A busy week.. hence only my second week note being rather late! It’s still helpful to review and reflect on things at this point as I plan the next stage of things, and if it’s worth doing it’s usually worth sharing.
Where?
Last week I was in Scotland Sunday to Wednesday night, then back in London for the tail end of the week before a weekend visit to Brighton.
What?
  • Travelling to Scotland, first to Glasgow and then to Dumfries to schools who have been trying out Nesta & NFER's ‘Flipped Learning’ trial.
  • Exploring Glasgow. I went up a day early on Sunday to take a look around and enjoyed getting to know the city a little and enjoy the museum and art gallery, particularly their Salvador Dali painting, and an expected but impressive organ performance in the main atrium.
  • Learning how these schools have been getting on through lesson observations, interviews with teachers and focus groups with students. It was great to be welcomed to some schools in a country that is so similar and yet so different to what I am used to in England, and really was a pleasure working with all the teachers and students. I’ve taken away a lot of learning about Flipped Learning approaches, and innovation in schools more widely. Much more to be written soon…
  • Recording all the interviews and writing up notes. I find it’s hard to write anything meaningful if you are going to build ups good rapport with someone in an interview and ask the probing and follow up questions that help construct the most useful understanding. However that does mean lots of listening back through recordings and writing up. I ended up using VLC with the variable playback speed turned up to speed things up- as I was there it was more of a memory jog than thinking for the first time.
  • Shortlisting for the ALT ‘Learning Technologist of the Year’ awards. Some really interesting entries and I’m looking forward to hearing more at the face to face judging panel on Friday.
  • Training a new school for our ‘Visible Classroom’ professional development through transcription & analytics project. Springwell school in Hounslow, London were very welcoming and it was a great workshop to dig deep into their goals for developing their practice and learning in their classrooms through the programme.
  • Blogging about Brett Victor’s challenge to teachers and speakers to be honest and authentic.
  • Planning and writing about an 'Ed Invent' event in Brighton next month for developing Ed Tech ideas based on the challenges from real classrooms. I also blogged about that here, come join us if you can.
This week it’s more Visible Classroom, more follow up for Flipped Learning, trying to start fleshing out my next project, judging the ALT awards and meeting my new boss.