My day at Chatsmore Catholic High School, West Sussex, UK was jam packed with meeting people with a firm grip on moving education for the 21st century forward, with a sound base and carefully thought out implementation. The school operates on a combination of PC and Mac platforms, with a wonderful new Mac multi-media lab due to open in the next few weeks. The main purpose of my visit was to engage in meaningful conversation with head teachers at the school about their thoughts and plans for 1 – to – 1 and mobile learning. One of my main concerns with the move forward to ubiquitous access to mobile devices is the ability of wi-fi in schools to sustain such a large scale deployment. At a 1- to – 1 conference I recently attended in Melbourne, I was able to participate in a workshop that aimed to de-mystify wireless internet for teachers. I learned a lot of the basics of the physics of wi-fi communication at this workshop, but it left me with more questions than answers about the capacity of the wi-fi at our school to sustain large deployments.
While at Chatsmore, I met Aidan Bowen from Solutions-Inc, UK, who presented to me an overview of ‘Air Traffic Control’ technology from Meru Networks. Here is a video which outlines the major features of this system:
You can read more at their website on The Wireless Campus. Chatsmore Catholic High School is certainly working towards a future of handheld learning, but have chosen wisely to focus first on establishing a workable and reliable wi-fi solution before purchasing hundreds of devices. After reviewing a number of possible solutions, they have chosen to install a network based on Meru. This wi-fi network is fully functional now at Chatsmore and provides a sound base for the next steps the school will take in providing wi-fi enabled devices for more of its students.
I was able to visit an IT class, with mixed feelings about its success in delivering 21st century skills to students. As with so much of the curriculum I have been exposed to, the class was tightly bound to a series of specific learnings that need to be answered by students in an essentially robotic fashion, in order to assess whether these standards have been reached or not. Painstaking hours of labour had been poured into constructing simple web pages which linked to word documents requiring students to respond to questions and submit their answers. 8.1 was followed by 8.2 was followed by 8.3 and so on…this was the experience if IT for these students.
I was able to demonstrate to a few of them my student blogs where students are able to respond to a series of tasks in an interactive, online environment. The Edublogs Campus has provided this for my class back in Australia. The kids at Chatsmore thought it was pretty cool! My concerns are, with the many web 2.0 tools and social networking opportunities available online today, will a class full of netbooks / notebooks harness this or simple provide another device to link into a series of Word documents? I am convinced that the handheld learning environment provided by the iPod touch / Studywiz mobile breaks this mould and opens a new personalised learning niche not provided by the more traditional netbook / notebook solution. But it is not an either / or question. Read more about this in great conversations taking place over at Classroom 2.0.
We also had conversations about the quality of the education portals provided by our respective institutions. Here is the West Sussex Grid for Learning and here is the DEECD Connect portal.
As in all other places I have visited, staff and students have been very interested in the nature of the Lindsay Thompson Fellowship which has provided me with this unique and unrepeatable opportunity to research internationally on my chosen field of hand-held learning. Pictured below is myself and a student from Chatsmore who interviewed me about my visit for their school publication ‘The CHAT’. I have been proud to be associated with this fellowship on my travels, and have not yet come across any similar type of program available to teachers in the UK and US.
So where does Chatsmore stand on the future of ubiquitous handheld or mobile learning? As with many schools, districts and states around the world, that decision is currently being processed. My visit has certainly added further fuel to the question of ‘what is best best model for personalised learning technologies for 21st century students to improve their learning outcomes and how should it be supported?’
Consider this article about a school in Lancashire UK, and a recent comment by Deon Scanlon at Classroom 2.0.
My warmest thanks goes to Julian Morgan at Chatsmore who ’seized the day’ and made it possible for me to visit the school.
Julian can be contacted at Chatsmore Catholic High School
