The Flippin' Classroom

Thanks to the Twitter community I have returned to school this term with renewed energy and enthusiasm to experiment. One idea that receives a lot of attention and is frequently revisited is the flipped classroom - where content learning takes place prior to the lesson allowing more opportunities to apply the learning in the class. This is by no means a new idea, setting homework as preparation for lessons has been around for years, but with the advent of social media this is fast becoming a powerful learning tool in the 21st century school.

Breaking away from the delivery of content in the lesson is a positive and refreshing move. In many respects classrooms are not ideal learning environments because of the large numer of people in one room. Learning can sometimes be restricted by the very person who is meant to be facilitating it. Didactic teaching, however engaging you might be, is not an effective technique for most learners. The notion of wise teachers filling up young minds with knowledge can stay with Mr Gradgrind. Knowledge is no longer the captive of the educated - a swipe and a search on any smartphone will set free most of the world's wonders which had previously relied on educators to allow students into the secret. Teachers should facilitate learning and structuring activities around the concept of the flipped classroom takes more preparation and thought than a didactic monologue.

Frequently preparatory tasks are paper based, as in, 'read this before the next lesson', resulting in very little engagement or learning. The teacher is still required to go through the content essentially in the same detail as they would have done without the reading. Access to social media allows this content learning to be more interactive, meaningful and therefore effective. Videos, especially created by the teacher, are an increasingly common tool for the flipped classroom. The Khan Academy and other video sharing sites (see earlier blog) are well-suited for this kind of activity. But it becomes most effective when the teacher starts to plan tasks around the stimulus material such as questions relating to the video or collaborative online activities using, for example Google Docs. This also allows the teacher to have a better grasp on whether the students have actually engaged with the material and can also inform their planning for the forthcoming lessons.

With more teachers embracing social media and the innovative strategies that they complement the flippin' classroom might just have got a little bit more exciting.

Using Twitter to Transform

So my sortie into the world of Twitter (@jez_scott) is now into its 4^th day and my experience has been wholly satisfying and refreshingly inspiring. Having avoided Twitter for so long as a result of my natural caution and all-too frequent experience of its underbelly, I want to kick myself for not having made the jump sooner.

I opened my Twitter account of 2 January and started to find people of interest who I might want to follow. This started with celebrity wits such as Stephen Fry (obviously) and David Mitchell and then moved to authors and journalists who I have come across in my research on social media and futures thinking such as Keri Facer and Evgeny Morozov. Very quickly I started to find educators who were clearly well-established Twitter users such as Simon Warburton, Tom Sherrington and David Didau and a community of positive, forward-thinking school leaders began to emerge. It didn’t take long before people started to interact with me in relation to my posts and this encouraged me comment on and retweet others’ posts. I had viewed Twitter from afar as a bragging tool whose main purpose was self-promotion, and this aspect clearly exists, but what I also found were professionals who were using Twitter as a genuine tool of collaboration and communication. All teachers benefit from talking about their practice and uncovering new ideas about inspiring young people – this works within schools and it clearly works very well on Twitter. The opportunities to share ideas in school is dependent on the culture of the school and the time that is available for such activities – on Twitter there is a vibrant community of interested and interesting teachers which can be dipped into when it is convenient – anytime, anywhere learning should be for teachers as well as students. The potential that Twitter has for aiding effective professional development is very exciting and one which I will promote within my own school and when I talk at the BETT Conference on 1 February.

Reservations about using Twitter persist but they are perhaps different from my earlier assumptions. I wasn’t quite prepared for the emotional consequence of writing my first tweets and exposing my blogs to a wider audience. Is it normal to become rather obsessed with responses and the number of followers I’ve got? I was hoping to avoid this kind of arrogant reaction but I guess it is part and parcel of the experience and is likely to abate with time (and a more complimentary number of followers!). The obsessive nature of Twitter can therefore start to eat into time; the more prolific bloggers and tweeters must be almost permanently attached.

Can Twitter transform? I have suggested before that schools and teachers need to transform the way they use modern technologies and specifically social media. Twitter is the most frequently used social media service by young people – not always in the positive ways which I have outlined above. Young people need to be educated in the appropriate and effective use of social media and teachers are best placed to do this. To educate one needs to have experienced and therefore being involved in Twitter has obvious advantages. But most importantly, Twitter opens up communities of support and expertise that would benefit the continuous professional development of all teachers. It encourages people to reflect on their practice and to keep up-to-date with new developments.

So I will continue to tweet – not with my friends and family, I still think it’s best to talk to them – but with those who wish to improve education and give meaningful opportunities for young people to learn about this increasingly vital area of modern life. I may be late for the party but I bring Tequila.

