Ask Dave Whyley to justify his suggestion that the use of IT in schools is on the march and he will tell you a story.
Whyley is headteacher and elearning consultant for Wolverhampton’s local education authority (LEA). His anecdote is about a typical school girl in a typical school in Wolverhampton.
Like the rest of her classmates, the girl owns a handheld PC. What marks the pupil out is her proficiency with the device, a level of awareness that led her to respond to gripes about the size of the device’s keyboard by downloading a piece of online freeware designed to enlarge it.
She then proceeded to beam the application to other children in her class. The girl, it should be added, is a nine-year-old junior school pupil.
Whyley, who says the handheld device is an invaluable means of supporting personalised learning, has been instrumental in securing portable gadgets for 1,000 primary school children in the Wolverhampton area.
‘Children can have the devices with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week,’ he says. ‘The ethos is letting them learn where they want to and when they want to.’
Personalised learning is a buzzword for ensuring school children are treated less like homogeneous groups of pupils and more like individuals, with different needs and interests.
And with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), arbiter of all things examination-related in England and Wales, estimating the pupil-computer ratio in primary schools at 1:5 and the cost of handhelds – including built-in cameras – at a fifth of a complete desktop set-up, the equation is simple: get handhelds and personalise.
Personalisation is a word never far from the lips of staff at Parrs Wood High School, a specialist arts and technology college in Manchester.
The institution is among the most advanced users of virtual learning environment (VLE) technology – applications that support varying degrees of online interactive education.
At Parrs Wood, staff and pupils have 24-hour remote access to the school’s VLE, allowing them to log onto the network whenever and wherever they want. Pupils can contribute to subject-specific web forums, submit work or download interactive information – left specifically for them by teachers who oversee their curriculum progression.
Jo MacKinnon, deputy headteacher responsible for learning technologies, says the school’s deployment of its VLE has achieved significant results.
The new technology has begun to cut disaffection levels among Year 11 pupils. In 2005 98.3 per cent of pupils left the school with at least one GCSE A to G grade, compared with only 92.6 per cent in 2004.
‘We are trying to increase student capacity to learn independently, and move away from the situation where pupils are spoon-fed information, with teachers carrying them over the examination line,’ says MacKinnon.
‘Allowing them to work off-site while being part of the school, and maintaining a relationship with staff, but taking responsibility themselves, means greater personalisation in learning.’
Widespread adoption of VLEs remains patchy, but availability for schools that want to exploit the technology is widespread.
Birmingham’s local education authority, the biggest in the UK, is a striking example, having bulk purchased commercial licences from specialist supplier My Internet for all its 450 schools.
For those who have bought into the virtual vision, there is no going back. Cramlington Community High School in Northumberland has a full-time video-editing technician, three full-time web developers and a permanent desktop publishing specialist on its payroll.
The team helps to deliver the whole school curriculum via a VLE that is hooked up to interactive whiteboards in every classroom. Digital images, video footage, on-screen web links and sound clips can all be viewed in the time it used to take a teacher to chalk on a blackboard.
‘If I’m teaching about oxbow lakes I might show a three-minute video clip of how they are formed,’ says Mark Simpson, Cramlington’s ICT manager.
During the past five years, the school’s advanced use of IT has seen teacher-fronted, A-level maths classes reduced from 10 to eight. Two further lessons are delivered in an Independent Learning Centre, where students access the VLE for the curriculum resources they require.
Cramlington’s search for the perfect system has led it to employ three VLE applications in as many years, the latest supplied by Durham Business School. But many experts find little reason to stray far from freely downloadable open-source applications.
‘Some of the free software is so good and powerful that you can manage it yourself, provided you have the staff to do it,’ says Richard Millwood, director of Ultralab, a not-for-profit elearning consultancy and research firm.
‘It is often ideal for secondary schools, although may not be quite so suitable for all primary schools that do not always have the same level of expertise.’
Parrs Wood is fully wedded to its open-source VLE, Moodle. MacKinnan says open source allows the school to be more creative with its spending. ‘Generally we try to reduce licensing costs to allow us to have an ICT support team,’ she says.
‘You need the confidence in-house to keep the system going and understand the upgrades.’
With a whole generation of school pupils set to become as familiar with elearning as their parents were with blackboards and chalk, there is an inevitability about e-assessment technology ousting examination halls.
The QCA has already rolled out on-screen ICT tests to 45,000 14-year-olds, with the format set to completely replace paper-based testing by 2008.
It is just the beginning, with 2006 set to herald the first pilots for design and technology e-portfolios instead of paper-based GCSE coursework. This will allow pupils to submit digital images, voice messages and graphics instead of one-dimensional word documents. By 2009, all new qualifications must include an option for on-screen assessment.
For Martin Ripley, former head of e-strategy at the QCA, emerging developments in the way technology is used for learning and assessment will free schools from the constraints imposed by buildings and timetables, and mark a new era for education.
‘The moment we change the way we deliver learning we change teaching and learning almost overnight,’ he says. ‘The technology is a means to an end. The QCA and the schools will be interested in making cost savings, but the real interest in technology is the transformational power it offers young people.’
With year nine children in Wolverhampton exploiting IT as part of their learning, it seems reasonable to suggest that transformation is already under way.
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