Disruption in industry and the implications for schools

Steve Denning in his great article on the disruption battle still raging at Harvard Business School, concludes: 

"...corporations need to be implementing all other management principles required to delight customers—a shift from controlling individuals to enabling teams networks, and ecosystems; a shift from bureaucracy to agility and dynamic linking; a shift in values from the primacy of efficiency to the primacy of continuous improvement and transparency; and a shift from one-way top-down communications to multi-directional conversation. This is Management 101 for the 21st Century."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/06/19/the-new-yorker-battle-of-the-strategy-titans/ 

More evidence to support the upcoming global launch of No Rules Learning.

Watch this space!

Digital Citizenship Certification for GEMS World Academy Dubai

GEMS World Academy-Dubai Certified as a “Common Sense School”

Recognized by Common Sense Media for Teaching Digital Citizenship

DUBAI, UAE – Common Sense Media, a US-based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping children and families thrive in a world of digital media and technology, has certified GEMS World Academy-Dubai as a Common Sense School for educating its students to be safe, smart and ethical digital citizens.  GEMS World Academy-Dubai is the first school in the Middle East and the first GEMS school worldwide to be certified.

GEMS World Academy-Dubai has demonstrated its commitment to taking a whole-community approach to preparing its students to use the immense power of digital media to explore, create, connect and learn, while limiting the perils that exist in the online realm, such as plagiarism, loss of privacy and cyber-bullying.

“We applaud GEMS World Academy-Dubai for embracing digital citizenship as an important part of their students’ education,” said Rebecca Randall, Vice President of Education Programs for Common Sense Media. “GEMS World Academy-Dubai deserves high praise for giving its students the foundational skills they need to compete and succeed in the 21^st-century workplace and participate ethically in society at large.”

GEMS World Academy-Dubai has been using Common Sense Media’s innovative and research-based digital literacy and citizenship resources, which were created in collaboration with Dr. Howard Gardner of the GoodPlay Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The resources teach students, educators and parents tangible skills related to internet safety, protecting online reputation and personal privacy, what to share and what not to share, managing online relationships and respecting creative copyright. The free resources are currently used in more than 65,000 classrooms across the US.

 “We are honored to be recognized as a Common Sense School as we proactively support students to navigate the online world in the 21^st century,” said Jason McBride, the Head of School at GEMS World Academy-Dubai. “By preparing our students to use technology safely and responsibly, we are providing them unlimited opportunities to maximize and personalize their learning.”

For more information, useful links, practical advice and suggestions please follow visit http://gwadigitalcitizenship.weebly.com or ‘like’ our Digital Citizenship Facebook Page.

For more information about GEMS World Academy-Dubai, go to http://www.gemsworldacademy-dubai.com.

To learn more about the criteria GEMS World Academy-Dubai had to meet to become certified as a Common Sense School, visit http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/certification.

About Common Sense Media
Common Sense Media is dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in a world of media and technology. We exist because our kids are growing up in a culture that profoundly impacts their physical, social, and emotional well-being. We provide families with the advice and media reviews they need in order to make the best choices for their children. Through our education programs and policy efforts, Common Sense Media empowers parents, educators, and young people to become knowledgeable and responsible digital citizens. For more information, go to: www.commonsense.org.

Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages

Mal Lee continues to lead the way with this simply wonderful taster of his upcoming book on digital transformation in schools.

The full document, which is an absolute MUST READ can be downloaded here:

http://schoolevolutionarystages.net/?page_id=160

I'd suggest that every school leader needs to know where their institution sits in this taxonomy and the model gives a very useful breakdown of next steps, whilst also potentially providing the basis of a framework for long term strategy.

The whole piece is a gem but perhaps the point that resonates loudest with me is the recognition that researchers looking to establish a causal link between technology deployment and academic (or other) achievement have really missed what is going on in digitally normal schools.  What's really important is how the technology is brought to bear on student learning, within a complex web of influencers on achievement.  Technology is not the silver bullet but we are beginning to see that it is very much an essential element of the overall armoury.

Bring on NO RULES LEARNING...

Don’t Lose Your Balance! Raising the ‘Z’ Generation

Whenever I meet teachers and parents for the first time, I usually sense fear and suspicion.  Here’s an ‘IT geek’.  He wants to turn my children into soulless cyborgs who can’t write with a pen and don’t do any sport, who just sit in front of a screen all day and night and have no social skills.  Keep away!  Of course, there are those educators who do the rest of us no favours here – those who still call themselves ‘IT Evangelists’ and the like.  Even I am scared of them, and rightly so.  But they are, thankfully, a dying breed.  What we really need to be teaching is balance.