Why is education stuck in the past?

A friend of mine who works with the media industry made the interesting point recently that traditional journalists are now expected to have some kind of on-line presence, usually using social media and most frequently Twitter. A quick search will find an active community of journalists, covering all areas of journalistic interest, including the famous and the unknown, who share information and ideas rather than insults and the inane. Twitter tends to make the headlines when an ill-considered tweet is coughed up by an overpaid and overhyped footballer, but millions of people use it and other social media forums to extend their knowledge and awareness of areas that matter to them and to collaborate with people they might otherwise have never met.

So I have taken the plunge and joined Twitter (@jez_scott); literally just now. I got quite excited when I noticed that I had one follower almost instantly but rather disappointed to find it was someone called @Q9bbGzMeoNHo02E reminding me that 35% of followers of the average Twitter account are not real people. But I am now there and I’m determined to make use of Twitter, even if that is more about following others rather than making my own grand pronouncements.
Why has it taken me so long to engage in Twitter when I travel about the place promoting the use of social media? I can only think that it is a reflection of the rather peculiar resistance to change that pervades most educational institutions and educators. I am seen as something of a maverick because I write a blog and condone the use of social media in schools. I find this surprising and more than a little disconcerting. Unlike journalism and other competitive industries, schools do not have to worry about losing their customers – however out-of-date or irrelevant your provision might be the children will still turn up at the school gate each morning. This means that schools do not have to keep up with even the seismic changes in technology and society. We can continue to educate young people within the confines of Dickensian institutions with our rigid timetables, school uniforms and didactic teachers – and the most frightening part is that almost everybody thinks that this is just great. Parents and policy-makers remember their schools being like this and so they seek schools which promise to maintain strict discipline or introduce initiatives which show no initiative. Schools are perhaps the worst of all institutions at gripping on to some kind of perverse image of educational utopia.

Transforming schools and educational policy is therefore a difficult task which has frustrated generations of more forward-thinking educators. The answer may be found in the growing communities of like-minded school leaders and teachers who are starting to look at educational provision in different ways which are truly aimed at equipping young people for their futures. These communities cannot be unlocked within local consortium arrangements, academy federations or even national associations. These communities will grow online and Twitter seems as good a place as any to get things rolling.
 

Gun control debate on social media

The killing of twenty children and six adults in Sandy Hook School, Newtown, Connecticut on Friday has re-ignited the debate on gun control in the USA. The immediacy of social media meant that opinions on the matter were quickly raised. Many voiced their anger and sorrow at the events and encouraging President Obama to act decisively to, in some way, pull the country back from its rather entrenched position of mass gun ownership. Others were equally as quick to defend the 2^nd Amendment which gives Americans the right to bear arms, and some indeed used the tragedy to express a rather distasteful view that gun control laws should be loosened to allow schools to hold guns on site in order to combat similar threats.

The reaction on social media reflected some of the wonderful advantages of digital media but also some of its more depressing features. Genuine and considered debate was allowed to flourish on social media sites but too often it was hidden by the ill-informed bile that seems to dominate such forums. On Google+ Richard Branson added a poster from thirty years ago to his message of condolence. The poster gives some raw statistics about the number of people killed by handguns in one year with 10,728 in the US and 58 in Israel being the next highest figure. The comments made, over 500 in less than 24 hours, give an interesting insight into the quality of debate that can, or possibly can’t, take place on social media sites.

 

Some were quick to be dismissive because of the age of the poster and its rather basic use of statistics, summed up by one comment which read, “LOL at West Germany. Also do these spurious numbers take into account the drastically different population​s between each country? I guess not.” Both criticisms are fair from the perspective of a pedant who has rather missed the point of posting the image, the sentiment being that nothing has changed over this span of time despite the all-too frequent killing of innocent victims in American schools, colleges, hospitals, cinemas, shopping malls etc. Here is an example of another frequently voiced objection to Branson’s view, “Richard, natural disasters kill people, diseases kill people, gravity kills people, and people kill people. Handguns don't kill people.” ‘Guns don’t kill, people do’ has become a bit of a cliché of the pro-gun lobby in the US and strikes me as a rather weak argument, especially when it is extended to the suggestion that if guns are banned then so should cars, alcohol, bears etc. It is only after fairly careful examination of the comments that you come across some rational arguments that don’t just adhere to the simplistic for or against standpoint. For example, “Canada has very lenient gun control laws compared to the US, it's the Culture of the American's that is Killing People. Not the manner in which they do it.”

