Head in the Cloud

After having a trial of some earlier in the term, Rhws Primary School have now purchased a number of Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks to use with their pupils. I've been kindly lent one by the school over the summer break to 'try out'. They are very light-weight, have a good 11.5" screen, full sized keyboard, headphone socket, built in mic and web cam, along with two usb ports, a HDMI out and a SD card slot. Impressively it boots up from off in under 10 seconds, no frustrating time spent waiting while Windows loads up. They appear to be excellent value for money, the school paying under £200 for each Chromebook and £19 extra per device for the Chromebook management licenses. The licenses enable the school to manage the Chromebooks from the Google Apps for Education administration panel. This allows them to assign apps and profiles to different groups or individuals. A pupil or teacher from the school logs into the Chromebook using their school Google Apps for Edu username ...

The report shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been involved with ICT school improvement. Estyn have held up the mirror and confirmed what we already very much knew. It was quite a coincidence that I blogged about the need for a robust, reliable and resilient infrastructure within schools last Thursday evening, and then woke to a BBC Wales breakfast news report saying that this was the main finding of Estyn's report - spooky! For me, the other main highlight of their findings concerns the lack of ICT vision in most schools. Again, this is something that we have been finding in our recent discussions with schools. Even in schools who budget well and sustainably for ICT there is often a lack of vision around what they want ICT to achieve in their school, and very rarely (if ever) the impact it has on standards. Here are my interpretations of the Estyn main findings. A primary school who uses ICT well would be one where: Standards - Pupils develop a full...

As discussed in previous posts, much of first year of using Google Apps for Education at Rhws Primary School, has been focussed on the teachers use of the platform and helping them to gain the skills and confidence in working in this particular way. Therefore the school wanted to gather some information from them to find out what had worked well, what not so well, future CPD needs and general thoughts about its use. The questions were devised and then easily built using Google Forms which was shared with the teachers. The web form was submitted online and the results automatically populated into a Google Spreadsheet for analysis. A summary of responses is also automatically created, some of which you can see at the end of this blog. A couple of questions from the online questionnaire The results from the questionnaire have proved to be very positive from the teaching staff and will give the senior leadership team ideas on how to further develop the platform and support the...

I've been thinking about the cloud in education for some time, hence my posts about  Google Apps for Edu  or  Microsoft 365 . So it was with interest that I read  this blog post by Matt Britland titled "What is the future of technology in education?" In the post Matt proposes that the future of technology in education "is in the cloud" . I tend to agree with nearly all that he says in the post. Freely available core tools available from any device, anytime, anywhere. Alongside online storage in the form of Google Drive or Skydrive. As Matt says, schools "will not need software installed, servers or local file storage." I'm sure certain large cost savings can be made by schools, along with removing the stress many of them feel in trying to maintain and upgrade a traditional server network. If a school also looks at the option of subscribing to some online content or tools providers that support specific areas of the curriculum, filling in any gap...