I come at this from a position that I think is relatively little heard: the enthusiastic class teacher with no direct input into leadership / policy. The amount of time I waste trying to get round problems cause by tools I want to use being blocked without warning after being previously available, or kids logging onto machines some of which haven’t got an up-to date enough version of flash or whatever installed. And now, I’m increasingly nervous about trying new things in case it might be seen as contravening our safeguarding policy. We’re not supposed to interact with students using social networking sites, but that isn’t defined.

I want to be more active than I am in promoting learning technologies, but I just know the nightmare that less tech-confident staff will have if they try in my school some of the stuff that is routine among ‘activists’ in the blogosphere.

I want to follow Ewan’s advice “for our extended family of connections, to pull together on one or two simple “next step” actions”, but I’m not entirely sure what they should be.

I’m cogitating on all this and hope to put together a blog post of my own to clarify my thoughts – but in the meantime, I’ve got a football match to go to!

On the bright side (and we must always seek to be optimistic) – a great opportunity to meet with some thoughtful thinkers and have a day to reflect upon achievements so far and consider ways forward.

.. and Ewan is right to stress that this is only one small day in a huge consultative, collaboration process. These blogs and reflections are of equal importance to the words spoken on the day.

On a less bright side; fantastic to have students available all day – desperately sad for the poor souls in schools who were essentially forgotten for almost the day. We need to find a more effective way to engage with students and today’s news isn’t helpful in this challenge (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8599485.stm)

- and I felt our pm discussion was frustrating

I’ll probably write a reflective blog on this sometime but at this stage my thoughts are:

we know there are some great ideas for more effective teaching and learning
we know there are some great people capable of putting these into practice
There needs to be greater recognition of these people’s work
Becta has a role in this (see the learning platform area as a good example http://www.nextgenerationlearning.org.uk/extendinglearning)
The National Education Network has a role in this
The PLNs have a role in this.

Ewan’s right. This is a process and if we don’t take a first step, we wont move at all.

Thanks for your thoughts, and I hope more splurge out in the extra bandwidth Easter should bring to our minds.

See you the other side – have a great holiday.

I think my points in the post above very much focus on the now. In fact they are necessarily now. Did you hear Nicola McNee’s excellent presentation? I have exactly the same issues at my school and I need some back-up. My conversations on twitter and EdTechRoundUp reinforce this. The onus is on Becta here IMO.

Ewan, I do not seek dowdy or boring and do not wish for a ‘what worked in our school’ approach. You have no need to defend BectaX. Your first line is important – now. We need stuff to support the now. My picture of it all has most schools with one or two teachers switched on to ed tech. They need support to help others.

The day for me was a positive affair. I think it is absolutely necessary to splash some cash if you want to make some motion. I agree it is the conversation that counts. But there are things that need to be done that are not being done and would have impact in many schools.

I was taken aback by the debate, and that is where the answers will be, I think, rather than the workshops’ ‘solutions’, which ended up being almost one and the same thing.

However their solutions are highly do-able, and something that, if we adopted a ‘pass it on’ approach quite vigourously, we could manage.

I do wonder what Terry and you want from an event: dowdy? boring? a string of anecdotes of “what worked in out school”? Other events do each of these three things very well.

They key, though, is realising and making sure others realise that the ‘day’ is not the useful part of the process. This one day event was a kick-off for progress, not a summary of some work or a one-off consultation exercise. On a basic level, we’ve raised the stakes on how government bodies do their consultation exercises.

For people to get that, and to move their backsides to act on some of the points that came up in their own little ways, is the most significant worry I have. I have no concerns that the event fulfilled its purpose – to highlight what the key barriers to progress are and present some actionable points to get us started, with a longer line of contacts and connections for Becta to tap in their ongoing policy building throughout this summer and autumn. For Becta, the event was useful, invaluable.

I do worry, though, that folk seem to think the onus is on Becta (or worse still, on that one day event) to sort out the present or even the issues of five year’s time.

It seemed pretty clear to me by the end that the onus was on every one of us in that room, and for our extended family of connections, to pull together on one or two simple “next step” actions.