Taking a leaf out of Doug Belshaw's book, I’m going to start sharing what I’ve been working on in projects both in my official role at Nesta and in the other things I get involved with. The purpose of this is to keep a record of things as they develop, look back, share and open up connections and potential for collaboration. It’s a small step towards Open Working, and I think it will be beneficial to pull the week’s thoughts and activities together.
Where?
This week I have mostly been in London, with a short trip to Milton Keynes.
What?
  • Attending Comicon with friends & collaborators Musomic where they were showcasing their forthcoming app.
  • Catching up on documenting my visits to ‘Visible Classroom’ schools across Birmingham and Dudley last week.
  • Travelling to the Open University in Milton Keynes to hear about their learning technologies projects Juxtalearn, 3D Virtual Geology Field Trip and MK:Smart - in which they are encouraging children to collect and analyse data about their environment.
  • Catching up with Doug Belshaw and Vinay Gupta and talking Mozilla’s web literacy work, the untapped potential of children in developing countries with no education and hexayurts.
  • Doing lots of expenses for travel and booking lots more for next week.
  • Planning for the next phase of Visible Classroom schools who are getting started with an intensive version of the programme next week. I’m co-ordinating the training and implementation of this in schools.
  • Workshopping and dining with Nesta’s ‘Digital Makers Fund’ grantees. My colleague Amy Solder got together the 7 new organisations coming into this programme with some of the first round organisations and other supporters for a really interesting day of sharing their work and exploring evaluation, topped off with a rather wonderful meal for everyone to get to know each other.
  • Meeting David Weston from the Teacher Development Trust to talk professional development and evaluation, and Olivier from Virtual Language Exchange who is piloting a new one to one peer tutoring service for foreign language teaching.
  • Planning for a couple of events I’m doing with Paul Hutson and Dan Axon to first develop teachers’ Ed Tech ideas at ‘Ed Invent’, and then build them into a business at a startup weekend hackathon. The first event for teachers is in Brighton in July, sign up here.
  • Preparing for my research visits to schools who have been taking part in our Flipped Learning trial with NFER. I’ll be conducting some first hand research for this one and am looking forward to getting on the ground and seeing what they have been learning.
Next week?
I’m in Scotland for the first half of next week, visiting schools for our Flipped Learning project, then I’m back in London training a new school joining The Visible Classroom, and hopefully getting some writing done somewhere in between.