Essa Academy in Bolton is to issue an iPod to all its pupils, making them "the most technologically advanced in Britain", according to a large 2-page spread in today's Times.
What's more, the article adds: "A bespoke wi-fi system, with 130 access points around the school, means that children never lose connectivity. If teachers are pleased with a piece of work, they can ask a child to e-mail it to them and, using laptops and a projector, display it on a wall or screen to show the class. They can also annotate it with a handwriting function. But more is to come. Next spring work will begin to upgrade the school. It will have a 3-D audio visual theatre, writeable glass walls instead of whiteboards...."
I applaud the initiative and innovation.
However, within the same 2-page spread is a word of caution, easily overlooked in a short analysis piece "Gadgets provide a lesson to for us all". Greg Hurst (who is, as far as I can tell, a Political Correspondent) writes: "Yet evidence linking technology to higher attainment in schools is elusive. Academics cite how ministers become bewitched with interactive whiteboards; after vast investment, many teachers used them as they had blackboards." In other words, the possibility is that the "lesson" is that far from the new technology promoting new ways of working, organising and engaging, of teaching and learning, new technologies are merely used for old purposes.
This thought brought to mind another document that came this way, thanks to a link provided by a Facebook 'Friend', John Popham to a newly published BECTA report (free to download) "Schools and Parents - A new partnership: technology supporting a new relationship with schools". On Facebook, John asks "Will tech help parents be more involved? Or is it cultural/economic?"
For anyone with an interest in information and communcations technologies and schools, I recommend spending time exploring the BECTA website and its related Next Generation Learning website. There is much to stimulate and interest.
Yet having read the new publication, I am left disappointed. The whole assumption behind the report is that parents only and sole interest is their own child and their own child's progress. Indeed, the Introduction to the report is explicit on this:
"Good parental engagement is fundamental to children's learning and closely linked to increased attainment. One of the more effect ways for parents to engage in their child's learning is o maintain good communications with a school, learning more about their child's progress whilst also helping to identify any development or performance issues early on".
In other words, the report is about how new technologies are being used for old purposes. Despite the assertion of its title that the report is about 'supporting a new relationship with schools', the report is actually not about new ways of working, organising or engaging but simply about using new tools to enhance existing purposes.
I hesitate not to be seen as criticising an interesting document for what it did not set out to do. Nevertheless, given the power of the new tools of Web2.0 social media to create new forms of relationships and purposes, the report feels like an opportunity missed. I am reminded whilst reading it of the interactive whiteboards being used as blackboards, noted above in the Times article by Greg Hurst. I am tempted to offer a response to John Popham's question quoted above that new technology alone will not bring about new purposes and relationships (including so-called "partnership" relationships) without cultural changes within institutions - whether promoted from within or demanded from without.
The assumption of the report is that in a partnership between schools and parents, parents are only interested in their own child. Therefore the communication should be between school and parents. The importance of the communication between parents is not even considered.
The same is still most often true in discussions of the "partnership" between local authorities and parents: the importance of communication between parents, separate from all other parties, is still rarely considered.
The new social tools of the internet make possible new relationships and new strategic engagements of parents as a body first with each other and then with schools and local authorities.
Meanwhile all parents of all children with cerebral palsy might usefully ask how there schools are using ICTs and social media effectively to communicate with them.
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