Next Generation Learning in Kent

Open Source - now its officially OK for schools!

Becta has replaced its previous software framework agreement which expired in March 2008 with a new framework agreement, called “Software for Educational Institutions Framework”. The BIG news is that open source services provider Sirius has made it on to the framework with an ebullient press release.

"Mark Taylor, who is president of the Sirius Corporation, founder of the Open Source Consortium and a noisy critic of Becta’s reluctance in the past to adopt open source software in favour of proprietary beasts such as Microsoft's offerings, was stunned by the decision." (The Register)

I posted on a previous occasion when the Sirius CEO had a rant at Becta for awarding a contract to 'Becta's friends'. Hopefully a 60's style love in can now evolve. Its worth pointing out that Free and Open Source Software F/OSS may be free, but Sirius is not a charity, and makes its money selling the services that support Open Source.

I recently visited  Dover Grammar School for Boys, which has a fully open source infrastructure, desktops and applications and was impressed! More on that later!

Data Handling in schools - epiphany or apocalypse!

I recently posted on the huge shake-up that will result from Becta guidance on data management in schools. This week has seen the publication of detailed guidance in the shape of four guides:

• Impact levels and labelling available in Word (727KB) PDF (246KB) and OpenDocument text format (636KB)
• Data encryption available in Word (3.4MB) PDF (3.7MB) and OpenDocument text format (3.2MB)
• Audit logging and incident handling available in Word (662KB) PDF (288KB) and OpenDocument text format (563KB)
• Secure remote access available in Word (170KB) PDF (135KB) and OpenDocument text format (101KB).

Stuff that's caught my eye - 230908

BBC News School report - 11-14 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience.

Why the future is looking good - "visual computing" is a catch-all term encompassing anything driven by graphics.

Pupils test multi-touch screens - School pupils are trying out desks with interactive screens that can recognise more than one person's finger presses.

Takeover day! - The Children's Commissioner for England, is calling on schools to invite children and young people to 'takeover' for one day. The second 11 Million Takeover Day will be on Friday 7 November 2008 and this year's event coincides with the climax of the National Youth Agency's Youth Work Week.

Green energy for schools scheme - Co-operative Group members are invited to nominate schools to be fitted with free solar panels.

Parent Know How - four strands: telephone helplines, the Innovation Fund, print media, and online information.

24 killer apps for your USB flash drive

BT Watchdog joins ... er BT? -  Sean Williams, a former senior Ofcom regulator who ran the process that created Openreach and stopped short of breaking BT's power over the telecoms industry, has been hired by BT.

Child abusers adopt blackmail tactics -  Child abusers are increasingly resorting to online threats and blackmail instead of 'grooming' children, a specialist police child protection agency warns.

You're no-one if you're not on Twitter - great and funny video on YouTube (not available on KCC network)

Extended Schools and ICT - paradigm lost?

DCSF recently published extended schools funding guidance. One expectation of Extended Schools funding is a 'core offer' that includes community access to ICT. Extended Schools covers a wide range of activities, and for obvious reasons I am going to focus on ICT.

Steve Smith of Ramesys in an article published in 2007 suggests there are four main ICT related extended activities. I believe ICT can be more broadly categorised as:

• Student Access - combinations of online portals, learning platforms, physical access to computer rooms before and after school.
• Family Access - supporting the education of families both online and at school. Making information, e-safety, educational content and resources available.
  
• Community Access - community groups and individuals able to use facilities before, after or during school hours.

In terms of 'bang for education buck', the first two offer a desirable outcome to schools ... improved results and greater parental engagement!

Community Access is a nebulous concept, and many schools have struggled to find good reasons to offer facilities to the public; few are successful or sustained. This is surely the domain of Adult Education courses run by agencies who charge for the use and make the arrangements. Having 'outsiders' use your technology increases risk and cost, and seems to offer few real benefits if not directly aligned to the school mission. Most, if not all libraries have computers for public use, and perhaps they are better positioned to offer generic community access.

Use of ICT by non-school users presents a number of challenges:

• User administration and policies.
  