It has long been the case that schools are required to provide a broad and balanced curriculum, aimed at ensuring that every child realises his or her potential and is equipped with the knowledge, skills, attributes and values necessary to flourish in a future where the only certainty is uncertainty.   We know that human talent is incredibly diverse and we have a duty to nurture and develop the strengths of every child, whatever those strengths may be.  This can only be achieved within a balanced curriculum and by ensuring children also achieve that balance outside of school.

Of course, there is no doubt we now live in a digital world and, according to the European Commission, by 2020, 90% of jobs will need digital skills.  Add in the potential of technology to transform how children and adults learn and it is clear the game has changed.   And parents are also recognizing the benefits.  In a recent US study of 2-10 year olds, more than half (57%) of parents said that their children had learned “a lot” from educational media.  As part of a relevant, broad and balanced curriculum, schools need be using such educational media, teaching digital skills and also ensuring children know how to learn effectively using digital technologies - and, of course, supporting and engaging parents in this transformation. 

But balance is vital.  Another US  study, this time of media in the lives of 8-18 year olds, found that children and teenagers spent an average of more than 50 hours per week on media outside of school – and that did not include schoolwork!  The same report found that one third of the children had internet access in their bedrooms.  Also, clinical studies suggest that technology addiction is as real as other forms of addiction - reports of teenagers becoming so engaged in online gaming that they forget to wash, eat and sleep, are not uncommon.   As with the threat of any addiction, we really do need to take this issue very seriously. 

In many ways, technology has transformed the world and schools are now embracing the best tools and methods to improve their students’ learning.  Digital skills and learning to learn digitally are key elements of the modern curriculum in forward thinking schools.  What hasn’t changed, however, is the need for our children to become well-rounded citizens, who know how to be successful and to live happy, healthy lives in perfect balance.  Now, for that, I’ll be an evangelist.  

Digital Balance: Top Tips for Parents of ‘Z’ Generation Kids

1.       Model the behaviours you want to see in your children.  If you are constantly checking emails and Facebook on your phone, this sends a powerful, negative message to your children.  Put your own technology out of reach (e.g. upstairs) at certain times when the kids are around. 

2.       Have dinner together whenever possible.  Switch everything off and talk!

3.       Build relationships, based on shared interest, practice, accountability and trust.  Take an interest in your children’s technology and what they do with it.  Play the games they play and familiarise yourself with the sites they use.  The more interested you are in what interests them, the easier it will be to share in other, non-digital activities together.

4.       Keep all technology, including chargers, in shared areas.  There is simply no justification for children to have any sort of screen in their bedrooms.  That’s where they really need to sleep.

5.       Plan activities with and for your children that do not involve screen-based technology.  From karate to cooking, ballet to basketball, it is essential that we actively help our children to engage in a wide range of learning and leisure opportunities.  

A $1 Million 'Nobel Prize' for Teaching

Applications open for world’s first One Million Dollar Teacher prize

Sunny Varkey, Founder of the Varkey GEMS Foundation and Chairman of GEMS Education, announced the formal opening of the application and nomination process for the Varkey GEMS Foundation Global Teacher Prize on the final day of the Global Education and Skills Forum.

This one million dollar award, under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, and Ruler of Dubai, will be given to an exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession.

The award, which aims to have the weight and importance of the ‘Nobel Prize’, underlines the importance of the teaching profession and symbolises the fact that teachers throughout the world deserve to be recognised and celebrated.

Sunny Varkey, founder of the Varkey GEMS Foundation, said:

"The prize is open to currently working educators who teach children enrolled in compulsory schooling, or are below the age of eighteen. Head-teachers with teaching responsibilities are also eligible to apply.  The prize is open to teachers in every kind of school and, subject to local laws, in every country in the world.  The closing date for applications will be August 31^st 2014, and the winner will be announced at the Global Education and Skills Forum 2015 in Dubai next spring.

Applications will be judged by a prize committee, who will meet this October to choose a shortlist of ten candidates. The prize committee will include Sunny Varkey, Founder, Varkey GEMS Foundation; Vikas Pota, Chairman of the Varkey GEMS Foundation; Sir Michael Tomlinson, former Chief Inspector of Schools (England); Ann Mroz, Editor, Times Education Supplement; and Karen Giles, Headteacher, Barham Primary School, London.

A winner will be chosen from these ten finalists in November 2014 by the Global Teacher Prize Academy made up of head-teachers, educational experts, commentators, journalists, public officials, tech entrepreneurs, company directors and scientists from the UK, the US, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Austria, Pakistan, Philippines, Netherlands, Thailand, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Japan, Nigeria, Uganda, Singapore, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India and Turkey.

The academy includes prominent names such as Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey; Baroness Martha Lane Fox, founder of Lastminute.com; the Grammy winning jazz musician and singer Esperanza Spalding; US social activist and educator Geoffrey Canada; Nigerian businessman Jubril Adewale Tinubu, Group CEO, Oando; Strive Masiyiwa, Founder & Executive Chairman, Econet Wireless, South Africa; British philosopher David Rodin; Hadeel Ibrahim, the Executive Director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, and Jiang Xueqin, Vice-Principal, Tsinghua International School, China.

