Personalised learning: the movie
Miles Berry and I gave a presentation entitled “Personalised Learning Through Technology”. Miles captured it on his laptop as we did it, so here is the presentation, along with some reflections. This article also contains references to Jim Knight’s speech about home internet access and a new consultation.It was Miles who suggested personalisation as a theme for our talk, and it certainly seems to have captured the zeitgeist. Not only were several presentations arranged on this theme at BETT, but many of the products are being “tagged” with the term “personalised learning”. To confirm that impression, look no further than Jim Knight’s opening speech.Just to put you in the picture, and give this a context, The BETT Show always opens with a talk by a Government Minister, usually the one who has the brief for educational technology. Jim Knight (left) is the Schools Minister and is committed to the cause so to speak. Last year he set up the Home Access Task Force, and this year the Minister has once again put home access firmly on the agenda.He has stated, in effect, that home access should be a right, not a privilege, saying:”I want a home computer to be as important as having a calculator or pencil case is.”Becta will be investing £600,000 in Proof of Concept activities to test different ways of delivering access, and 50 schools will take part in a pilot project. A 12 week public consultation has now started, to look at the best ways of achieving universal home access. If you’d like to take part in that, go here.So what has all this got to do with personalised learning? Well, having access to your school and to the internet from home certainly widens your choices as a to where, when and how you do coursework and homework. But parents will be involved too:”All parents will get regular electronic reports on their children’s progress in future - going far beyond the traditional annual school report”.Now you might wonder what that has to do with personalised learning. Well, as I make clear in the presentation, all of these approaches — assessment for learning, curriculum developments, Every Child Matters, Harnessing Technology, and yet others — are intertwined, with the common element being personalisation. It has to be so, for one simple reason: the common denominator is the child.Miles (above left) and I have presented together 3 times now, and the fact that neither of us has had a nervous breakdown in the process is something of a minor miracle: our presentation styles are quite different. But it seems to work: the audiences always seem very satisfied, and give good feedback. For example, Steve Bullock, Head of Physics / Virtual Learning Coordinator at Wembley High Technology College, in Middlesex, England, emailed last night to say:”Thanks for a superb seminar today at BETT. You really put things together clearly and in a logical way.”Although that’s nice from an egotistical standpoint, it is also important because it means that people find what we have to say interesting and useful. All one can do, I think, is chip away at these things, hoping that something we say will make someone change one or two things that they do. Hopefully, that person will pass on their new-found ideas, which will in turn spark someone else off. Then, eventually, some of these teachers and schools will come to the attention of a wider audience, and be cited in another presentation, thereby perpetuating the cycle of improvement.Yesterday whilst we were attempting to find a café that could cope with more than 3 people in the line, I made the observation that the section I’d spent the greatest amount of time on was the bit we had to skip, but that it didn’t matter because that section tied in very well with all the other parts, and helped me to improve my own understanding of personalised learning. Miles regarded that as an indication that it’s really only by giving presentations that one really starts to learn “this stuff”. We all know that’s right, of course: we do it in classrooms and, in some enlightened schools, even in teachers’ professional development sessions, by getting the kids to do the presentation. Miles and I hope to re-record the video one day soon, as we had to skip a fair bit, as I’ve just said. A pity really, because the “missing” slides (which you can obtain without commentary), concerned physical and virtual learning environments, handheld devices and other really interesting stuff. But as I said in my introduction, hopefully people will end up with lots of ideas, resources and references to explore as a result of the presentation. I hope that is true for you.You can download the slides, the audio-only version and a video iPod version of the presentation from here.
