides excellent food for thought, and was quoted several times in my dissertation.

Key posts

• Avoiding Second Hand Thinking
• The Slam Dunk Digital Lesson
• The Medium is Not the Literacy
• Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students

Ending the War on Sharing: Richard Stallman

I described Richard Stallman in my famous faces in tech poster series as an “open source evangelist”. Here, he makes an excellent argument against the war on piracy & file sharing.

Stephen Fry on the history of copyright

Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, and talks candidly about his own attitudes to file sharing. An excellent talk on the subject from someone who makes money by virtue of his intellectual property. Downloadable m4a podcast.

News roundup

• New Scientist: Worldwide battle rages for control of the Internet
• The Guardian: Teenage girl is first to be jailed for bullying on Facebook
• Plagiarism: Textiles graduate student caught out
• Wired magazine: BBC launches open-source Digital Revolution
• Social media statistics

“So what do you teach?”

“ICT.”

“Oh, well at least the kids must find that interesting.”

- Opening to half a dozen conversations I’ve had with non-teachers.

We’re not in the ‘90s anymore, and sitting a kid in front of a computer generates little more excitement than sitting them in front of a toaster. In a society where computers are truly ubiquitous, they can’t be expected to be intrinsically exciting. How impressed would you be to find a TV in a classroom? What if I said it received Ceefax?

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the process of innovation – or the final stage in the hype cycle. New developments only remain interesting for as long as they can be called new developments… technologies older than that (or “the most profound” technologies, as Marc Weiser said) simply disappear into the fabric of our lives and are thereon taken for granted.

From this, the only logical conclusion is that – in the eyes of the only people that matter, students – ICT is no longer a new subject. It’s still treated as such… viewed as a hip and trendy subject by outsiders, or a mealy-mouthed Micky Mouse affair by (some) teachers of other subjects.

So how do we teach ICT in a meaningful way without boring the buggers to tears?

When I watch children playing video games at home or in the arcades, I am impressed with the energy and the enthusiasm they devote to the task. Why can’t we get the same devotion to school lessons as people naturally apply to the things that interest them?

Donald Norman, quoted in Marc Prensky’s Don’t Bother Me Mom – I’m Learning!

Read that quote through. Have you had an “uhm…” moment yet? If not, the problem is with the last sentence. If you’re anything like me, after reading it a couple of times the question becomes “why can’t we get the same devotion to [REALLY BORING] school lessons as people naturally apply to the things that interest them?”

But it’s actually worse than that in that the REALLY BORING goes unsaid, as if it doesn’t need to be said. Kids like doing what interests them… if only we could find some way of introducing that enthusiasm into the classroom.

Maybe try interesting them, Don. I don’t know whether this is an overly tart Brit missing an American attempt at irony, but in my defense Marc Prensky uses the quote in the chapter of his book dedicated to motivation. Classroom-based education & engagement/interest/enthusiasm aren’t mutually exclusive now, and never have been.

Donald Norman was talking obliquely about harnessing interest & enthusiasm in “the classroom”, but I’d like to focus in on the ICT room.

Most kids view the traditional ICT fodder of spreadsheets & databases as being as far removed from their home computer use as reading a poem in English or designing a desk tidy in Tech. There doesn’t seem to be the difference in attitude towards ICT (or IT, back then) that my generation was brought up with – that it’s something new, something different.

Certainly, using functions & formulas in a spreadsheet is no more intrinsically rewarding for students than solving for x. A different way of handling numbers, sure – but no more engaging or exciting an activity because of the presence or use of a computer.

As I said in the opening, this isn’t a bad thing, but how can an activity in an ICT lesson (a subject that by its very nature is applied) be truly engaging when it’s viewed as academic, with little relevance to the students’ world, or the wider world?

I’m not suggesting that spreadsheets & databases shouldn’t form part of the curriculum, but anyone presenting one as a tool for tuck shops to calculate profit & loss, and the other as a tool for a video rental shop to keep track of loans needs to brush up on their meaningful examples. Just ask a fifteen year old where they rent their videos from. Maybe they’ll tell you they use LOVEFiLM, or that they’re looking forward to streaming movies to their Xbox 360 from Netflix like the Americans do.