The public can nominate a teacher, or teachers can apply themselves, by filling an application form at http://globalteacherprize.com . If teachers are being nominated, the person nominating them will write a brief description online explaining why.  The teacher being nominated will then be sent an email letting them know they’ve been nominated and inviting them to apply for the prize.   Applicants can apply in English, and from May onwards, in Mandarin, Arabic, French, Spanish and Portuguese.  To join the conversation online follow #TeacherPrize on: www.twitter.com/TeacherPrize and www.facebook.com/TeacherPrize

Teachers who are applying will have to provide references from their current supervisor and up to two additional references.  These can include video testimonials about their work in the classroom and beyond, and can come from pupils, colleagues, head-teachers as well as members of the wider community.

The winner will be paid the prize money in equal instalments over ten years, and the Varkey GEMS Foundation will provide the winner with financial counselling. Without compromising their work in the classroom, the winner will be asked to serve as a global ambassador for the Varkey GEMS Foundation, attending public events and speaking in public forums about improving the prestige of the teaching profession. A condition of winning the prize is that the winner remains as a classroom teacher for at least five years.

-From GEMS Inbox

Bringing experts and primary sources into the classroom = transformational

Below is a story from GEMS Royal Dubai School, which I would like to share.  As per previous posts, I was skeptical of using Skype, Hangouts and so on for whole class interactions, mainly because I was concerned that it doesn't put individual children in control and it has a bit of an 'Inactive Whiteboard' feel to it.  I was wrong (again).

I've seen a few of these now and the thing that has changed for me is the use of primary sources and experts who would otherwise have been unable to share their knowledge and, more to the point, passion and feelings with the children.  In each example I have seen, the teacher has reacted in exactly the same way at the end of the session:  "As their teacher, I could never have given my children what you have just given them - thank you so much!"  I suggest that's transformation...

Do watch to the end of the video for Mrs. Stone's reading of 'The King's Letter' and we can add inspirational as well...

My thanks to Mark Stone and Anne-Marie Murray and of course Mark's amazing parents.

Year 6 Topic: ‘World War II - Skype to New Zealand’

Teacher:  Anne-Marie Murray

The day that I introduced the topic World War II to my Year 5 class in Royal Dubai School I quickly realised that all of the planning I had prepared for the next 3 weeks would be completely useless. Having taught World War II for 3 consecutive years in England I was pretty confident that the activities and lessons I had planned would provide the children with all the skills and knowledge that they needed to understand the war and its impact on children in the UK. I was wrong!

It quickly became apparent in my first lesson that I was dealing with a number of different nationalities, each bringing different perspectives, experiences and stories of WWII. The classroom became a hive of discussion about how each of their countries had been involved in and affected by the war. It was fascinating to watch but I quickly realised that these children would need something much more personal and real to help them understand the perspective of the war from a child in Britain. Books and photographs were useful to an extent but to make their learning memorable and real I had to think outside the box.

That’s when I approached our Digital Learning Coach, Mark Stone. I was fortunate enough to have a weekly coaching session with Mark and in that time we had set up Skype links with a school in Sweden, introduced Edmodo, had the children using Dropbox to collaborate in their learning and had incorporated the SAMR model in my classroom, making the children familiar with using the terms of the model to describe their learning.

I would regularly chat to Mark about my classroom practice and the challenges that I faced as a teacher in an international setting. Mark quickly came to know about my ton of useless planning for the WWII project and as I banged my head against a brick wall he told me about his parents’ story. Mark’s parents had been children in England during WWII. They now lived in New Zealand and had always shared stories of the war with Mark as he was growing up. Mark realised that there was no point in him telling me the story when in fact his mum could tell me the story herself; moreover, through the medium of Skype, his mum could tell the whole class her story.

I raced back to my classroom to tell the children about our idea. The excitement in the classroom was amazing. Children naturally began to collaborate together to create lists of questions to ask and within an hour we had come up with fascinating questions for Mark’s mother and father to answer. We emailed the questions to them to have a look at and set up a date for our Skype. In the meantime I used the children’s questions to plan my lessons. These lessons were based on their genuine interest in the war and the planning became personalised for my class rather than a general plan to work from. The learning was transformational and the children’s motivation was off the scale. They were well and truly gripped and it was brilliant to be driving their learning forward.

On the day of the Skype the children were so excited. They had their questions lined up and, as Mark’s Mother and Father appeared on the screen, the whole room fell silent. The children listened attentively to their responses and the level of their questioning indicated that they were captivated by the stories being shared.

