Where?

This week I’ve been in London.

What?

• Meeting my new director at Nesta Sylvia Lowe, and discussing where all my projects are up to.
• Attending the Teacher Development Trust 2nd birthday celebration at the House of Lords. It was great to catch up with quite a few people I know through twitter, and to celebrate their success in encouraging CPD.
• Meeting Bryan Mathers from City & Guilds to talk about future directions in assessment.
• Updating Geoff Mulgan our chief executive on our education projects and future directions.
• Workshopping Nesta’s values as part of an ongoing process to develop how we define and communicate what we do.
• Organising visits to Visible Classroom schools to collect some video interviews with teachers about the project.
• Researching and reading up on measuring education outcomes outside of standardised testing.
• Planning an article for an interesting publication ARK schools are putting together.
• Writing blog posts about each chapter of my book ‘The Thinking Teacher’ to be published over the next few weeks.
• Initial planning for an event at Nesta looking at innovation in tutoring.
• Presenting some ideas on moving our thinking from ‘ICT' to 'Technology Enhanced Learning' across the curriculum to teachers in London.
• Writing a blog post for Ai media about our Visible Classroom project, to be published soon.

Writing this week

The Thinking Teacher: What’s it all about - First in a series on my book.

The Thinking Teacher: Thinking makes it so - An extract from the book

Flexible learning space opening at Westfield Junior school - On the Nesta blog

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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.