Views & Opinion Ask Charlotte!


This month, regular Education Today ed tecch contributor Charlotte Beckhurst looks back at Bett, and offers some pointers on cloud technology.


If you attended Bett in January, and you spent your time walking round with your head in the Cloud, then you are in a good place. Bett this year was a success. Last year I commented that it was a little ‘deflating’ and that it had seemed to completely miss out on the opportunity of developing teachers’ practice. This year the gap has begun to be filled and, more importantly, it sought to answer questions that are floating around every school, college and university at the moment; how do we use cloud-based technology to support and enhance the learning and what cloud environment should we choose?


Cloud technology is an excellent tool to develop depth of learning. It enables learners to write blogs and wikis, tell stories digitally, post via social media, make movies and evaluate their learning through annotation and commenting. This year Bett provided solutions for encouraging learners to review, reflect, and engage in their learning digitally. While apps are still useful in the classroom, the cloud environment is more flexible, and more open to teaching strategies and pedagogies. As teachers we need to find new ways to differentiate, assess, provide feedback, give homework, and to develop metacognition and we need to do all of this, without creating any more work for ourselves. The answer is the Cloud and Bett appeared to deliver this message loud and clear. “Which road do you go down” is the next question. As we all know there are two big contenders; Office 365 and Google Classroom. I have been lucky enough to be able to experience both environments, beginning with Office 365 and moving to Google. I must point out that this was not through choice and therefore I am not recommending a school to do this. However, I now have a good understanding and practical experience of the pros and cons of both when used in an educational institution. My advice? You have to make a decision based on your school context. Recommendations to consider: decide what you want to use it for. And secondly, think about the skills of your teachers and how you plan to embed the use of the cloud over the year. I will say it does need to be part of your school improvement plan and the Head of the school must be 100% behind the change otherwise pockets of use will form and a lack of consistency throughout the school. As I left Bett this year, I found myself wondering whether it would begin to take on a very different shape in the future. As the focus shifts from devices to strategies and pedagogies, and purchasing can be done online, will Bett become more of a professional development ground rather than a sales pitch? I feel like it has already begun to make this move. I feel that this is what schools have been asking for, for a long time now and they are slowly being listened to.


Charlotte Beckhurst (beckhursteducation@gmail.com) is a Microsoft Educator Expert, Assistant Head at a primary school in Tottenham and runs training courses on using technology in the classroom. She blogs and shares resources at @CharBeckhurst and www.chicmeek.blogspot.com


March 2016


Meaningful and purposeful learning


Comment by Alicia Blanco-Bayo, Early Years teacher at Kirkham Grammar School


As I write these words I analyse the meaning of teaching as the delivery of information which should facilitate the acquisition of concrete concepts that can somehow be applied to real life scenarios. Let’s break down this explanation into sections:


What if we looked at the real life scenario first? What if we let the child tell us what inspires him? What if instead of wanting to lead the teaching and the learning too, we acted as analytic observers? We must begin with a blank canvas that is filled by the child with spontaneous thoughts and ideas. How we see and interpret those thoughts as practitioners is the key to a successful learning experience. A child who leads his learning as he shows us what he is interested in, is already facilitating the acquisition of any concrete concepts. Whilst this is happening, the child is simply giving the teacher time to gather enough evidence during the spontaneous exchange of information that is then transformed into learning.


As the diagram shows, we as teachers might choose to begin our teaching at one end of the process or the other. How we make the choice to start at either end will vary depending on the environment we bring the learner into. Whether the concepts spontaneously arising are as concrete as each child needs them to be, is an aspect of this process that only the teacher who knows her pupils well can address.


The Real Life Scenario


Over a period of time a team of practitioners had observed that a group of 3- and 4-year-old boys were not particularly interested in using scissors. “Let’s sit down together to cut out some paper” could have been one of the approaches. However, the practitioners chose to facilitate the acquisition of that concept by providing an environment that offered the skill of cutting in a way that attracted the boys’ attention. It was important for the teacher that these particular children enjoyed using scissors if the aim was that at some point they became confident at cutting out. So the team of practitioners chose to let the children cut something they were interested in (whatever the end product looked like to the adult eye did not really matter at all).


A series of shapes were drawn on different coloured paper that was displayed on three different tables together with some pencils and scissors. Children were told they could cut out the shapes or make some of their own if they wanted too as well as join some of the other activities taking place around the classroom.


Here is where the dialogue between the practitioner and the child is a key factor. “We have all these different shapes. We could make something exciting with some of them if you try to cut them out”. “What would you like to make with these shapes?” At this point the child is taking ownership of the learning and the teacher acts up as the facilitator who must find strategies to support the child in that process..


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