Following the Skype session the children wrote letters to Mark’s parents. The letters demonstrated that the experience had had a massive impact on the children. They were deeply touched and inspired by the stories they heard and they invited Mark’s parents to be VIP guests (via Skype) at our VE day celebrations the following week to signal the end of the topic.

On VE day the children sang WWII songs to our New Zealand guests of honour and shared some of their learning throughout the project with them. The Skype with New Zealand became an integral part of the celebration day.

At the end of the project I was keen to see what the children thought of the process. We used De Bono’s thinking hats to evaluate our learning and to think about how we could use Skype in the future to help us engage in our learning. Their responses were honest and inspiring. Skype had given them the medium to engage with WWII survivors who had lived in England at the time. The children still had their own stories of the war but they now had a real understanding of what life was like for children in England during WWII.

Skype to NZ Video  http://youtu.be/glOgoPEv52U 

Transformation vs. Improvement - and one proposed example

This is a great post by Derek Wenmoth on the gaping chasm between improvement and transformation:

http://blog.core-ed.org/derek/2013/03/two-agendas.html

Once again, we see that visionary leadership is critical to transforming learning and providing our young people with the skills and attributes they really need to thrive and survive.  It's just not enough to have a handful of hero innovators in each school battling against the odds to change the world.  All they manage to do really is create pockets of excellence.  Only the people at the top can scale this excellence to make it 'normal,' to transform the culture and to say, "this is what we do here."  If they've done a good job then I suspect we wouldn't recognize the place as a school, such is the level of transformation needed.

Here is one example of something we may not recognize in our schools at present, not really tech-related, but I suggest transformational, innovative and with the potential to provide enormous benefits for learners.

This idea came out of a recent project I was working on with my colleague, Mark Stone, who is the Digital Learning Coach at a school in Dubai.  We spent some time in the evenings visiting children in their homes, interviewing them and their parents about digital learning and seeing how learning was organized in the home environment. It started out about digital learning and we were really looking at how the use of digital tools differed in and out school.  What we learned, however, went so much further and was quite unexpected (you could say we were uncovering the curriculum, not covering it - cliche alert).

We found out about extended families, the culture and history of each and every one, what and when the children ate and who the best person in the home was to support each child's learning in different situations.  We were even at one point offered some home made Romanian vodka crafted by Granddad on the shores of the Black Sea.  The warmth of the hospitality was quite overwhelming.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, spending just 1 to 2 hours in each of these homes gave us an insight into the lives and learning preferences of these children that was previously hidden and which was, quite simply, a revelation.  Perhaps the greatest piece of learning for us was that, at home, we saw the children as true individuals, not part of a class that had to be managed.  When we talk about personalised learning, what do we really mean?  Well, we saw it in the homes - children deciding when and where to work - and on what, when to have a snack to keep their energy levels up, when to take a break, which parent or grandparent to ask for help, which device to use and so on... you name it, they were in control of it, always under the careful guidance and with the support of adults passionate about supporting their learning.  In short, it took very little time and effort on our part to gain a much deeper understanding of each of these young people as individuals.
This is important because, when I worked at the school a few years ago and was running a parental engagement workshop, we asked the parents the question: "What makes a great teacher?" The answer was pretty much unanimous in the room: "Your best teachers are the ones who really know and love the children, who see them as so much more than names on the register or numbers on a spreadsheet.  They engage with us and make a huge effort to be a part of our family."  Moreover, they proceeded to name the school's "best teachers" - again, with pretty much unanimous agreement - and on exactly this basis.  No one mentioned test scores.

So what's the innovation to come out of this?  How can we transform learning based on this experience? Well, this is one small suggestion to get going - not aimed at this school in particular, but to try in any school.
This is what I would do:

1. For the first half term every year, I would start school an hour or so late, with teachers having that extra hour to spend as they like - have a lie in, a swim, go to the gym or relax in Starbucks. If there are logistical issues for parents with this, provision could be made with a skeleton staff, a bit like a breakfast club, but a late one!  The Principal could run it.

2. There would be no after school commitments for teachers in the first half term.

3. Instead, teachers would spend an hour or so every weekday after school visiting their children and parents in their homes, getting to know the families and their circumstances.

Of course there would be logistical issues - working parents, etc..  But guess what, if the parents aren't there when the kids get home, who is?  Teachers would benefit greatly from experiencing whatever the children experience when they get home.  The objection will arise: aren't the children losing an hour of schooling? I suggest this would be more than made up over the year by the teacher's enhanced understanding of each child as a learner. 

Would all the parents welcome the teachers into their homes?  Probably not. Would those who do see their children benefit significantly?  In our experience, we suspect so.

This may sound crazy.  That might just mean it's a good idea.  I'd suggest it's more transformation than improvement and that makes me feel confident that it's along the right lines.  And we'll never know if we don't try.