Social media allows all of us to pass comment, to a large extent, on anything that we want. These comments are immediate and can potentially be read by millions of people. This is the way in which people will increasingly make their point. But there is a danger that the views of bigots will drown out the voices of those who genuinely want to add constructive comments to issues of concern, in the same way that genuinely interesting posts of Facebook are often significantly out-weighed by the mundane. Schools have a duty, more than ever, in the unedited world of social media, to teach children about the skills of interpretation and objectivity so that they can sift through the mass of words, videos and images to find the real gems of considered wisdom and thought which can offer something positive and useful to our world.

Opening channels of communication

A study of policing across 13 European countries has shown that police forces with strong social media presences have better relationships with the citizens that they are policing. The study found that criminal incidents and other related matters were frequent topics of discussion on social media sites, therefore, as project co-ordinator Dr Sebastian Denef, from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology states “the question is not whether the social media are appropriate for police topics, but how the police forces get involved and reap the benefits. If the police is not active, others fill the void.” As social media demands a less formal tone than more traditional forms of communication it immediately attracts a wider audience who therefore perceive an institution such as the police as being more down-to-earth and on their level.

This is a great example of the marketing power of social media, especially for public institutions who might be viewed as rather stuffy and aloof. Schools, like the police, have found it difficult in the past to really connect with people at a level that they all feel comfortable with. As academics we are often guilty, albeit not necessarily intentionally, of over complicating and formalising communications with all stakeholders. Whether it’s the assembly that flies over pupils’ heads or the newsletters and reports that would be more suitable for Hogwarts than your average comprehensive, I have always felt that schools generally miss the point when it comes to effective communication. With social media we now have the perfect excuse to discard the quasi-grammar school approach of previous forms of communication – shred the old school magazine and replace it with up-to-date, pupil-generated blogs and other user content (video and photographs), bin the termly newsletter and instead keep parents informed on a daily basis using social networks. This is how people are increasingly expecting to receive communication and institutions that fail to engage in this forum run the risk of becoming a rather comic portrayal of a by-gone era.

The Pope's on Twitter

I read with interest that the Pope has a Twitter account - @pontifex. It is believed that his first tweet will be on 12 December and he already has over 350,000 followers before tweeting anything. The current Pope has not had the best track record when it comes to communication and the Vatican obvioulsy think that this will be an effective way to reach the masses; they already have a presence on YouTube.

There are not many establishments which are as traditional and conservative as the Roman Catholic Church and surely schools must take the hint, if any were still needed, that social media is now an essential and expected part of modern life.

Pleasant noises coming from the Welsh

I’ve recently come across some very encouraging reports about the uses of social media in Welsh schools. The Education Minister of the Welsh Assembly, Leighton Andrews, commissioned a review of digital classroom teaching in September 2011 which resulted in the publication of The Digital Classroom Teaching Task and Finish Group’s Find It, Make It, Use It,Share It: Learning in Digital Wales in March 2012. The recommendations are eminently sensible as shown in their vision, “that teachers and learners now live in a world where communication and knowledge are routinely digital, ubiquitous and highly interactive, and that the processes of learning and teaching can, and must, take advantage of what digital technologies offer.”

I was very encouraged to read the suggestion to “Use existing tried and tested web-based products and services to disseminate existing and new content.” I strongly believe that we should not be wasting resources on trying to develop bespoke programmes for each individual school. These Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are often poorly conceived and exceptionally difficult to maintain in terms of relevance and ever-changing technologies. As a colleague eloquently said to me at the Scottish Learning Festival in September when discussing VLEs, ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig’.

 

I was also pleased to read the recommendation to “ensure that learners and teachers have the freedom to access rich learning and teaching resources from anywhere, at any time and from any device.” Politicians and school leaders often like to wax lyrical about the uses of new technologies, but for many I feel this still means shiny ICT suites. New technologies are the emergent mobile devices whether phones or tablets which are already owned by a large majority of students and teachers. We like the idea of being at the forefront of new technology but too many still cringe at the idea of allowing students to use the mobile devices for the purposes of learning – devices that they have on them at all times, not just when an ICT room can be booked out.

The Welsh are not just saying positive things in glossy publications; changes are also taking place in their schools. St Julian’s School in Newport, for example, have announced a refreshing policy change in relation to the use of mobile phones in classrooms and the bold decision to convert their library into a ‘cyber centre’ replete with iPads and plasma screens.

This kind of coordinated approach to facing the challenge of adapting our rather conservative and out-of-date educational institutions is absolutely necessary and I hope that the Welsh Assembly see through their plan and that other government officials might adopt similar initiatives across the rest of the UK and further afield.