Keeping current allows teachers to engage students in discussions about the impact of ICT, progress being made, and the march towards utopian/dystopian technocracy, depending on your point of view. Hell, with a little more encouragement you could even nudge the students into forming their own opinions about it.

By invoking my year 8 students’ understanding of the iPhone, they were soon thinking quite deeply about human computer interfaces, and different ways of controlling & using technology.

“How many buttons do we need?”

“We only need a power button. Everything else can be on the touch screen, but that won’t work if it’s switched off so we can’t lose the power button.”

Keeping up to date is remarkably simple in this age of syndication. You don’t have to scour the web for news, read the papers or watch TV to find out what’s going on. You can easily combine RSS feeds from most major websites using a feed reader such as FeedDemon, or integrating them directly into an iGoogle or Netvibes homepage. My homepage looks like this:

Some recommended links:

• BBC Technology news
• Wired Top Stories
• Delicious Popular Bookmarks
• The Register
• PC Pro tech news

Hell, you can even subscribe to this site via RSS if you want to, though I make no promises to update as much as the ones above do.

Or, if you prefer, combine the day’s news from as many feeds as you like into a Tabbloid, a customised PDF newspaper emailed to your inbox as often as you want it:

Either way, let news come to you. Don’t battle your way through it all, just take the time every now and then to dip in and see what’s going on in the world of technology. Like the rest of the world, you’ll probably be surprised.

This is an event – the first resource to be posted borne of collaboration! Debbie Jones – @teach_ict – of Teach-ICT fame very kindly put together two of the handouts in this set covering the moral issues in ICT.

The social & moral implications of ICT are something we both have a passion for, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion – I’ll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario. Subjects covered:

• File sharing
• Plagiarism
• Snooping
• Web addiction
• Censorship
• Web medicine

I hope they’re useful – we had fun making them!

Download handouts (PDF – 3mb)

From firm foundations…

When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled “vocab”. At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan – the kids know the vocab, right?

Early this year, my department ran a survey for all key stage 3 students (11-13 year olds) to find out attitudes and opinions on ICT. I would say I picked the first answer at random, but as the student’s first and second names both began with A I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Regardless, here’s what we saw:

Question one: is ICT important?

Yes. ICT is everywhere so it’s very important to understand it.

Question two: what do the letters ICT stand for?

I’m not sure.

So she knew that ICT was important, yet didn’t know what it was? This student was in year 9, so had been receiving two lessons a week for over two years at my school – not to mention the years she spent studying it at primary school – without covering a simple definition of terms.

Saying that she didn’t know what it was is a little harsh, granted, but after realising this good student didn’t know what the fundamental acronym stood for, in a subject littered with abbreviations, acronyms and a raft of otherwise alien words, that vocab section I derided as a trainee started to make an awful lot of sense.

According to this blog’s stats, the most popular resource on this site (by a considerable way) is the Bloom’s taxonomy document. I have to say that I’m glad about that… posters have their place, sure, but they’ll never have the kind of impact that really thinking about how you teach your subject will.

I was responsible for the year 7 scheme of work this year, which I put together largely over the summer, but after reading this girl’s insight into the role vocab has to play in truly understanding ICT concepts I opened it back up to add a vocab section to every unit. Key words were flagged up with definitions, and time built into the scheme for what some might think was a step backwards: vocab tests.

I went to a grammar school which taught very much as tradition dictated, and out of my three French lessons per week, the first ten minutes of the first lesson was dedicated to a simple, ten question vocab test – completed in the back of our vocab books, mere tantalising pages away from the answers which we’d written in the front. Under the keen eye of either of the stern Mr Wilby or the frankly terrifying Mr Ryder, we would learn our vocab in preparation for the test, do it, swap books with a neighbour, mark them together and by show of hands the teacher would determine… something.

