Innovation
This page is being developed to support your innovation project. You will find a series of links to items of interest around the theme of innovation. If you come across anything you might feel is useful to the group please add it in a comment below and we will make the link available to everyone.
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April 26th – Visit to Alexandra Infant School
Visited Alexandra Infant School Bromley to discuss animation with the headteacher Michelle Lewis. Michelle and her staff have developed some innovative practice around animation, particularly to develop spoken language. Michelle gives a great example of a teacher using video to assess a childs ability to retell the story of the three little pigs. What is so good about this is the child has multiple learning difficulties. Listen to the podcast here.
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April 25th
Follow this link to the BBC and learn more about Web2 technologies (may only be up for a short time as it is based on a weekly TV programme.)
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April 23rd
Take a look at this PowerPoint from the USA (forget the first few slides) – it aks the question “did you know” – thought provoking – it’s why things need to change.
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Things are changing?
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Listen to Deborah Grossek (Principal of Glendal Primary School Victoria) talking about how she introduced robotics as an innovation in the primary curriculum. (you will need to press the play button twice – once to activate and once to play).
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Managing, Sustaining and Embedding an Innovation – PowerPoint from day 2 (DB & AA). The linked documents can be found here.
The activity “Spotlight” can be downloaded from here.
The comic video used at the start can be found here.
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These notes are taken form Ewan McIntosh
Four things that hold us back from innovating, or that make us get innovation a bit wrong:
- “Thin-slicing”
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink gave me plenty of parallels in education to think about. Thin slicing is the Pepsi Challenge effect, where we see a guy at a conference talking about something new for a couple of minutes. We then make up our minds: “I love it, I’ll just jump into it” or “I’m too old for that/the boss will never go for it”. Taking a thin slice of a more complex process makes us less likely to succeed in both these scenarios. Most of the things I’ve been proposing this last wee while are simple initially, but require more complex thinking about the role of the teacher. - Fear = loathing?
When we fear things we decide not to take the jump. But if we can decide that failure might actually be a good thing then we can start to play a lot better. Making purposeful play something that both learner and teacher do will help make that learning so much more effective. - Over planning
I’m not saying that we should stop planning our lessons, but rather that we need to leave room for happy accidents to happen, for those tangents to be developed. This might mean throwing out the annual planner for a week, just to go off on a tangent that might lead to something more interesting or relevant to the kids’ own experiences. It might be a false lead, it might be the lead that makes that period of learning 100 times more worthwhile.With ICT we tend to overplan our lessons. This might be a starting point, if we can start to see technology as opening tangents (“how could we do something other than PowerPoint to make the task more demanding cognitively and less demanding technically?”) rather than closing them off (“we don’t have all the equipment we need to do that”). - “Why bother?”
Kids are changing. The 16 year old in 2007 is entering the employment market with only internet-age experiences on which to rely (the internet came into being in 1991). The six year old entering elementary school expects the web to allow them to publish and share their views with the world.
