The winners of the Becta ICT in Practice Awards, run by national ICT agency Becta and supported by The TES, show more pathways into the future than all the gurus, keynote speakers and advisers combined. Quite simply, the winners are doing it, while the rest are talking about it. The resource bank of expertise that has been built up over the life of the awards is a database of practitioners not just to be celebrated but learnt from.
Take the work of Jane Cooke, who won the TES-sponsored New to Teaching award, for example. “It was like being in school all on my own and the lights were out. Bit frightening, no one to ask.” That was a child describing working at home with the school’s learning platform (also know as a VLE or virtual learning environment). Jane did her own research into these and reached some disquieting conclusions. It was controversial because it contradicts some of the glowing things being said about what is being billed as “the next big thing”.
Research is not something you expect in the category New to Teaching. Jane Cooke works at Ivybridge Community College and was appointed head of ICT at the end of her first year. In addition to that she explored with an art teacher the concept of synaesthesia, the art of seeing music. Students used charcoal to draw what they felt as they listened to music. The images were digitised and manipulated with image editing software. Eventually, in an imaginative piece of theatre, the images were printed, attached to helium filled balloons and released into the Devon skies. A celestial art gallery!
Room to grow
Down to earth technicians and classroom assistants are crucial in schools now and the awards have recognised that and discovered some fascinating projects and people. Teaching assistant Pippa Carey from Alexandra Junior School, Hounslow is one of those rare people who can both be assertive and yet allow teachers to grow and develop. Efficient people like Pippa have been known to hold teachers back as there is a temptation for ICT-phobic teachers to let a keen teaching assistant take on the ICT. Pippa has none of that.
The teachers in her school are encouraged and inspired by what she does. In a different way, the project devised and run by Adele Ruddock and Justin Wheelhouse who were runners up in the support section, has set up a network for technicians in West Sussex. Technicians are the people who keep the whole show on the road and yet they are often marginalised. Adele does it by strength of personality and by making the group meetings into social occasions. They also pose the question: why aren’t more people celebrating the work of this important group of people in schools?
When you walk into a classroom in Cookstown Primary School, Co Tyrone, that has been turned into a media lab you know something special is going on. The bulk of Joanne Murray and Paula Burnside’s work is built around the visual arts to motivate their class of 11-year-olds by using digital video. Both Joanne and Paula are anxious to point out that their work is not play: literacy targets are met and other subjects such as history, geography and science occur quite naturally. ICT skills are gained by learning how to use the equipment and to edit the materials. You only have to see the involvement of the children and the quality of the results to realise that this is a way of teaching and learning that many could usefully adopt.
Getting ICT in to the right hands
Sometimes the awards have picked up on individuals and projects that will create radical change. Joint winners of the Collaboration category, David Whyley, Jill Purcell and Andi Bourne (Wolverhampton LEA), Patrick Flynn (Stow Heath Junior School, Sue Morris (St Albans Primary School), Lewis Bronze (Espresso Education) have worked together to put ICT into the hands of students. The fact is that even in well-resourced schools students rarely get to use computers. The use of personal handheld devices, which children carry with them both at school and at home could well revolutionise ICT in schools and bring about the impact on learning that ICT has promised to deliver but only sporadically has.
It can be argued that transforming institutions, the focus of Becta’s new ICT Excellence Awards, is harder than transforming individuals. That is undoubtedly true, but all institutions are made up of individuals who can be fired up by new ways of working with their subject. Teachers, and secondary teachers in particular, are subject orientated and what you find when you see a great practitioner is a way of transforming the teaching of a subject. After all, doesn’t sustainable change work its way up from the bottom, and not down from the top?
One thing is certain, any school that studied, absorbed and acted upon all the lessons inherent in the work of the ICT in Practice winners would probably achieve the elusive goal of institutional systemic change.
www.becta.org.uk/corporate
The ICT in Practice Awards were sponsored by Ramesys, The TES, Adobe, Toshiba and Viglen.
