 My name is Dan Stooke. I'm an assistant head teacher at Stratford High School, a school which is only a couple of miles from here. I've been teaching eight years. I'm a maths teacher by trade, but split the time between maths and IT at the moment. Hopefully I'm going to try and I've changed this presentation about five times since I arrived here yesterday. So hopefully what I'm going to try and do is is talk you through some of the challenges and some of the exciting things that are happening in secondary and to a smaller extent primary schools across the UK at the moment and hopefully draw on quite a lot of parallels between what's happening in our sector and the further and higher education sector as well because I've been listening to an awful lot of stuff over the last two days and marveling at how we seem to be facing a lot of the same challenges. So Stratford High School is a bog standard comprehensive the independent kindly called us on results day when they put that lovely picture of our star students opening their results in the paper. They were quite kind about us after that. So I'll let them off, but we are a traditional comprehensive school. I think I'd probably call us situated just between old Trafford football and cricket size of place. So literally about a mile and a half away probably as the crow flies. So it's a very inner city Manchester school is in Trafford, which means we're in a selective education system. So we lose the cream of the crop off to grammar schools before they get to us. We have 750 fabulous students who do really well. What I thought I talked to you today about is how technology is being used to support learning in secondary schools at the moment and some of the challenges financially and otherwise that we're facing at the moment. And hopefully all of this is driven by the teaching and learning and in each of these little sections, I'm going to try and just cover a bit of the reality of what's going on in schools at the moment. The reality is there's some fabulous teaching and learning going on in secondary schools at the moment. Not all of that is as well supported by technology as it could be. There are also schools and teachers who are using technology in ways that I could never imagine myself. A lot of our technology education or education supported by technology still takes place in rooms a bit like that. That was one of the IT classrooms at my school when I joined there about three years ago. When I joined, we had, there was a little bit of paint in the picture at Stratford High School. We had about four or five rooms like that. We had a series of laptop trolleys around the place in various states of repair. We had a lot of our services came through the local authority and were a little bit unreliable. And taking your class off to use one of those rooms by the time you'd got there, you'd lost a quarter of your lesson anyways. And it wasn't always conducive to what we were looking to really produce. A lot of our teachers, and I'm being honest here, even some of my teachers are not going to paint Stratford High School as 100% an amazing place where technology takes over the world. A lot of our staff and our students across the country still think that using technology support learning basically involves Wikipedia and press and copy and paste, particularly the students. I have to admit. And one of the things that's really, one of our big hurdles I suppose in terms of getting the teaching and learning where we'd like it to be across the whole of the secondary sector are still the dreaded performance league tables and our English and math scores, as you will all be acutely aware of the press for the last few weeks. They are, in my humble opinion, the biggest stifler of innovation and creativity and everything we'd like to happen because the pressure that especially head teachers and governing bodies are under for the performance in those subjects make it very easy to focus all our energies there and drive out some of the stuff we really want to see happening. And there is fabulous stuff happening in classrooms just quickly whizzing around there. Those five words at the bottom, those four words in particular, creativity, independence, drive and respect, that's kind of our core values on what we try and instill in our pupils. And that's what we really believe in at Stratford High School. And that's what hopefully we're starting to see in all of our classrooms. In my opinion, all of that can be supported with the use of technology. There's schools across country looking at trying to release students and let them take charge of their learning. And I think some of the work Dan Pink has done and Google on their 20% time of idea of giving time over to students to go off and learn stuff of their own volition is something we've been working hard to build in. And in secondary schools that's particularly difficult to factor into a timetable. We're seeing some great work starting to take place with, I think, Sugata Mitra was here last year or the year before, probably standing where I was talking about his self-organised learning environments. And that's something we've been pushing at our school and it's starting to take off across the country as people are realising that students can lead their own learning and can go off onto the internet, working teams and deliver a lot of learning themselves. It's a bit scary for teachers to just take a step back and leave them to it. But once you do that, it's getting quite exciting. There's some fabulous work going on in schools and this isn't so much of my school, I'll admit. Using games-based learning is already taking off in little pockets. That little picture there is a little primary school class who are all in Minecraft. If you've ever come across that and they're building structures and collaborating away. And that's the world that our students live in when they leave and we're just starting to try and pull that into the classroom and make the most of it. And obviously we've incredibly focused on literacies all across the board, whether that's traditional literacy, which is still a big driver, all the digital literacies, et cetera, et cetera, that you guys have been talking about. I know across this conference and I sat in the discussion yesterday on digital literacy thinking we're doing that too. Just out of interest because I hope we get the gauge to the audience right. Hands up if anyone does. I can't resist a hands up because my teacher does work in schools. Excellent. A couple. What about teacher training? I suppose might be a link here. Higher education. Good, I've got the audience right. That's all right then. Thank goodness. As far as the provision, the systems, et cetera, that we're putting in place, the reality is those two happy chappies, I'm not going to get too political, have cut the amount of money we've got to spend in schools, whether