• ICT Infrastructure and network security (all those potentially infected USB memory sticks, and how to set up appropriate filtering for adult use).
• Technical support - should the tech' guys be expected to cover use outside of school hours?
• Supervision and child protection - who manages out of hours use (... and how trusted are they?)
• How is the additional cost of 'out of hours' availability to non school uses accounted for?
  

It sounds sensible to make school ICT facilities available for use by the community, but unless it is based on the core business of education it requires thought. It is telling that a search of the Becta web site reveals very little advice and guidance on this topic. The best advice comes from an old DFES publication 'Extending the School's ICT to the Community' found on Teachernet. It raises all the issues a school will face, and leaves me wondering who would want to ... its all just too complicated to even know where to begin!

This post was prompted by the lack of clarity and purpose in the official guidance on extended use of ICT; the confusing messages about what it means in practice, but it seems to me that the answer for effective services to extend the school are better met online (I would love to hear form anyone that's cracked the issues!)

ICT Managed Services in Schools - information

In light of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) requirement for ICT to be a managed service, I thought I would point to a report commissioned by Becta. It usefully explains what a managed service is, and the experiences of its customers. 

14- 19, keeping track when students move around!

A continuing trend in education is the need to support 14 - 19 choice, and to achieve this schools join consortia to improve the range of courses on offer. This presents two problems: How do you move them around? How do you know where the student is?

The first is still awaiting an answer, often involving taxis and minibuses at considerable cost to the school. The latter point may now have an answer. According to the Guardian Education supplement (9th Sept 2008) Edexcel are recommending that schools deploy Collaborative Learning Manager software developed specifically to address those needs by Perspective UK.

The web based software monitors the students attendance and notifies schools instantly if an unauthorised absence occurs, and is already used in Leicester, Stafford, Bromley, Isle of Wight, Nottingham, Birmingham, Islington, Rotherham and Oldham. Once the register is taken at the host location, results are immediately sent back to the school office. The software can also be used to monitor and track individual student progress.

It is unusual for an organisation such as Edexcel to recommend any product, so one suspects they are convinced of its efficacy. A competing product in this space is Capita's Partnership Xchange, the market for which was tested by EIS in a recent letter to secondary schools. The Capita SIMS product remains at the proof of concept stage, with a number of SIMS partner schools evaluating. 

Stuff that's caught my eye! - 070908

Database of children delayed

Intel cites US education 'crisis'

HP's plan to fix ailing planet - Hewlett Packard is up to two years away from starting to build a "central nervous system for the Earth", known as CeNSE.

Tablet and other mobile PC case studies update.

Lets just scare the #$%& out of them, OK?

e-learning on a shoestring - resource kit for creative community engagement.

Google Chrome

edmodo - private micro-blogging for classroom and teachers.

Taxonomy of Interactivity

Mobiles - computers that wrong-foot schools - New research suggests that schools’ problems with mobile phones – they are banned in most places – lie not with the phones, or with students, but with school culture itself.(From Merlin John's Blog)

Personalisation - the learners should decide -  If a consensus is emerging from the introduction of learning platforms into UK schools it’s this: the technology will not bring about transformation unless it is wedded to a clear vision for learning. (From Merlin John's Blog)

"Proprietary software akin to tyranny" ... Stephen Fry

Google launches online world, Lively

Teachers shun web 2.0

QCA ICT GCSE consultation

Online Reporting - Making it Happen.

All Secondary Schools are expected to make the following information available to parents via secure online access [PDF 6300KB] by September 2010, and Primary Schools by 2012:

• Attendance and behaviour (+ve and -ve)
• Progress and attainment
• Special Needs.

Becta has published a toolkit [PDF 6300KB], but as my previous post on the new requirements for managing personal data in schools highlights, setting up robust and secure systems for getting personal data online are a complex matter. Who is the parent? Who is allowed access? What happens where step-parents or estranged partners seek access? Will schools be able to manage the user accounts on complex reporting systems containing sensitive personal data?

