Jim Fanning – Tideway School

Podcast 

Time: 10:39

My name is Jim Fanning. I’m the assistant head teacher at Tideway school. My main responsibility is as technology college co-ordinator so I co-ordinate technology across the curriculum areas and I’m also responsible for the teaching of IT at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.  

Back in 2005 we were a school of 900 students and subject to a massive fire, a massive arson attack which destroyed 80% of the school infrastructure, so overnight literally the school and the technology and the school network had gone and we’ve been accommodated in portacabins for the past three to four years.  In February 2009 we moved into this brand new school.  

It’s interesting to see how the technology has developed at Tideway School, especially over this last year.  If you go back one or two years there were certain key people, certain staff, who were really pushing IT forwards.  The interesting thing now is that as you move from curriculum area to curriculum area there are any number of staff in those different areas saying “We want the technology, we can see the benefit that technology brings to learning, please give us more, these are the ways we want to use it”.  So, that’s been an interesting development over this past year or two that we’ve seen, from those one or two key players to staff in general that really recognise the benefits of the technology.  

The major benefits that staff see with technology is when it can personalise learning. The way that resources and teaching opportunities and learning opportunities can be set up online for individual students and groups of students and I think that has to be the key thing in the way technology is used in this place, the way that it does personalise learning and open it up in terms of individual students.  

Differentiation is definitely one of the key things when it comes to using technology for learning.  I think we’ve still got a long way to go as a school to crack what differentiated learning and what a differentiated lesson looks like online but certainly it’s one of the key things for us that, difficult as we may find it to differentiate effectively in that classroom is the technology and that’s what will make it possible.  

In terms of the virtual learning environment and how it helps with learning; you’ve got subject areas that have basically put up every learning resource and the learning platform is embedded in every lesson that they teach.  They’re using it for students to access learning resources, they’re using it to record student progress so that students and parents can both access that data and they can then use that data to improve pupil attainment.  We’ve got other subject areas that are using the forums and blogs and wikis and to actually push forward with collaborative learning in the classroom, something that wouldn’t be as possible if we didn’t have that technology in the classroom.  

We’ve just started using netbooks in English; we’ve been piloting them in English for the past 6 months.  Now, I think the one key thing about using that technology in the classroom is that it does send out a really important message that every time you want to use the technology you don’t simply, well you don’t have to book in a computer room, you don’t have to take students to the technology.  The fact is if the netbooks are there, they’re connected to the school network in terms of wifi, you’ve actually got anywhere, anytime access to the technology.  It becomes embedded in the lesson and it becomes just as accessible as any other classroom resource so it doesn’t become something that you think, this is really special, this is really different.  I think the fact that Zoe’s using those netbooks in English, it allows both her and the students to decide what technology, whether that technology is a netbook or simply a paper book.  It allows them to decide what is the best technology to use for learning.  Now I’ve been into Zoe’s lessons and observed certain students using netbooks in a really fantastic way.  Some students, who if you were to simply deliver a standard lesson using paper based resources they would never have achieved as much especially in terms of independent learning and especially in terms of the way that they are engaged through the use of the netbooks, you simply wouldn’t have engaged them in the same way as if it was a paper based resource and their levels of attainment and achievement wouldn’t have been as high if it had simply been a paper based resource.  The netbooks really have moved that department forward in terms of the way they support low and underachievers.

In terms of engagement there is a quite clear link between the way that you engage students in lessons and achievement and attainment at the end of the day, I mean that’s just a straight forward link between the two.  Again if you go into Zoe’s lessons or if you go into Rima Hashim’s lessons and look at the way the students have been engaged with the technology for learning.  Whether it’s through the use of the smart board or whether it’s the use of the netbook you can track quite easily the impact that has had on student attainment and student achievement. I think partly technology is a hook to real students and get them interested in learning and all that but I still have this thing that technology on its own is not the thing that will enthuse students.  It has to be that teacher in that classroom who really engages with students and then through the technology further engages students in the learning.  The technology is a really really important part but I really think you’ve got to align with a good teacher, you know, somebody that is enthusiastic about the subject, somebody who has got really good subject knowledge and somebody that enjoys working with the students and somebody who wants to use that technology to take students further than they would with all the traditional resources they’ve been using.