they've dressed it up one way or another and we're in inner city school who gets an awful lot of people premium money. That still doesn't balance out what has been taken away by other hands. Give me one and take away with the other. There is less money for us to spend on our infrastructure and the back end there. The local authorities obviously used to have a key role in this and as more and more schools moved to academy status, et cetera, those local authorities are losing their business in a way from us and hence the systems that they had there to help back us up, the technical support, et cetera, et cetera, is starting to disappear. In fact, at our school, we've almost entirely moved all our stuff away from the local authority. We used to have a 20 meg internet connection from them, which whenever I tested it was more like four and worked one day, hour two, and that was great. When the harnessing technology grant disappeared from local authorities, that used to cost us £4,000 and we got a bill for about £12,000. So the reality is that wasn't good value for money and that's something that we're really having to look at now and go out into the private sector and see that those services we used to get from the local authorities, where can we get them from now? Just back in that last one I put RM as an example there, there are still and I'm lucky, I feel, not to be in this situation. A lot of schools who have managed service contracts which have their own benefits, allegedly cost wise, but real problems when you want something to get done in a classroom, the projector's broken, you make a phone call and somebody will come and fix it by the end of the week. That doesn't work in a classroom environment, you need somebody there on-site who can fix it immediately. So we've been really looking to budget properly ourselves, I'll be honest. We used to have pots of surplus cash left over at the end of the year and if there was a pot of surplus cash in my school I was really lucky because the head teacher would say, do you want to spend that on some new IT equipment, Dan? I'm not going to turn that off, so of course I would. I think that happened across quite a lot of the sector. That's great until it gets to the end of its life three years later and there isn't another pot of cash there to replace it. I think one thing schools have been trying really hard to do is look at the total cost of ownership of devices, look at the lifespans, look to see if we can replace those at the end of it and look to build sustainable models. Do we need to buy everything capital-wise or lease it? We've been trying to build relationships with the private sector. I've developed really good links with Toshiba, with MCC and with companies who actually care about what's happening in the classroom and how their stuff's been used and they've given us a lot of extra value over just what we've bought from them. Schools are also looking at models like the eLearning Foundation, which is a fabulous charity. There's lots of schools going down the road of looking at one-to-one devices, whether that's an iPad or a netbook or whatever device it is. The eLearning Foundation is a charity that helps schools get parents to contribute part of that cost to that and it's amazing what you can actually set up with those. I'll mention that a little bit more in a minute. As far as where we kind of get our vision and our intelligence about technology and where it's going and training our staff again, those old systems and support networks we had in place are dissolving quite rapidly back to God rest their soul. We're a great government organisation that really did provide advice, a senior level to schools of where technology could be used and where it will be used in the future and that's sadly gone with nothing, frankly, to replace it. Again, like I've mentioned before, the likes of the local authorities aren't supporting us with that knowledge for us as well as the training that we used to get. Unfortunately, again, the money comes into it. We used to be able to send people off on lots of training courses, how much value we got from those I don't know, but that happens less and less now. We're pushing out, I think, where a lot of people are and looking at building those networks. I found that talk from Microsoft yesterday really interesting because that's the sort of thing we're having to tap into now. This isn't all teachers and this is one of our real challenges at the moment. There are lots of teachers going on Twitter, building social networks, building communities of interest, following blogs of prominent people who were talking about what's happening in their schools, but there's no centralisation of that anymore and the actual percentage of teachers who are getting their own CPD and getting ideas and such like that from social networks and from those looser structures is still pretty low, so that's one of our big challenges, I think, is pushing out from the core of us who use this and take this for granted now to really get more and more staff involved with it. Teach Meets are a fabulous little invention that's sprung up through social media and such like over the last few years where teachers go and spend an afternoon or an evening, get on stage three minutes, hear something fabricated in a classroom and off they go and it's just a great form of professional development and again that's something where keen staff are doing that and we're now trying to take those models and put them back into school. It's a far more effective model of training than what I'm doing now of standing up and talking to you for 20 odd minutes on a topic, ironically. There's other communities there from a techie point of view, Edugeek is one of the most amazing websites we don't have any support when my IT team get something they can't solve, somebody on there can because there's IT tech support guys from all across the education sector on there and we'd be lost without that now. There we go. A big part, one little bit I wanted to just hold in on is something I've been involved in the last year or two, getting the students to help with that training in school, help with training there, teachers and help with training their peers as well. The reality is I don't like the digital migrants, digital natives kind of thing that's been bandied around for years but there's elements of truth to that. A lot of my teachers are definitely digital migrants and they pick things up and they try their very best but the more support they can have in the classroom when something goes wrong the better. That's me at the top. Buried under paperwork. This little idea of digital leaders came to me and from a colleague called Christian Still it's dead simple. It's basically to develop a group of students like digital prefects. Those students who really are the digital natives who have got those literacies and have got the