Apple Leadership Summit 2012

The event had its many ups with only a few downs (more the responses from the audience than the speakers). The following is a mixed up evaluation of the ideas that inspired me....

The opening speakers started to describe a classroom focused on the pupils way of learning. Imagine a classroom where:

Students can write on desks/walls/any surface (obviously wipeable)
Students don't have to fear using their smartphones to learn.
Students bring in their own up to date tech that costs the school £0
Students tell you about a new resource they found to help your subject.

Imagine a daily equipment list meant:
Bring your sports kit
Bring a pen
Sort your lunch
Bring your maths kit
Bring a browser !!!!!!!!

Then a few thoughts:
Do Students with technology work longer and harder with no cohertion?
Is making students pack up move around and restart learning every 45min, 5/6 times a day, a waste of learning time?
Is the future Super Classes, 75 students 3 teachers - 1 Lesson leader, 1 trouble shooter, 1 differentiation assessor. Is this a better teaching model than 1 teacher 25 students?

Imagine a super class where students sat at different desk colours, Red, I want to work on my own, Blue I want to work in a group, etc learning spaces for different learning styles.... An idea Bohunt take seriously, they have learning spaces bookable by the students for challenge based learning. This does include a space where all the walls can be written on! The teachers assess the students lesson plan to check the relevant learning is taking place but the students ultimately decide how the topic will be learnt. In science they spend much more time doing than recording. Why spend time doing graphs by hand, do the professionals do that? Don't spend time recording data, use the tech to do that and comment on the live data instead, much more interesting.

Some interesting comments from the opening speakers:
Stop telling students what to do, start asking......
Be brave take chances (teachers)

We were then treated to a science experiment involving the iPad. The apps involved were:

Tectonic £7.99

A great 3D visual of current seismic activity, bit expensive for what it is.
Seismometer £0.69 (iPhone app)

Create your own seismic activity. Really nice practical demo app
Wind tunnel £1.49

See what affects shapes have on flow. Wind or water with pressure colours. This is nice and there is a lite version to play with first.
Emerald Observatory £0.69,

What's happening in the solar system.

SPARKvue £FREE

A great tool for practical work but you may need some extra sensors
Spectrogram £8.99

Great visual display of sound, see the Doplar effect. A bit expensive, there are some basic cheaper versions like Spectrum View (FREE).

Some practical uses of the iPad as a multi sensory tool included:
Throwing the iPad across the room (in a very good protective case) spin it around in a bag to demonstrate forces. There was a very good wireless microscope that allows everyone with an iPad to see what macro events are going in, it was amazing and I'm buying one ASAP. Also it can be displayed on a projector or wirelessly using an AppleTV.

We were also told that apparently teachers do the wrong things really well...
We started with the Blackboard
We changed everything with the Whiteboard
We became futuristic with the Interactive whiteboard
But has the teaching/learning changed? Are students still in rows? I hope not.

Then a thought provoking question, maybe we should get the "students to do their exams when their ready not by date of manufacture" Abdul Chohan. Maybe Abdul has something, they went form 37% to 67% pass rate in 3 years. He uses AppleTV a great deal, as I do, but with large TVs rather than projectors. Are big screen TVs better value than projectors? Light issues v screen size v bulb life v sound quality. The large TVs looked pretty good from a distance at the summit I must admit and the sound is also an improvement but are they cheap enough? I'm not sure myself so will stick with projectors for the meantime, or at least until the price comes down.

Using a projector/TV with AppleTV means you could move away from class sets of textbooks, just fire one copy on the board, via a projector. It will save a great deal of money across the board and save the stress of collecting them in each year!

Going further Abdul thinks teachers should create there own textbooks. When did you buy a text book where you agreed with everything in it? Teachers already have a great deal of content in powerpoints, documents, video and audio. Why not copy and paste it all into an ePub and save your department/school a fortune! The students can take a digital copy anywhere and keep it, make notes in it, highlight it, do what they want with it!

Essa Academy uses an amazing app for connectivity with students parents and teachers - Avaya, looks amazing. Give teachers a school number, or extension for calls and video conferencing on a mobile device with multiple people. Looks like a professional version of Skype. While the app is free I suspect a paid service but might be worth it.

Abdul's case study session was the best for me. I see a lot of parallels in the pedagogy and delivery of what I want to do with learning myself. I hope I can execute it as well. The big part of the presentation was Essa's Wiki server. The Wiki contains ALL the schools scheme of work and content. As it's a wiki so the students can contribute! In Gove's recent statement of wiki planning to 'revolutionise' ICT teaching did he mean the students as well? Probably not. It is a scary though for a teacher to allow students to help make the scheme of work better but why should it be? Surely the students are the best people to know if the teaching has worked or not.