What I didn’t know at the time was what exactly they were determining. Check your taxonomy – they’d just assessed our knowledge. What was next? Comprehension of this vocab (applying different cases & genders) & application (forming into gramatically correct sentences).

I realise I’m way over-egging this particular pudding, but in thinking back to my experience in my formulaic but effective French lessons, I saw what I’d been doing wrong as a trainee. Expecting students to understand the difference between a database and a spreadsheet is more than a little unreasonable when you haven’t provided them with a definition of either. I see this all the time with new students in year 7. “What’s a spreadsheet?” “Microsoft Excel.” “Okay, that’s an example of spreadsheet software, but can you tell me what one is? What does it do?”

I’m not sure whether this is something only I have had to deal with, but sometimes we feel like we’re regressing too far. “These kids have had ICT lessons virtually from the womb… why do they need to start from scratch when they arrive in my room?” was an interesting question from a high school ICT teacher I met at a conference. Just as interesting was the question “Do you have to complete the database task in Access, or can you do it in Excel?” from a qualified ICT teacher.

Students with a firm foundation in vocab and definitions go on to form confident opinions, and apply their understanding. By starting lesson one of spreadsheets with =A1+B1, there’s a hell of a lot that you (I) just missed.

Encouraging higher level thought

Equally important is what comes next. At the end of year 7, all students completed a project in small groups where they came up with a vision of some form of information technology they would expect to see in ten years’ time. Here’s how we broke it down:

What can computers do?

Pick a current example of some kind of ICT – mobile phone, games console, PDA – and list what it does. Everything that it does.

What could computers do ten years ago?

Sticking with the same genre of technology, pick an example from ten years ago. If you chose the PS3, pick the original Playstation. Write down what that could do, and note any differences you see.

So what can you expect in ten years time?

Think about the context you’ve just discovered – think about what’s next. Think about input & output devices. How will you control your invention? How will it relay information back to you?

In three manageable chunks we covered past, present & ideas for future technology, with the likelihood being that they’d only really experienced the present examples. Understanding.

Short assessment tasks were prepared – students had five minute interviews with me as an industry expert (eyes rolled) in which they describe their product and I give feedback. Often the ideas were along the lines of “It’s like an iPhone, but with more memory.” Or “It’s a PS3 that can play Xbox & Wii games.”

With that last example, we got into an interesting discussion about why Playstation, Microsoft & Nintendo would allow their games to be played on one console. We also discussed what the controller would look like – they presented me with a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a games controller – chunks of all three console controllers Photoshopped together, but with a little discussion they agreed it wouldn’t work so moved on to another idea.

While giving current examples, I used the Nintendo Wii (again) as a key example of the kind of change we’ve seen in recent years. I started my lesson with the key question:

Why might it be surprising that Nintendo is having one of its best years on record? And why do you think that is?

As expected, nobody volunteered an answer – those are two difficult questions, and take some thought. So I left it on the board with the promise of a praise slip for anyone who came up with an answer before the end of the lesson. I did this with three separate year 7 classes, and in each one the answer came at around the 30 minute mark.

It’s surprising because we’re in a recession, and they’re making so much money for two reasons. Firstly, the Wii is a lot cheaper than the Xbox or Playstation 3, and secondly it’s a very different interface. You have to be more active to use it, and a lot of the games involve more than one person so parents are buying them to play with their kids.

A question like that digs a little deeper than a vocab test, drawing on awareness of current events as well as understanding the appeal of different consoles to parents – the ones who hold the purse strings. A games console no longer means hours of solitude locked away in a darkened bedroom.

After some thought, these students got that – but it only came after setting those firm foundations in vocabulary & encouraging them to build upon these themselves.

I feel awfully preachy having read this post through, but please don’t imagine me standing atop my soapbox trying to preach to a choir of grandmothers about the virtues of sucking eggs – this is more a description of the issues I had with building competence in my students.

It’s all too easy to fake understanding in ICT lessons: doing doesn’t necessarily mean understanding. By introducing key questions teachers can assess what’s actually being learnt. My resolution for next year is to do more digging in order to assess genuine understanding.

The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.”

Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now?

For decades, gadgets marginalised people who didn’t understand them. In the 1980s programming your VCR was as much a standing joke as airplane food. In the 1990s, nobody over the age of 20 could send a text message in less than half an hour.

These gadgets didn’t meet our expectations. Tapping dozens of buttons, scrolling through list-based menus or trying to work out what two circles joined by a line at the top aren’t natural ways of interfacing with the world. That’s not to say they weren’t popular, but rather than them being used intuitively their owners had to sit down and learn how to use them. Not quite man-machine synergy.

I am 24 years old, and for 14 of those years I have been the technology expert in my family. My dad, an intelligent, articulate, savvy man, has not only been confused by his gadgetry, but has sometimes been so flummoxed by the thing that he’s been unable to describe the problem.

Why? Because they don’t do what he expects them to do. My nan’s first mobile phone didn’t have predictive texting on it. Her second one, bought after a year of practicing with her first, did – and did by default. She couldn’t work out how to turn it off, so she stopped texting again. Are we born with the innate knowledge that hitting the hash key twice switches from predictive to normal texting? I’m no neuroscientist but I doubt it. Is not understanding the intricacies of these gadgets her fault? No.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s the guy who designed the phone, but we have to bear in mind the limitations imposed on mobile phone designers over the last ten years – size, cost, performance, hardware limitations, battery life… when you really start to think about it, there’s little wonder the things have been such a chore to use.

There is an awful lot that we do innately understand, though. Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this brilliantly in the video below:

Did you know that he was demonstrating the pentatonic scale? Even if you did, did you need to in order to sing along? Thankfully, we’re now at a point where technology has advanced enough to meet us half way in rising to these natural expectations within us all.

The two examples that leap to mind are the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

Give someone an iPhone (even, shock horror, someone over the age of 40) and just through playing with it they will very quickly learn how to use it, initially being impressed by the clever little touches like swiping to scroll, pinching to zoom & twisting to rotate up to typing on the qwerty keyboard & noting the changes in interface when the accelerometer detects it has been tilted. It’s outselling most other phones in most markets, and not just because it’s cute.

The majority of Nintendo Wii games are cute, with oodles of the fuzzy anime-like charm Nintendo does so well, but the real reason behind the blinding success of the console is in its revolutionary, pseudo-real movement-based interface. Demonstrating this with my year 11 top set, I mimed my way through several different games with a Wii controller in my hand (baseball, tennis, shoot ‘em up, golf, etc) while dragging a hapless volunteer to stand beside me and mime the same genre of game using a PS3 controller. Smirks all round, but they got the point. These inventions make sense.

“Who here has a Nintendo Wii?” Hands fly up. “Keep your hand up if you have ever needed to read the manual.” Hands snap back down.

So are we there? Have we truly reached the technological nirvana of seamless human-computer interaction? Not quite, but over the last few years we have seen some considerable steps in the right direction.

“What else do we need?” was the next question for my class. Here’s what they came up with:

• Voice recognition & commands: lights on, music, coffee
• Gesture recognition: wave, point, stop/go, nod/shake
• Further developments of touch technology: integrate with PCs, not just phones
• Develop movement recognition: Xbox Project Natal is another step in the right direction
• Biometrics: fingerprint, iris scan, DNA recognition

Quite an extensive list, really – I was impressed by the last one. The guy who suggested it had been reading up on the ID cards that have been causing a furore since they were announced several years ago. The idea of biometric integration with technology reminded me of the closing section of an excellent lecture given at Huddersfield University last year by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of the DNA fingerprint.

In the lecture, he described the effect technological progress had had on the process of identifying a sample for DNA fingerprinting – identification of a person, or even a person’s relatives, by using samples of skin, hair or bodily fluids.

When he invented the process in 1984 it took two weeks in a laboratory in order to get a result. In 2008, it took about an hour with a kit that could fit into a briefcase.

And so he revealed his vision for the future; a Britain where nobody would ever worry about losing their keys. A nation of doors without locks or handles – when you get home you wouldn’t have to put your key into the lock. You would spit on the door, it would analyse the DNA contained in the sample and as if by magic open before you.