confidence to sit in a classroom and go, do you know what I missed? Do you want to hand with that or to deliver training with me which they'll be doing this afternoon when I get back to school or just to help out their fellow peers in the classroom? So we've been really pushing this over the last couple of years and it's something that's kind of spread out quite virally. Again this was supported in the early stages by Tosh Ibar and I have to give him a lot of credit for helping us get out there, helping us go to other conferences and spread the idea and there's now 50 to 100 schools across the UK who have taken this idea and run with it. There's an unofficial kind of digital leader network website which some new teachers have kind of taken the ball on from us. A couple of us that started it and have really run with it and it's a great example of those social networks pushing ideas that work all across the school. The little picture in the bottom right there that's two of my year 11s who have just left speaking at the European Schools Network Conference in Copenhagen earlier in the year so they've got, as well as helping me, do my job in the school which is what I originally liked the idea for because I need about five heads. They've got great things out of it as well. Right, five minutes. Technologies, the technologies in our school in reality is a mess. There's so many of you. From one school to the next what's being used there is a complete hushparch from one place to the next as interactive whiteboards galore most of which get used to project onto. There's an awful lot of kit that schools have bought over many years because it was fashionable and that continues and will forever continue. There's kids bringing their own devices in really powerful ones and no mobile devices allowed in these classroom signs on the door which is a little ironic. There's learning platforms that likes a frontor or moodle or blackboard, et cetera which, frankly, when you're a 13-year-old don't really compete with Facebook and Tumblr and Xbox Live and they're really expensive, a lot of them. There's the dreaded web filter controlled by somebody in an ivory tower somewhere which means that in many, many schools still teachers will go sit at home plan a wonderful lesson later at night involving lots of fantastic websites that'll get into the classroom the next day they'll take them off to the computer lab and everything's blocked and the whole lesson falls apart and, fair enough, they decide I'm not doing that again I'll get the sugar paper and the pens out next time because I know that works and I know where they are. So one thing that is absolutely crucial in my eyes and we're starting to get there and I fought for it for two or three years in my place is to get outstanding web access across schools and I've just about done that now that sadly aren't my speeds that was the speeds of the network sat outside here but we've got 100 megline of our own at school and I control the filter and it's not really filtered other than for the obvious things. We've just thrown in a cheap wireless network at our place that we found through Edugeek £7,000 and we've flooded the whole place in a network that handles what we want to do it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but that's absolutely crucial because you've got to give teachers the ability to kind of do be able to innovate and that's really tricky. Abdul's at the bottom there from Easter Academy I found a little quote from Abdul on the bus this morning he's worked at a school where they gave every child an iPod touch and they've got all the staff there have iPads he said that technology must not be a barrier to learning if the technology doesn't work for staff and students it won't work to enhance learning I think that's key and that's something we've been trying to do at our school bring your own device works but it's not a solution we allow the students to bring them I'm going to skip over that one bring their devices into our school but I don't think it replaces the infrastructure that we need to take with us we love Google apps it's great and we love free tools in our school there's stuff like that out there that does as good if not a better job than a lot of the VLEs there's an overhead mode over there which is like a little Facebook for schools it's absolutely fantastic a few things a couple of projects we're working on just to be a bit selfish and talk about our school we're looking at our teachers have all just been giving an iPad and we're looking at somebody mentioned yesterday why are we still doing trials we're effectively doing a trial this year with a couple of classes as well we're working with the e-learning foundation because I've spent a year going through the sums and even in our inner city school we can afford in the money that we've always used to spend to equip every single one of our learners with an iPad-esque device whether that watch everyone we choose eventually with some very minimal parental contributions and they get to own that at the end and in a school like ours getting that technology into the homes as well as key because they're only with us for 20% of the time so that's something we're really working hard on the car phone warehouse a pilot help working with this little pilot that I hope to get involved in using iPads to promote some maths so again it's finding those partners who are out there who are willing to get involved in the actual teaching and learning of what's going on show the students how their heart works and then throw the fuse this is Janice Janice is a teaching assistant who's had an iPad for a week and a half and I said Janice could you just I know she's amazing do me a video of what's been going on Do I have my iPad? What do you think? I've used a dictionary today a translator, an interactive website for showing digestion I've shown the student how their heart works and then throw the fuse students by showing them an art circles iPad app I've learned a piece of music and recorded it on my garage band I've used the calculator I've used the iPad to show a pair of plastic floor on the iPad and a volcano and I've investigated the world of insects Do you have my iPad? Well what do you think? I have not done any training with her yet it's the first week back but I've given her the tools and the network that are that easy to use that the learning just takes place and hopefully we've started to build those networks in school so that the students are helping the staff and the staff are helping the students and that's been really key to what's been going on I've skipped over the digital literacy bit there but all that work that is going on in universities we're doing exactly the same rewriting our ICT curriculum and trying to get those skills in there I think that takes us back to the beginning and I've got the red card so I'm going to stop there