After many years as a secondary
school teacher, Head of Department and ultimately a senior manager in a
Comprehensive school, I moved in to SEN to work with pupils with severe and
profound learning difficulties. This
involved me in not only teaching but developing ways for staff and pupils to
use technology as a tool for communication.
My experience in SEN, whilst challenging, confirmed a long held belief that ‘no child is ineducable’.
Initial involvement with Ultralab was as one
of 40 UK Advisory Teachers managing the Tesco
Schoolnet2000 Project. The Project aimed to encourage through action
research, the recording online of the observations of children and young people
from all over the United
Kingdom, concerning their lives, local
environments, schools, family life (past & present) and their visions for
the future. This was a ground-breaking project which went on to become
the biggest educational project of its kind in the world and subsequently,
entered the Guinness Book of Records.
In 2000 I joined the Talking Heads
Project, working with Headteachers across England,whilst simultaneously
researching the practice of online facilitation and engagement in a virtual
environment. Our findings are included in Ultralab’s reports published by
Ultralab and NCSL. Talking Heads is now part of the National College for School Leadership's online
provision.
In 2002, the 'online community of practice' model developed with Talking Heads
was adapted for Scotland.
This involved introducing and piloting the Heads Together Project for
Headteachers all over Scotland
and provided the opportunity to research the impact of the project on:
- supporting
the development of existing Scottish Headteachers Management skills
- supporting Scottish head-teachers in their day
to day role by providing them with a mechanism for mutual support, the potential
solution of problems and the sharing and creation of new ideas
- reducing the isolation of head-teachers in small
or remote schools
- raising the ICT skills of participating
head-teachers
- making participating head-teachers aware of the
potential role of ICT for
management and administration, learning and teaching.
Over a period of four years, the Talking
Heads and Heads Together Projects involved providing an ever-widening range of
improvements and arenas for the use of online learning communities in enhancing
educational opportunities:
·
International
Conference on Behaviour
·
International
Conference on Inclusion
·
Setting up of an
Online Community of Practice for educators from Gaelic and Welsh medium
schools.
Following the successful handing over of the
Heads Together Project to Learning and Teaching
Scotland in 2004 I moved to
the Ultraversity
project. This involves tutoring
undergraduates undertaking a radical, work-based honours degrees in Learning,
Technology and Research. This has enabled continuity of my interest in researching
into the potential for a community-based approach to eLearning, in particular
the impact of the Ultraversity degree on the lifelong learning needs of the
participating students.