One of the challenges with any system requiring the management of a user account is ensuring that accounts are created, edited, kept up to date and deleted at the appropriate time e.g. when the child leaves or transfers, when parental control changes hands, where one parent has siblings in more than one school, and where step families are involved and a parent may have children in two families (or more!).This is a complex area, and it is not clear how this could be managed effectively. One of the onvious problems with any portal is that school administrators aren't able to view what a parent or child views as they don't log in as them; they can remain blissfully unaware when access permissions are not working properly. When we have set up  learning platform accounts, we always create dummy users in each category to ensure we see more or less what the user sees as a quick sanity check. This isn't likely to be possible in day to day administration in a school.

The framework document is colourful and interesting but light on the specifics of managing complex stakeholder relationships and how these map on to data structures in the school MIS system. It is imperative that the rules for management of users (Identity Management)are clear, and the rules of the game (policies) established before moving this forward. We also need to consider who needs 'God Mode' in the game. Download the document, but my guess is that it is too light on specifics for any school to manage a transition or to meaningfully plan a strategy for online reporting, and this is a clear case for either learning platform / MIS system providers introducing suitable products and services, or Local Authorities setting up common systems. In either case they must be based on clear guidance on the data sets and structures required, and how these reference to Becta's new guidance on personal data; the alternative is each school re-inventing their own wheels (again).

Huge shake-up in school data management?

It's no surprise that an on-going shake-up in the management of personal data at all levels of administration and government was going to affect schools sooner or later. As the main source of national pupil data through the school census, its where our most sensitive information about children is ciollated and held. It will also come as no suprise that not all schools protect their data effectively, with USB memory sticks, external hard drives and Virtual Private Network (VPN) access typically being used to remove data for working on from home. This is compounded by electronic exporting of data from SIMS to external processors in order to set up learning platform accounts, where mass data has been handed over for hosting on systems outside of the control of the school. Its worth mentioning that a school is a data controller and therefore responsible for the data it collects, and equally for where it sends data for processing.

With no fanfare at all, and none of the usual press releases (I found out from Merlin John's Blog), Becta recently published 'Good practice in information handling in schools - Keeping data secure, safe and legal' [PDF: 186K] . This extends the best practice guidance required of local and national government to schools, and make no mistake, that with the accompanying four good practice guides, will mean significant changes to the way data is managed at school level. So, are schools ready? The answer is almost certainly no!

The document heralds the coming of four focussed accompanying guides, which are briefly outlined:

• Impact levels and labelling
• Data encryption
• Audit logging and incident handling
• Secure remote access.
  

The first impact on a school will be the need to have in place a Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO), a named individual responsible for information risk and responding to incidents. This will typically be the Headteacher or other senior leader.Their responsibilities include:

• Owning the information risk policy (assuming your school has one), and risk assessment.
• Appointing Information Asset Owners (IAO's)
• Acting as advocate for information risk management.

The second impact is an audit of information assets. Once each item of personal data is identified, it must be allocated to an 'Information Asset Owner' (IAO), who will be responsible for its protection. Each school will have several IAO's. Their job is to understand:

• What information is held and for what purpose
• How information is amended or added to over time.
• Who as access and why.

In order to implement the new measures schools are required to implement a number of technology and operational changes. To quote directly from the guidance "... Some of these can be accomplished quickly and within existing resources, others will require investment and participation of suppliers of school ICT systems and managed services." The crux of the issue is that this isn't going to be a cheap exercise, and may require schools to assess the risk in the short run and establish operational changes. As the document continues:

"... Until new technology or enhancements to your existing ICT infrastructure can be put in place, you are likely to need to make operational changes. These may mean that certain types of sensitive data may no longer be accessible away from the school in the short term."

Complying with the guidance is going to hit schools hard, (and isn't specifically funded), and will require a radical rethink of how data is stored accessed and used. My guess is that most won't have the expertise to carry out risk assessments in what is a complex and developing professional area. Just as an instance, imagine how many spreadsheets are on teacher laptops, USB memory sticks etc. containing assessment and attendance information. What about accessing personal data at home from your learning platform? Becta was responsible for setting up contracts for learning platforms wthout considering the consequence of the implicit need for secure transfer, processing and storage of personal data by third parties.

I have a question. Who will be checking that the guidance is followed? There is no mention of any obligation to periodically audit the effectiveness, which rather suggests that systems and processes are likely to be reactive following an incident. Should the Local Authority have a role in compliance, e.g. periodic compliance audits?

Further Reading