Ashford Rural Blog

Andrew Adonis announces an extra £125 million of eLearning credits.

A total of £200m is being invested in education software over the next two years.

£75m towards the standard eLCs we are all familiar with. Then there is to be an additional £125m ring fenced on top of this available only for spending on Curriculum Online approved products and services.

Schools can use eLearning credits to purchase solutions as diverse as virtual theatres, specialist communications for children with speech difficulties and online multimedia newsrooms. Schools have the freedom and choice to use the products that are best suited to their pupils’ and teachers’ needs to help them to make even better use of powerful tools such as laptops, interactive whiteboards and high speed broadband in learning and teaching.

Perhaps this is the time for the cluster to look at how we can collectively benefit from this investment.  Imagine if we had a central cache, where we could combine our spending power to negotiate prices so ALL schools could benefit from products like; Espresso, Kartouche, Knowledge Box, AEN packages...

Providing a foundation of products that once individuals specialise with, they can then disseminate tips and ideas through our HOS programme.  We all have different operating systems; RM, Viglen, Windows Server or standalones etc and different IWB's; RM, Smart, Promethean etc - imagine if this could provide us with a collaborative technology base, a universal language we could build our cluster resources upon?

SEGfL Learning Platforms Conferences

In February, the DfES plans to release details of Learning Platform functionality that will help schools with the personalised learning agenda.

The DfES has approached regional organisations for assistance with conferences to disseminate and publicise their findings.

In the South East Grid for Learning region there will be four events in four locations, see the SEGfL link above for full details.  Although more detailed conference agendas and individual invitations will follow shortly, it would be helpful if you could reserve our areas date and venue:  Ashford, Weald of Kent Conference Centre, 29th March.

The theme of the conference is; Personalised Learning - What is it? How will it affect my school?

Aim of the event; Inform school leaders of the policy context, existing practice and future developments of 'Learning Platform' technologies.

Audience/intitees; Headteacher or a member of the senior management team from schools in the Southeast Region.

ARC Project Communications

Keeping In Touch

Throughout the course of this project; first year progression and second year support, I would like to make sure we can all keep in touch.

By subscribing to this blog you will be notified of any updates automatically.  Drop me a line on my email if you'd like help setting this up.

But more importantly if you are an ARC ICT co-ordinator or Project Representative I would appreciate an email just to make sure I have an up-to-date contact address against your details.

Project first point of contact - arc.project1@btinternet.com

SIMs install to extract Portal data going well!

Chris Shaw and the EIS team have been fantastic, contacting schools and arranging visits to install an additional extraction file onto SIMs, which will then allow them to create your virtual school and populate it with users.

I feel confident this will be achieved for all Ashford Rural Schools over the next couple of weeks, until then please iron out any wrinkles and gain experience through your training user account in the EIS Primary school area.

Once you are online please drop me an email, so I can welcome you into the ARC page (LEA) 'Interest Groups', please let me know if you are taking part in the Infomapper phase2 project and I can add you into this group too!

My focus will be 'Discussions and Live Communications' within the safe environment of the learning platform, to help me with this please keep visiting the 'ARC 5 - 11 Curriculum' Interest Group and contribute to the forum discussions - PLEASE! 

See you on the virtual side!

Nov 2005

Excellent Progress - Learning Platform's Engagement Day

I was thrilled to see so many faces at the Ashford International for the 'Learning Platform', Portal, Engagement morning on Tuesday 8th November.

Several delegates spoke very highly of the enhanced communication opportunities, believing this platform would provide a sound basis for greater collaboration.  Success will be measured by our involvement and participation not new technology skills.

That said we obviously start with training, I'm pleased how many users have said they find the programme intuative and user friendly. 

Of course there may be teething problems along the way, please feed frustrations and successes back to me - I'm here to support you, and don't forget to drop a line just to let us know how you're getting on.  We will be taking this learning journey together.

I will be contacting you all over the next week or two to agree 'Partnership Schools' and discuss your interest focus ideas, once you've had chance to absorbe the training.

Best Wishes - Donna

Nov 2005

ARC Portal Training Dates

The targeted school representatives are envisaged to be the Headteacher and the ICT Co-ordinator, only because the portal benefits both management and curriculum features.  

Your school's representatives are dependant upon individual allocation and those you feel will best suit the role; this may become clearer after the 8th November's demonstration.

Please confirm attendee names, school responsibility and email addresses once you have chosen your representatives to:  Donna Rogers, ARC Project Manager arc.project1@btinternet.com

Oct 2005

ARC ‘Learning Gateway’ Engagement Commences!

Each ‘Ashford Rural Cluster’ school has been invited to be represented by two school members, targeted towards the Headteacher and ICT Coordinator - however this is by no means restrictive, participants are selected by each individual school. 

Portal training follows an exciting ARC Engagement meeting at the Ashford International Hotel, on Tuesday 8^th November 2005. 

The morning will provide an invaluable project awareness; ‘Vision’ insight, how collaboration will secure our success and engage each school’s involvement by demonstrating the web-based ‘Portal’ environment.

I am delighted to say every school is sending at least one person along to the Engagement session, which is terrific!  

