Newtools Toolkit - Telling Stories and making things

Yes Telling Stories and Making things.  I had a dream sequence a couple of years ago and I thought imagine if government eased off on teachers a bit in terms of curriculum overload and just as they signed off or were about to said sorry about that we overdid it and we trust you they then gave some final bits of guidance.  I thought that perhaps the best bits of guidance they could give was here is the content that you’ve got to cover and we suggest that you look at telling stories and making things and just by following those two pathways suddenly teachers as they intuitively new can make learning come alive.  Tell me the story in words of what we have just covered, do a drawing of what you’ve learnt in the maths lesson, map out on the floor the way in which monopolies work or make me a plasticine model of a design of the school of the future and suddenly it is a very fertile way of re-energising teaching.  Everything can really be taught or understood by following either or both of those pathways.   So children could be more creative.  Yes giving them the chance so that once they’ve heard it or read it or been taught it by a number of means to actually roll their sleeves up and make something, paint something, draw something, write something or else put together a story in words or on paper or in group narrative where they tell what they’ve learnt.  Two very useful reinforcement tools work well and the magical thing about telling stories and making things is the positive part that ICT can play suddenly we can record voice and turn it into a podcast, mix it with music to amplify the effect, we can take plasticine and turn five stills into an animation that tells a moving story.  So if we make the two pathways simpler at that level Im not sure that there isn’t anything we couldn’t teach!

Newtools Toolkit - Difference Engine

Ah haa.  The difference engine it  came to me really when I was researching the history of computing and I found that one of the earliest names for a computer back in the 1800’s was a difference engine one of the first computers that computed difference and it was a very large object the size of a big room, brass cogs and wheels and it took several people to drive it physically but it was able to carry out large complex navigation calculations.  It started as an idea in one mans mind  and another man  took it further.  It wasn’t built for a long time after its initial design.  The interesting word there was difference because we have come a long way with computers in education and I thought it was perhaps time to revisit the difference in the UK in particular the government has spent close to 2billion pounds putting computers into schools but still now tries to centrally dictate how schools should use them and what good practice looks like and there seems to be a paradox in there in that if you give schools, teachers and students a tool that seems to have a great potential for difference, you cant really expect them all to run in the same direction and I think maybe its time to start to celebrate the difference and think that some schools are going to take ICT and turn it into a really creative tool to build music technology areas look at broadcasting, look at ways in which they can build their creative curriculum and enhance it with ICT.  Others are going to look at the diagnostic effect of admin and the use of ICT within that.  We are all going to do it differently. 

Newtools Toolkit - 10p Curriculum

Beyond the 10p curriculum.  Yes I was never quite sure what to call this tool as I was thinking about it but I wanted to get across the idea that there are a number of paradox’s that are running about curriculum and particularly in terms of content and this tool is to do with realising that curriculum doesn’t improve necessarily as we make it larger and that we can share what we have in many ways.   Beyond the page and the 10p comes from the idea that you could probably put all of the government guidance, all of the national curricular and at school levels, schools could publish a guide for parents on and examples of past work onto a cd rom at a cost of 10p if a CD replicator was owned by the school and that’s quite a powerful idea because you could give each student the content that they would be covering for the next couple of years at least and then you could say that we’ve got the content, how shall we learn it, how do you want to explore it and for many of us we start to relax a bit once we know that we’ve got all the content and that there are no more surprises ahead and we can really start to get our minds around it in new ways.  I guess the parents could look at that cd.  Yes there are a number of access issues but it’s a good starting point to say look there it is find a place if its not in the home its in the library or its in the learning resource centre of the school or its in the education action zone so there are a number of ways of doing it and leading on from that there is ground breaking work going on in Wolverhampton where students have been given their own very small computer pocket pc and Dave Whilley head of the project there says that it is the cost to parents of a packet of cigarettes every two weeks so we are into some very interesting issues of access and cost.   Its time to look afresh at how much paper we need to use and when other methods might be more useful than perhaps the danger here might be that we are getting a bit too web centric and that everything has to be provided through the internet and the BBC another large organisation is colluding that because they see that there is another opportunity to keep us watching or  keep us browsing if we are no longer watching.   Maybe some of the older technologies like CD rom have been overlooked and its time to sort of revisit them.   If a large secondary school is photocopying 2million pages a year that’s the size of 3 and a 1\2 Nelsons column then maybe its time to ask why isn’t there a cd duplicator sitting next to the photocopier in schools and if we can do the curriculum for 10p then we can move on to saying how can we provide different paths of access and we will hear more about this in tool No 9 The Modality Motorway and how we can build it.