Re-vitalising the blog
Re-vitalising the blog
Posted by PeterT on 01 Jun 2012
In this first post in our revitalized blog I thought I should update you on what is happening with Vital as we move into our third phase. Yes, we have funding from the DfE for another year (taking us to the 31st March 2013). Happily, we are no longer trying to become self-funding, which means we can go back to truly collaborating with other providers of support to schools. Here are the things we are focusing on as we move forward.
- Supporting our In-house Professional Development Partners – we have sold over 150 In-house Professional Development Partnerships (IPDPs), who we intend to provide with superb support as they roll out the programme. To that end we will be appointing two Vital National Advisors from September.
- Extending the reach of our Subject and Special Interest Portals – the number of subscribers to our Portals is growing rapidly, but still represents a tiny proportion of teachers in England (yet alone the English speaking world). To help extend our reach we are offering significant discounts on ‘bulk purchases’ of Portal Subscriptions.
- Developing the Education Futures Evidence Hub – a vehicle to engage practitioners, academics, commercial folk and policy makers in sharing evidence about what works (and what doesn’t) in education. To be honest the current user interface is unusable, so we have delayed the public launch of the Evidence Hub until September.
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Publishing Vital Guides on topics such as:
- Moving to the cloud
- Responsible use policies for mobile devices (inc. phones)
- Setting up a Digital Leaders programme
- Implementing a school/community radio station
- 1:1 computing
- Bring you own device (BYOD)
- bring your own technology (BYOT)
If you know of schools that are implementing any of these things then we would love to hear about them. Our plan is to collect evidence about what works and what doesn’t from a range of schools who have practical experience of the topic and then pull out key strategic advice for others to benefit from.
- ‘Franchising’ the In-house Professional Development Partnership model, so that other people can use the model and materials that we have created free of charge. We are currently thinking about how we need to change the materials so that they work face-to-face and without Vital’s infrastructure. Find out more about the IPDP and let us know if you are interested in using the materials.
- Stirring the pot re the ‘ICT Curriculum’ – expect further posts on this subject in the near future!
- Preparing a website strategy to ensure the ongoing availability and updating of the Portals from the 1st April 2013. Our preferred option being that the Portals should be taken over by a consortium who will make them available free of charge and ensure that they are maintained and updated.
Comments
Andrew in response to your comment I have to say that a scheme was trialed some 5 years ago in my daughters middle school , with students paying half towards the cost of laptop in monthly installments over the term.
Student were very proud to have the devices, and in the main did look after them, there were some quibbles around those parents who didn't have internet access and they paid a lower amount towards the laptop to recompense for this. The student were all supplied with rucksacks to carry them in, in order to ensure that no damage was done to fragile shoulders or the laptops !
I have to say that it was in my opinion a success, my daughter left the term after the pilot so I'm not sure how long it continued, and if its still going. I think its was a great initiative though and a positive experience for the students and the school.
An evidence-based guide to 1:1 computing will be very useful in many schools.
I have two pieces of anecdotal evidence which it would be great to have verified by social media responses (since gathering hard data from schools is very difficult).
1) Hard cases for netbooks reduces damage by 90%.
2) Assigning 'ownership' of a device to individual students reduces maintenance costs by at least 50%.
A local secondary school added a small amount to the cost of providing individual netbooks to provide the hard cases, and found this eliminated the costly spree of damaged screens when students accidentally dropped their device, or the school bag in which the device was being carried.
Several local primary schools have engineered situations in which parents buy or rent-by-the-term an iPad or netbook. Those in which students are assigned the device individually have much lower IT support costs. Individual ownership (rather than taking a computer from the classroom trolley) makes students responsible for keeping the device operational, and appears to induce a degree of caring not see with respect to institutional equipment.
Can anyone else confirm these assertions, perhaps from personal experience?
Best wishes - Andrew
Franchising the Vital resources could help get the message to senior leaders in schools by delivering some modules on a face-to-face basis. An exercise to map the relevance of individual resources to segmented group needs would be a useful start-point e.g. VP-M7 Introduction to evaluating the impact of professional development activities, could find a face to face audience of senior leader interest, who may then go on find out about IPDP, etc.
Who'd like to join me in setting up a project to encourage students to slant their use of social media towards education?
http://laurencejames.co.uk/?p=472
Just remember, you saw it here first!
Best wishes