A future

I was reminded this week exactly why I work in teacher education. It is incredibly rewarding. Our graduation ceremony on Plymouth Hoe yesterday saw not one, but two of my student teacher groups receive their degrees. The picture above is one of those two extraordinary groups of young people. They are a part of a larger group of digital literacy specialists - primary school teachers who specialise in technology supported learning. They have been with me for four years, developing their skills as educators and acquiring all the knowledge they need to go out and transform the learning of our children. They are all just as passionate as I am about learning, and each of them has a unique and creative perspective on how to use technologies to enrich and extend children's education.

With me in the picture from left to right, they are Charlotte Langslow, Matt Povey, Hannah Shelton, Megan Douglas, Chris Nesbitt, Charlotte Rice, Polly Short, Rebecca Legatt, Peter Tolley, Lloyd Chilcott and Adam Easterbrook. Missing from the picture are Kelly Holborrow and April Farrell-Langler. Each of these former students, now newly qualified teachers, have contributed significantly to knowledge already, with their regular blogging, video making and other activities related to education.

Take the example of the blog Learning to Teach by Megan Douglas which is a frank and honest running account of her time as a student teacher. Or read Hannah Shelton's account of her own journey to become a primary educator in her Life as a Trainee Teacher. Chris Nesbitt always wrote deeply thoughtful pieces, reflecting on his own learning and produced an exceptional piece of blogging for his assignment on psychological perspectives in education. Lloyd Chilcott has quite a presence on social media as can be seen here, and won the prize yesterday for the highest grade on his research project in digital literacy. I will miss the verbal sparring I enjoyed with others such as Peter Tolley, who always challenged and never stopped questioning. Along with other students in the group Polly Short was always very active in organising Teach Meets and other Education Society activities and fully deserves her first class honours degree. In fact, over half this group achieved first class degrees - something that is rare in any field of academic study. And I can't forget the brutally honest and wonderfully touching video Kelly Holborow created on her own digital identity - one that I have shown several times in my own presentations as an exemplar of student video autobiography (below).



I could go on, but I like to keep my blog posts short. I will miss this extraordinary group of young educators. I believe I have learnt as much from them as they have from me. I'm certain that each will go on to significantly impact their own particular corners of the education world. I hope to hear from one or two of them now and again to hear how they are progressing in their teaching careers, but I have no worries for any of them. They will all become great teachers. I will never forget how rewarding it has been to teach them during their time at Plymouth University, and I will treasure the immense sense of pride I felt yesterday as I watched each of them receive their awards.

Someone asked me yesterday what would be the collective noun for a group of newly qualified teachers. My response: 'A future'.

Photo: Steve Wheeler


A future by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Selfie number 9

Bill Rammell, Stephen Heppell and Steve Wheeler

OK, so this one's not really a selfie, but it caught your attention didn't it? This is the second in my short series on my top ten photographs with people who have influenced my thinking. Click here to see selfie number 10.

This picture was taken in April 2011 at the start of the Plymouth Enhanced Learning conference (Pelecon), which was an annual learning technology event I chaired at Plymouth University. Our opening keynote speaker that year was Professor Stephen Heppell, and our Deputy Vice Chancellor was Bill Rammell.

Professor Stephen Heppell has been a regular mainstay on the keynote circuit for some time, due to his wide ranging and innovative research around education environments and learning technology. He has influenced my own work, encouraging me to be more aware of the entire learning environment. Stephen's research has resulted in some very useful insights into how children learn and why they don't. Consider for example his claim that red lighting in the morning wake students up, while blue lighting in the afternoon calms them down after lunch break. He also suggests that the entire sensory experience of school, including odours and configurations of wall spaces can positively influence children's learning. What resonates most for me though, is his statement that 'everything technology touches grows exponentially'.

Before joining Plymouth University as Deputy Vice Chancellor, Bill Rammell served as Member of Parliament for Harlow between 1997-2010. Among his other roles in government was his tenure as Minister of State for Higher Education under Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. During his all too short stay at Plymouth, Bill developed our student experience services and was also responsible for international developments. I will never forget his great spirit of service and his willingness to go the extra mile. He not only opened our conference that day, but also returned twice more during the 3 day event to see how we were doing. He left the university in 2012 to become Vice Chancellor of Bedfordshire University.

Coming soon: Selfie number 8.

Photo by Jason Truscott on Flickr


Selfie number 9 by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Hi-tech campus?

An article on connected cities in the latest edition of Wired Magazine got me thinking. It talked of solar powered bike paths, footfall sensors and other Internet enabled environments. I wondered if such ideas could also be applied to schools, colleges and universities to make life easier. The fine balance between surveillance and freedom must be considered of course, but what applications of smart technology might we introduce into education?

