Yacapaca

Konrad Glogowski is my all-time favourite educational blogger. Partly this is because he posts so rarely that he’s easy to follow, but mainly it’s because he’s a teacher not a techie.

Konrad’s latest post is a real treat. He’s talking about how he responds to his students’ writing, and gives an example of a lengthy and encouraging response

This is probably one of your best essays, if not, in fact, your best ever. As soon as I saw the title I knew that this would be a great read. It was! I was thoroughly engaged in your work and often felt as if I were discovering this novel for the very first time…(read the rest)

So what’s this got to do with educational technology? Nothing. With leading-edge teaching practise? Nothing. With old-fashioned English teaching? Everything. This could have come straight out of Mr Chips. And therein lies its charm.

Therein also lies its (near-)fatal flaw. How does Konrad find the time to leave 345 word-long comments on every item his students write? Because he’s teaching in Canada, that’s how. There, he can legitimately trade-off frequency of marking for quality of comment. The Canadian system is geared far less to the production-line values foisted on us in the UK by a decade and a half of excessive political interference in education.

So – he can do it, but we can’t. Goodbye, Mr Chips.

Well, perhaps not. There are ways to free up teacher time.

We’ve been at work for years in Chalkface on ways to mark work automatically, specifically so that the dull stuff can be got out of the way and you can concentrate your attention where it will do most good. That’s one way.

And you can get more radical than that. For example, look at TutorVista. In a recent post to the Distance Learning list at Becta, they boasted “Our Tutors are based in India and are familiar with the UK Curriculum”. You see the possibility? Outsource all your marking to well-trained Indian professionals, thus helping to fund education in the third world and freeing up your own time into the bargain.

You may be feeling just a tad threatened at this point. Your job, and pension, outsourced to India? I don’t think so. Look at Konrad’s comment again. Do you really think that could have been made by somebody who did not know the student? More importantly, would it have had an impact on the student had there not already existed a close teacher-student bond?

Suddenly, we get to the heart of where Konrad, and you, add value. It’s not in the facts you teach, or the marks you give. You inspire and motivate young people to learn by who you are, and the relationship you build with them.

In my opinion, technology can and should help by freeing you up from other stuff that gets in the way of that relationship, but true teaching requires no more than a paper and pencil, and a kind word.

A review this morning from Ste for Formative Assessment in Applied Business for the Double Award GCSE says “Average, lose the dodgy animations”. What interests me isn’t the fact that it’s a negative review, but rather that it pretty obviously comes from a student.

When we put reviews on the site, I expected a certain amount of vandalism from students. It happens, we clean it off promptly, no big deal. But I didn’t expect this. This is a serious, succinct review, in which Ste clearly states what would make the resource work better for him.

Now I’m asking myself what would happen if more students were reviewing, and if teachers were making buying decisions based on students’ criteria and not their own. This review suggests that far from drowning in flashy trivia, school materials might actually become more serious. And just imagine how empowering it would be for the students.

But….please don’t send your students to the Chalkface site to write reviews just yet. Ste did it off his own bat. If you send them, they will write what they think you want to read. They’ll be nice reviews, of course, and we’ll get lots of stars so the authors will be happy, but they won’t be from the heart. And if they are not from the heart, you won’t trust them to inform your buying decisions.

It’s been a slow week for change on Yacapaca; just a couple of announcements:

• Membership is now past 3000 teachers and 85,000 students. I’m well chuffed with that!
• Miranda has revamped the Yacapaca Wiki. The authoring section in particular has been rewritten.

By the way, if you are looking at the wiki and don’t like the colour scheme, here’s a trick. Do you see at the end of the url it says “s=base4”? Change the number (1-4), and the colour scheme changes too.

I hear many stories of how Digital Brain, Fronter, MS Class Server etc have been introduced into schools by the LEA or RBC, then after some initial training, left to rot.

Why is this? A lot of thought, and money, has gone into making these systems suitable for school use. Surely they can’t be that useless?

Dig a bit further, and we find the stories fall into two groups:

1. “I’ve been told this thing is great but I’ve not seen any real evidence. I’m too busy/not inclined to explore it so I ignore it, other than to resent the expense.”
2. “I’ve been championing elearning within the school for years but in my opinion system X, Y or Z is much better-suited to my needs. I resent both the expense and the fact that my hard work has gone unrecognised.”

These stories were in my mind when I was reading An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise by Suw Chapman yesterday. She’s using blogs and wikis as examples, and her ‘enterprise’ looks more like a corporation than a school or LEA, but the lessons are the same.

If you don’t feel like reading the article, she’s essentially saying that imposing technology from above is a hiding to nowhere. Rather, you start by working with the existing enthusiasts (who are often quite low level in the organisation) and work outwards.

In my examples above, person (2) is the enthusiast. Being present in the school, he or she will eventually win round person (1), but only after having first personally committed to the new system. Gaining that commitment doesn’t happen overnight. You have to demonstrate consistently that they system will deliver results and that the support will be there (and typically that it will be there late into the evening).

It’s difficult for traditional VLEs to do that, because they are bought and paid for, typically, by LEAs or RBCs. The decision is made by a committee who will never actually have to teach with the chosen system, and who are applying highly abstracted criteria.

To sell to them, the VLE vendors must field expensive sales forces. Once they have those guys on salary, they must chase the high-value RBC/LEA sales in order to pay them. It’s a vicious circle that leads to bad outcomes.

I am more persuaded than ever that our approach with Yacapaca of “sell to the teachers first” may be slower, but will produce a better result in the end. The early adopters become enthusiasts, and enthusiasts become champions. Usage spreads organically within the school. It’s true we don’t make much money, but 15 years of selling books has convinced me that giving solid value is both right livelihood and better business in the long run.