A utopian vision of the future; millions of homes with phlegm-covered doors.

Yeah.

One of the big rubs in this brave new world of technology-assisted education is getting students to realise that not everything posted online is true. With young children, even getting them to realise that search engines don’t actually provide you with information – rather, they link to websites that do – is very difficult. This is made easier with the introduction of Wolfram Alpha, which rather than linking to websites that contain the information provides the user with a nicely-formatted cribsheet of information related to the search topic.

I was recently asked with very little prior notice to run a taster lesson for year 6 children who were in school for a taster day. Because we only had 50 minutes, and couldn’t expect anything like skills with graphics packages, etc, I decided to do a lesson on finding information on the Internet. I divided the class up into three groups: group A had to use Ask Jeeves, group B had to use Google, and group C had to use Wolfram Alpha. I told them they would have to answer some fact-finding questions as quickly and as accurately as possible. The first correct answer would get two win/draw slips (our school’s reward system), the second would get one, then we’d come back together as a class and discuss the answers they found.

Question one: what is the capital city of Guatemala?

Start off easy. Most kids got it, with the majority of the early hands up coming from team Google. Some members of Team Wolfram who used the keywords “guatemala capital” found not only the information they were looking for, but additional information including location, population, which they started avidly reading in preparation for question two.

Question two: what is the currency used in Guatemala?

Another easy question, but it allowed us to discuss the differences between the three search engines – Ask presents its information in a similar way to Google, with no discernible improvements, yet the chatter from Team Wolfram had the other two thirds of the room craning their necks over to have a look. One student in Team Wolfram who had used the keyword “guatemala” already had the information on his screen (along with a great deal more) so won the prize for first correct answer within seconds.

Question three: what is the population of Guatemala?

With this question, you see the penny begin to drop. I started writing answers on the board:

• 12,300,000
• 13,000,000
• 14,400,000
• 68,000,000,000 (not entirely sure what happened there)
• 13,400,000

Wolfram’s population section.

When I got to ten different numbers I called a stop to the search.

“So which one’s right?”

A couple of unsure hands went up. “Mine,” said one of the more confident boys. “Why?” “Because it looked right.” “What do you mean by looked right?” “I’m not sure. It just did.”

There were another couple of similar answers, but then I asked where they got their information from. Because this isn’t immediately obvious on the Wolfram Alpha search page, I pointed out to the class that it was down at the bottom of the page under the link “Source information”:

I wrote this source information down on the board next to the answers. A handful:

• Wikipedia
• nationsencyclopedia.com
• History Central.com
• US State Department
• CIA World Factbook

“Okay, now we’re talking – Sam, come cross out one you don’t believe.” He goes for Wikipedia. “Why did you choose that one?” “My mum told me anyone can edit it.” Someone else chips in about how that’s true, but that most things that are wrong get fixed quickly. I tell my story about a cherub in a previous school editing Nikita Kruschev’s page to say “mmmmm, burgers are yummy” a couple of years back, and that it got put back as it was in less than a minute.

“Do you want to change your answer, Sam?” “No, I still think some of the others are more reliable.”

This post is turning into storytime with Mr Greenwood, so I’ll leave it there, but suffice it to say from such a simple start these children who had come from different primary schools, with inconsistent (sometimes insufficient) ICT teaching were very quickly discussing how to be critical of sources on the Internet. The US State department is a better source of information than HistoryCentral.com because State is the department responsible for dealing with other countries. You’d expect them to have their facts right.

In the last ten minutes, we discussed how populations are measured, and I ended the lesson with the promise of five of my finest win/draw slips for the first person to explain to me what a census is when they arrive as year 7s in September.

This is a potentially dry subject – hardly the kind of thing you’d expect young children to get excited about, yet it is a vital component of information literacy. I decided early in the year that yr 11 students explaining that they got the information for their essay “from Google” was unacceptable. Hopefully, through integrating lessons like these into the curriculum, it won’t happen quite so much.