There are many reasons why this is a better way of working than the current systems.
Department planning:
1. Absent students. Students no longer need to ask for missed work as it is already there, accessible at school and a home.
2. Wholistic school view. Every department will be able to see every other. You can see possible overlaps and potential cross curricular activities
3. Tagging. Similar to the above when you tag content across the departments with generic school wide learning goals like "logical thinking" or
"group work" these will automatically inform the other departments what is linked to what they a teaching in other subjects. Again allowing for cross curricular links to be made effortlessly and transparently.
4. Differentiation. Tasks can be set for further reading or supplementary work for stronger and weaker students alike. This can be part of the lesson or work left for students to complete in their own time.
5. Sharing. Rather than 4-6 teachers doing their own lessons for the same topic Essa sets aside joint planning time, different to departmental meetings. Teachers get together to make one amazing lessons, the best the school can produce.
6. Transparency. Parents and line managers can see what is going on.

Handing in work:
1. Speed. My students currently use a similar system to Essa. Students submit via email or Dropbox. I get the notice immediately and can, time permitting, edit and make comments within 30min and send the work back. Sometimes students can send work back and forth 2-10 times in an evening. I like it because the work is better, quicker. The student likes it because they can work on the assignment when the ideas are fresh and they are motivated. Students don't have to wait a week to get work back.
2. Backup. The process in its self creates a backup without the student having to think of it. I have on several occasions had to dig out an old email to save a students coursework. And there is no paper for the teacher to misplace!
3. Monitoring. Heads of department can also have access to cloud storage meaning that everyone is kept in the loop.

Comments from Essa students:
I carry two pairs of earphones "just in case"
"if you can't email you can obviously iMessage other students for help"
We respect the fact we are allowed to use the tech in school and "respect the tech"

A disappointing note at this point was that a number of school decision makers kept asking about filtering, not how this affected the learning! eSafety is getting out of control. I do think that eSafety is important but people drown and we still take water sports trips away. We assess the risk, we weigh it up against the learning potential. Why not with ICT? Will ICT become like school trips and teachers will avoid it through fear of litigation? As a country it would be/is devastating for our progress.

I did learn something about iBooks I never knew before. You can highlight text and the iPad with say it for you. Great for early years or students that have English as their second language. I haven't tried other languages, which would be great for MFL. Just go to the accessibility setting and activate speech, simple when you know how.

One thing i liked about Abdul's presentation is that he didn't mention Apple for at least 40min at one stage, it's all about how learning is changing not the devices, they are just the tools. It just happens these seem to be the best tools right now.

Essa assigns "middle leaders" to monitor the wikis and learning, it does seem best to leave that job to the subject specialists. One controversial guide line is that PowerPoints are to be avoided, as mentioned earlier the content needs to be accessible to the students in a form they can use and personalise so ePubs are making that happen. on the iPad two apps were mentioned to help create ePubs on the iPads, where as before you would have had to use Pages:
Book Creator for iPad £2.49

Creative Book Builder £2.49

Easily the best for teachers.

There was some advice for implementing mobile devices. Parents need to come in and see how the students are suppose to use the devices to learn so that when they a taken home they are, on the whole, used appropriately. Tell parents to gift apps NOT associate credit cards to the machine, or they will pay the financial penalty. He says, and i agree that it is vital that students own the devices to use them best. And of course games are not the devil!

Essa has significantly reduced the paper and printing costs (including text books). He mentioned that past papers are now on the devices. Maths and Science took a while to get used to this. So there is an offset to the initial outlay. You just have to plan for it. Departments who now want class sets of text books are told no! They have the ePubs and apps, that's where the cost went, you can't have both.

It was also interesting to note that quite a few of presentations talk about didactic teaching being the past and then presenting there topics didactically.

The final guest speaker was the producer of QI, my favourite program, and was entitled "The joy of ignorance". We were told to embrace the fact we actually don't know that much In the grand scheme of things. He said start with the fun details of the topic and add the boring basics after. We were told , quite rightly, that as teachers we are often only interested in a couple of subjects but expect the children to be interested in 10 (GCSEs). The point was backed up by asking some subject specific questions to teacher of different subjects. I certainly didn't know the atomic number of Barium! This was followed closely by the best comment of the day, "'A good teacher should learn all the time a bad one teaches the same thing over and over". How many teachers really work hard at keeping up to date with their specialism and striving to push the boundaries? Your degree is put of date what are you doing to rectify that?

If you've managed to get this far thanks for reading but the day was so inspiring it warranted the effort.

Location:London