In terms of the students that achieve best with technology;  our high achievers will achieve whether we work with them in terms of using paper based resources, you know all the traditional materials that we’ve got in the classroom, or whether we employ the technology.  I think particularly in terms of the underachievers and low achievers technology brings something different to the mix and technology really does have the potential to be that tool that turns that low achievement into high achievement.  It’s quite interesting looking at the way that schools adopt new technologies and it’s been more than interesting looking at the way Tideway has developed and used its learning platform.  Now I know in the early days there were a number of staff who were a bit reticent and a bit worried about what they saw as a  knew technology.  They didn’t know a great deal about it, they didn’t really know the impact that it would have on teaching and learning.  Why spend time trying to use it when we’ve got tried and trusted methods, you know, that are there already in place.  The one way we got around that in terms of this place was to actually identify a small number of key staff who were really interested in technology, train them really effectively.  They then got out and spread the word and helped other staff to understand how that range of technology could be used in the classroom.  I think the other thing that had the big impact was to actually train a small group of student trainers.  So, to recruit 10 year 10 students, train them to use the technology, let them loose on the staff so that if a member of staff felt concerned or worried or had a lack of knowledge about a particular area, another member of staff was there to support or nine times out of 10 a student was there to actually come in and work with them and do the training and show them how to move forward with that and I think that, especially the student input, that had a big impact on staff perceptions of technology and the way it could be used.  It is really interesting watching the way staff will collaborate with students when you use students as the teachers and the trainers.

In terms of the implementation of technology in school I think you’ve got to accept, in some way, prepare young people for life after school and technology is a big part of their life and it’s going to be an even bigger part of their life over the next 10 or 20 years and there’s simply no way in school that we can get away with saying “We’re worried about the technology, we don’t know how to use it therefore we won’t use it”.  If nothing else we’ve got a moral duty to make sure that we’re there with the technology and that we’re using it and we try and keep up with and we try and prepare these students for life after school.  

About two years ago we ran a pilot ‘anytime, anywhere’ learning project.  We allowed a small group of year 11 students to actually study, not in class, but to study at a time and a place that best suited them.  So, Tideway have got an early start, we’re in school from half past seven in the morning, I taught them period 1 on a Monday morning so instead of turning up to lesson period 1 at eight ‘o’clock they had the option of completing the lesson online over the weekend and not attending school and lessons until 9 ‘o’ clock.  You know it gave them a longer lie in and the interesting thing about it was that by and large they did that lesson Saturday afternoon or Sunday evening, they did it with support from their parents, they did it with support from other friends.  Now that was only a small scale project but at the end of the project those students actually achieved a far higher pass rate at their end of year assessments than they would have done had they actually been in a class with 25 – 30 other students.  I think there are a number of key things there, one is the fact that you’re allowing them to study at a time and place that best suits them.  The second thing has to be that the support that they receive from the friends and from parents and also when teachers were online to support them instead of one teacher trying to give support to 25 or 30 students in a class, quite literally that student had one to one access to that teacher online to give support through email, through forums or through video conferencing.  Now we ran that two years ago with a small group of students and we’re about to extend it later this year to a group of 50 to 60 students to see if it actually works when you push those numbers up.  That’s just one example of the way that technology can be used to help students who are low or underachievers. 

One of the interesting things about using the virtual learning environment from class to class is that heads of subject and senior managers can actually go online and they can look at the lessons that are taught they can look at the resources that are taught and they can look at the grades and those grades that are attached to individual students within those lessons and you can almost micro manage the learning that is taking place so instead of leaving assessment, you know, for two weeks or four weeks or six weeks you are actually assessing, I mean almost on a day by day week by week basis.  That’s the key thing to the use of the virtual learning environments.