This was my presentation at the SSAT National Conference. It was a really interesting session, there was a high number of people there and a few people who attended commented that they had come along as it was a controversial topic and they wanted to get some answers.
You can see the full presentation here: (But the links to the video clips won’t work however the main video used commissioned last year by the QCDA can be viewed on youtube here: http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=vdzeYzDNJjk&feature=related )
https://www.ssatrust.org.uk/sites/NationalConference2010/abouttheevent/Pages/wedpresentations.aspx
I won’t go through what I talked about in the presentation – you can see that on the presentation itself, but will sum up some of the key points that were discussed by others there. It was interesting to first get some opinions from the world of twitter which I shared with the audience:
If you were at the presentation then it would be great to hear if you feel if this summary is an accurate perception:
- The majority of people there were looking for answers and it would be fair to say did not allow mobile phones or social networking sites to be used in their schools, although funnily enough the majority of them used them. (This was established from a good old fashioned hands up)
- The majority of the audience held a negative view on things like facebook, that it caused more issues within schools as quite often more problems would come into the school from facebook and the use of it outside. In fact one senior leader in a school claimed that 60% of his working day/week was taken up from resolving issues from facebook which is a huge amount of time. Why is that the case? Is this true in other schools? Why do some schools have much less than this? Is it because allowing students to use it, educating them how to use it responsibly removes these barriers – I think so.
- There was a small number of people in the audience who came up to me to discuss this further at the end and were keen to try to develop some of the good practice I discussed at saltash.net at their schools which was great although I still feel that for many more there the session didn’t relieve their fear of these new tools.
Finally the best part of the presentation was the question and answer session with some of our students via skype live in the conference who fielded some difficult questions and were a real credit to not just our school but all young people in education by explaining their views in a mature, perceptive and honest way. This was endorsed when Adam & Lewis got a huge round of applause at the end.
Do you have good examples of using mobiles or social networking to enhance the learning of your students? Please let me know what they are by posting comments here.