Yesterday, I spent the day at the Hallmark Hotel in Cheadle Hulme for the annual Manchester Head teacher's Conference at the invitation of Dave Watson, headteacher at Chorlton Park where I teach three mornings a week. On the bill were Professor Stephen Heppell and both the former and current headteachers from Robin Hood school in Birmingham. The idea was to prod and provoke by demonstrating some interesting and innovative developments in technology here in England and around the world. Originally I was hoping to get the opportunity to put some of that into a local context by demonstrating some of the excellent blogging that goes on at Chorlton Park, but, for whatever reason, that didn't happen. Their loss.
I feel I have to make the point that the coffee served by the hotel was the worst I have ever tasted -truly dreadful and prompted discussions as to whether someone had mixed the tea with the coffee as the taste was completely indeterminate. Inexcusable.
The audience listened intently to Stephen Heppell's tour d'horizon of developments in ICT around the world, and he had some particularly interesting points to make about school design including what furniture we might consider; shoes off, slippers on; and the size of schools (small is best). On this latter point I tweeted about his comments that secondary age children tend to look back wistfully at primary school and the learning that took place there. This turned out to be a salutory lesson in thinking before you tweet. I tried to pithily sum up his point. My tweet was picked up by Dave Stacey who teaches in South Wales. Here is the resulting blog post that came out of the discussion his class had about my tweet. My point about thinking before you tweet, especially on the fly while listening to a presentation is covered in the comments below the post.
Was Mr Stacey wasting his time in school by picking up my tweet and using it to stimulate a discussion? In today's Telegraph there is a story about a Scottish teacher who has been suspended for tweeting about school. My real anger about this article is in the ignorant and reactionary rubbish spouted by the "LA spokesperson," parent and local councillor. Let's just consider the fact that all the tweets quoted were outside of school hours, and it's not at all clear whether the member of staff tweeted from a school computer or a mobile phone (how are you going to block that then, muppets?). I agree that, as in any other social network situation, teachers must be extremely careful about tweeting about their charges, but the revelation that she thought that some children were "hard work" is really shocking (yeah, right). This sort of reporting does the profession no good whatsoever and just stokes up the ostrich brigade and the web blockers. The message is clear, teachers are not to be trusted in deciding for themselves what resources and websites they should be using in teaching and in their professional development. It also reinforced the lesson from my tweeting of Professor Heppell's words.
The afternoon was kicked off by Neil Hopkin who is the current head of Robin Hood primary school in Birmingham. Early in his presentation he showed a video of primary age children explaining how they used Yahoo Pipes to edit RSS feeds. The looks of utter bewilderment on many headteachers faces was a delight to see.
I thoroughly enjoyed the day and will definitely be taking up Neil's invitation to visit Robin Hood.
