Education journalist Richard Doughty gives his day by day take on the wide range of cutting-edge, pioneering projects that came to life in Professor Stephen Heppell's Learning Together "classroom" at Bett 2013
Throughout the UK's national technology in education show Bett 2013, Stephen Heppell and his team from the educational ICT and learning consultancy Heppell.net were showcasing some of the latest in cutting-edge technology in schools in their "learning together" classroom. There were practical demonstrations and ongoing project work by volunteer pupils and teachers from the UK and Spain.
These included:
- GPS shapes – students left the stand in teams to "walk" a drawing on the Excel / Bett site using a GPS trace;
- Maths Together – students checked out how other people do maths, quizzing Bett visitors for ideas, talking to grandparents about their methods with the aim of helping grandparents learn from the children how best the grandparents can help them with maths, and with the help of t-shirts "becoming' binary numbers in different ways;
- Both primary and secondary school students experimented with the new, cheap and tiny Raspberry Pi computers;
- Students took it in turns to interview over 70 people passing by or working on the Heppell.net stand by setting up a student radio station linked to an iPad;
- Computer networking company Netgear, partners of the Learning Together area, with the students, gave tutorials using a cut-away Netgear router and other components to explain how the internet is brought to home, school and workplace;
- A wall of the stand was coated with a special write-on paint with practical demonstrations of what promises to be a valuable, ground-breaking teaching aid;
- Use of international videoconferencing via Skype with children across the world to examine the "differences between us";
There was also a series of short talks on innovative practice and policy by leading practitioners.
Over the next few days, we'll be posting some of the forward-thinking, leading-edge activities, products and concepts that took place in the "learning together" area at Bett 2013:
International videoconferencing
A key moment during a series of skype videoconferencing sessions came during a session with two schools from Dubai (GEMS Royal Dubai school) and Sweden (Hedlunda school), coping with daily temperatures of around +40 C and -17 C respectively.The Swedish pupils were asked to fetch a big chunk of snow outside which they then held up in camera to show to the Dubai children sweltering in the heat. Using the live show to detect tangible differences, such as Dubai wearing uniforms but Sweden wearing what they liked and clogs for the snow, the videoconference was also taken part in by UK and Spanish pupils based in the "Learning together" area.
Questions asked were all designed to emphasise the here and now: what is the weather like? Do you like uniform? Can you imagine wearing one? How do you learn? When are you in school? There was also an insight into how to use skype, which malfunctioned in a second conference with one of Denmark's leading innovative schools, Buskelundskolen, Silkeborg. Treat Skype with care, warned Professor Heppell. The lunchtime conference to follow - with the Danish school Buskelundskolen, Silkeborg - had its link broken several times and had to be abandoned. The advice is keep skyping very simple. The Danes had used an additional microphone to avoid pupils having to leave their seats to talk but this seemed to throw skype.
Best advice: if you try it, avoid adding extras. Stick to the simplest set-up and it will work well – and it's free! Get your pupils to take it turns to sit at the front next to the laptop microphone (it worked fine for Dubai and Sweden).
An afternoon conference the same day with Capac Jr/Sr High School, Capac, Michigan, USA, went without a hitch and showed a 1.5m high robot throwing both a frisbee and a basketball across a hall. All the students on the project were voluntary, had spent six weekends designing and creating the robot and entering it in a competition. They had to raise all their own funding.
One of Heppell.net's new projects for 2013 is to gain entry to the competition for British schools.
Did you know that UK schools can link up with up to two foreign (or UK) schools free with skype, while simultaneous link-ups with between two and eight schools costs around £6 a month. What's more, the app to record any skype audio- or videoconference is free to download.
Classroom furniture
Sit, stand, kneel, lie on it or just lean against it… the decision was left to students as to how they used a new line in school furniture (the "Heppell bench"). Every surface was designed to be written on, and it verrsatile enough to let children choose where to set up their computer screen and other equipment.It allowed flexibile use by flexible young minds.
Furniture designer James Clarke from Intuition Design admitted he was no techie but just a designer who was learning how to let children set the design agenda, not himself. "We're going back to basics." He said the idea was to change the dynamics of the classroom and that, yes, it could also be affordable. "I've got to be relaxed as a designer. It's a skill we're learning – designers like to control things" .
He found out a lot about how children thought. For instance, "We made all the vertical surfaces on our desks writable but no one's used the desks vertically!" He said children had even chosen to stand up at the tables to work. They used the furniture intuitively, whereas adults did not.
The paint wall
On show was a remarkable paint that turns almost any surface (apart from hessian!) into a whiteboard so that instead of each child coming up in turn to use it, upwards of 30 children could all be writing on it at once and lessons could thus become far more interactive and dynamic. Developed by UCJC in Madrid, it costs 3-5 euros a square metre and a wall sized sample could be found at the back of the stand.Netgear had erected a paint wall in front of a router and the other necessary components in a computer network topography. What has until now always been a small room or store cupboard full of wires and metal boxes to interested onlookers – and students – is transformed into a teaching aid. The paint allows a teacher or anyone explaining how a system works to label each component, draw lines to link them up and make the machinery come alive for students in real time. So now any sort of machine, electrical, gas, water, power etc system can be clearly explained using any adjacent, painted surface. Technology unravelled.
Heppell highlight - Learning from students:
SH was impressed how quickly secondary and primary pupils working in the "learning together" area were helping each other and swapping ideas throughout the four-day show. "You have to trust your children. You get better ideas as there are a lot of them and [only] one of you. Keep them engaged. It's lots of fun. Don't spend much money on professional development, use your students to find out how they want to learn!"Richard Doughty is a freelance journalist who has covered ICT in education for 12 years in his former role as the Guardian's special supplements editor (rich1.doughty@gmail.com)