I am currently finalising representative names for the actual ‘Portal’ training day; 16^th, 17^th or 18^th November, please refer to your training notice. 

I appreciate your assistance by keeping me informed of your attendance, and how great you've been by responding to my enquiries.

I look forward to working with you and forging partnerships through focus groups and bumping into you for ‘Portal’ chats!

Remember you can reach me anytime on my email arc.project1@btinternet.com

Best Wishes; Donna Rogers

Oct 2005

Teachers turned into Bloggers and Skypers

Experienced educationalists attended the ‘Leading ICT Conference’ and left inspired, not only from truly excellent speakers, but with new opportunities to enhance their Information Communication Technology portfolio. 

Returning home and a couple of downloads later and instant communications takes on new features; Blogs – web logs, the user types directly onto an extremely friendly site allowing their comments an instant audience.  Skype – ‘Free talking using the web anywhere in the world’ (Skype to Skype calls).

Not another website to keep my eye on - do I hear you say? Imagine creating one website that acts as a ‘bank’, so when all your favourite websites are updated the latest news comes to you!  Register on ‘Bloglines’ use the RSS feature on your favourite website or Add it’s URL address and click Subscribe in the ‘My Feeds’ section, sit back and wait!

How can this be used to help me or my pupils?

ARC Primary schools are already exploring the possibilities; Richard Fairhall’s Kingfishers class at Furley Park are expressing their views and demonstrating their work for all the see. Pluckley School are Skyping to Hamstreet and even trying to reach Canada!  The potential is only limited by our imagination (and time!).

While you are exploring I’d like you to take a look at a secondary age blog, which is very American, but look how this is used, rather than the familiar respective diary style, this takes on a ‘working role’ – very interesting.

I hope you find the hyperlinks informative, however the real demonstration masters were from Kent's HOS support team; Blogs = Alison Gaunt / Skype = Phil Bracegirdle. 

I’d love to hear of your own experiences drop me some feedback to let me know – Good Luck!

Oct 2005

ARC team building day at the Rare Breeds Centre, Ashford

The media studies department from Homewood Secondary school put on a video they produced of the rare breeds centre. It was very good. We also had a demonstration of the mini MAC computers and video cameras which are available for schools in the cluster to use. I was impressed at the quality of the editing and production. Excellent and well done!

The wellie walk was great fun, and we visited the green man hidden in the woods, as well as other carvings in wood. The demonstration of sheep herding (or is it shepherding?), was a hoot, as it appeared that the sheep had other ideas! Now you would think that with so many teachers this would have been right up their street!

I love the swamp ... an adventure playground with several challenging obstacles and rope bridges.

Back at the ranch ... we shared many ideas as to how the school can link with the rare breeds centre for sharing learning nand teaching experiences. Brainstorm to follow.

Infomapper was demonstrated by Donna with an emphasis on the way it engages and excite children and teachers.

Alan Day, Sept 2005

DEA - Digital Excellence; TICTAP & PICTAP

Digital Excellence has been well recieved, with several schools already completing the Teacher ICT Assessment Profile (TICTAP) and one or two schools finishing off their Pupil ICT Assessment Pofiles (PICTAP).

I will be sending out an update to all ARC schools offering additional support to lighten the load of data enty for the PICTAP spreadsheet process; check your emails Monday 28th September.

PICTAP - teachers prefered the idea of completing the 'PREDICTIVE ASSESSMENT' year group tab, then using copy and paste to import pupil's names and scores into the summary Year Grp sheet. 

I'd like to encourage schools to contact me on my email below if you require any support, from data capture to using the software.

Sept 2005

Any positive user tips will be gratefully recieved arc.project1@btinternet.com 

Wallace and Grommit promote healthy eating

The ‘Great Vegetable Challenge’ competition will invite every primary school in the country to design its own growing area. The winning school will receive £2,500 to have their garden built, with four runners-up prizes of £500 to help them develop their playgrounds into a growing area.

Over 12,000 schools have already received support and resources from the ‘Growing Schools’ programme, helping them to develop growing areas ranging from mini-allotments in rural schools to raised beds in urban playgrounds.

Sept 2005

Learning Platform - Awareness Days

Following an engagement planning and demonstration day at Pluckley on Monday 12th September we were introduced to the RM's project training/engagement co-ordinator, Steve McQuorcodale who will be working with Donna Rogers to enaure that schools get the maximum benefit from the features on offer. The following actions are now planned.

Early adopter schools will be having some technical work carried out over the next few weeks to reconfigure their systems. EIS are co-ordinating this with RM, and each school has been contacted individually. The early adopter school will get their live demonstration and introduction on 3rd October. Venue to be announced.

All other schools in the project will have an awareness day organised for November at a date to be agreed.

Sept 2005

Technical Hitch

There may be a small delay in commissioning the central servers for the RM Learning Platform due to some technical problems on the Kent Community Network which have prevented RM from remotely accessing the servers at Maidstone from their headquarters. Unisys are working to resolve the problem, and RM and EIS have been very resourceful in finding a workaround, and still hope to complete the work by the due date of 21st September. However, some of the testing may not be completed for the go-live.

Sept 2005