I'm an associate professor at Plymouth University, in South West England. It's a compact inner city campus, and it's a great environment to work in, with everything close at hand. However, the longer you work on a single campus, the more you notice the inherent problems that exist. One of the problems I have known about for a while is the log-jam of students that occurs every two hours or so in one of our main lecture centres. It doesn't actually demand a high-tech solution, just some common sense.

The Sherwell Centre (pictured) is an old United Reform Church building, which several years ago was converted (see what I did there?) into a facility that features two large upstairs lecture theatres. There are two staircases either side leading up to the front of each lecture theatre and there is a third staircase at the rear. Lectures are scheduled for 2 hours duration, and whilst one large cohort of 200 or so students is exiting, another 200 or so is queuing up on the stairs outside waiting to enter. Students invariably use the same door to exit and enter. This causes delays and frustration, and creates potential health and safety issues. One smart solution of course, would be for the exiting students to use on door while the entering students use another. This would improve the flow of students, lectures could start on time and the risk to injury could be minimised. And yet, as far as I am aware, no-one has ever officially suggested this as a solution.

Another problem we experience with large cohorts of students gathered together in lecture halls, is how to take an attendance register. We need to do this not only to maintain a record of who has been present at each lecture, but also for health and safety reasons. If there is a fire or other major incident and we need to evacuate the building, someone needs to know that everyone has exited safely. Some students have been caught marking other students as present when they are in fact absent. It's a practice we have tried to dissuade, but it will no doubt continue, as the errant few 'cover' for their mates. A technology solution here (and one that I have been told is planned) is to issue each student with a smart card which they are then required to swipe to enter and exit the lecture theatre. This sounds a little mechanistic and managerial, and there are potential problems with students forgetting their cards, or losing them, but it is a solution many university campuses are adopting across the globe to keep tabs on comings and goings of large groups of students. It eliminates the need to pass sheets of paper around, and gets around later claims that students were present or absent which cannot be verified.

These are just two of the instances of how campus life could be made smarter. One is no-tech and the other is low-tech. What might the hi-tech applications be? I'm sure there are many you can think of from your own experiences working in schools, colleges or universities. What innovations would you like to see in your hi-tech connected campus in the future? Please comment if you wish to share.

Photo by Hugh Venables


Hi-tech campus? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What's love got to do with it? #lovelearning

The lecture my colleague Phil Selbie presented this week to my final year primary education students was quite unusual in a number of ways. To start off, he played Tina Turner's pop anthem, got everyone clapping along, and he even performed a bit of a dance too. His message was clear - what you are about to listen to is not an ordinary lecture. In fact Phil's lecture was about an unusual subject - at least, unusual in that we don't often hear about it in education - love. His theme was love of learning, love of education, and especially love for each other. He argued that the success of teaching and learning is dependent upon good teacher student relationships, and that love was paramount. Phil (his name, appropriately, is loosely derived from the Greek word Phileos, meaning brotherly love) made the remark that love is a word that is easily confused in our western culture, because in English at least, we only use the one word for what turns out to be a large spectrum of different kinds of emotion and attachment - a complex array of loves, from mild affection, through passion to absolute adoration.

Here's the problem: Teachers can get away with saying they love their subject. They can even say they love teaching at their school. But if a teacher to say they 'love' their students, what they mean might easily be misconstrued when in fact what they probably wish to express is that they are dedicated to their students and are fully committed to helping them achieve their potential. Teaching is seen as one of the 'caring professions' for good reason. The problem is that 'love' is a word that is too often misrepresented because it has many meanings, Phil argued, but teachers need to care deeply about their students if they are to help them to achieve their full potential. The Ancient Greeks, he showed, had many words for love (some accounts suggest about 30), each descriptive of different aspects of what it means to love, to care. This huge repertoire of words highlights the importance the Greeks bestowed on love. Love seems to have been eroded and undervalued in our technology driven and fragmented society - hence the lack of vocabulary to express it in all its forms.

The highest kind of love, said Phil, is Agape - unconditional love, devotion to others, possibly to the point of self sacrifice. Many teachers exhibit this kind of selfless love, he argued, staying behind after school, running after school study groups, sports training, exam revision groups, going the extra mile. This kind of selfless dedication to children's education largely goes unrewarded, but the school often relies on this kind of goodwill from its staff. For teachers who practice Agape love, the best kind of reward is to see students achieve and succeed where they would otherwise have failed. It is this kind of love for humanity that attracts people to the teaching profession, because they get the chance to make a real difference in young people's lives. As we all know, while doctors save lives, teachers make lives. Just the identification of being human together and feeling a connection to other thinking, feeling human beings - this is Agape love, and it should be central to the ethos of being an effective educator.

I intend to explore more of the ancient words for love and their implications for education in future posts.

Photo by Hu Totya on Wikimedia Commons


What's love got to do with it? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.