Whole Education

Context: Grammar school for girls with some boys in the Sixth Form, with 1,372 students on roll in Maidstone, Kent. Less than 200 are from minority ethnic communities including the Far and Middle East, Chinese and Polish. A town setting and also draws in students from rural communities.

Aspiration: The field trial seeks to develop ways for students to use the technology they routinely hold (mobile phones, PDAs, MP3 players) to record and support their learning. Students will learn through creating multimedia diaries and documentaries of their personalised learning journeys in geography and history through a project approach.

The project is aimed at exploring the creative potential and application of these devices in and out of the classroom in an attempt to discover new ways in which they can be used by students to demonstrate their learning. Rather than teachers experimenting with the technology, the aim is for students themselves to take ownership of their learning by designing the projects and assessment criteria. Following careful consideration of the planned learning outcomes, students will select the appropriate technological tools from a special gadget box. Emphasis will be placed on accessing higher order thinking through students taking ownership of choice of appropriate tools (gadgets) to use demonstrate their learning. The goal of this task is to discover uses of technology that encourage higher-order thought, encourage students to consider the ways in which they learn, and to explore new and challenging applications of these facilities, exploiting their full creative potential.

Outcome: The learning to date has indicated a further area for development: Investigating whether a social networking tool makes an effective a method of recording learning and creating an e-portfolio. The open source software JOOMLA will be used to create the social network.

The field trial is no longer a project: it is embedded into the mainstream of school development as the means of a step change in pupil performance. It is being rolled out to half of y7 across a range of humanities subjects with a group of teachers all of whom have volunteered to take part. A young middle manager is leading confidently: the staff are going through a learning journey to re-invent themselves as teachers.

• Print
• Share