We will cover:

1) A pedagogical framework for thinking about using technology and mobile devices in schools
2) Hands on session – using the framework to improve student contextual awareness and performance (Comic Life and Wikipedia)
3) Mobile learning project at Felsted (discussing use of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches for pastoral and academic support)
4) Hands on session: iPod Touch Mobile Language Lab (please bring iPod friendly headphones)
5) Finance of mobile solutions and environmental considerations

Hope to see you there!

‘You sit at a table next to a wooden wall and the experimenter gives you the materials shown below: a candle, some tacks [drawing pins for us UK folk] and a box of matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax doesn’t drip on the table’.

The key to solving this problem according to Duncker is to overcome the ‘functional fixedness’ of the box containing the drawing pins and seeing it as having more than one function. The solution to the ‘candle problem’ can be seen in the image below.

By itself, this is instructive for confronting our established perceptions but what really caught my attention was the way Lucas and Claxton talked about education and using tools to amplify your intelligence. Blogging is one example and so can playing games as Dawn Hallybone has demonstrated but this is not something inherent in the tool. Having an iPhone/VLE/Laptop/Interactive Whiteboard does not inherently give me or my pupils the power to amplify our intelligence although the possibility exists if the perceived use of the ‘thing’ is expanded. This change can only take place if we are able, as Lucas and Claxton suggest, to develop a ‘tool-mindedness’ where we are able to be resourceful enough to look out for ‘tools to expand [our] own internal capacity, as well as get interesting things done.’

As I’m learning to play the Cello (not the most rock and roll instrument I know, but kindly described by a friend as being ‘retro’ so I’ll take it) I came across the work of Zoe Keating. She is a fantastic cellist in her own right but what makes her unique is her ability to overcome the ‘functional fixedness’ of the Cello and produce something which amplifies her intelligence and ‘get interesting things done’.  I can honestly say that I could not conceive of doing such a thing whilst struggling with the nuances of the many nursery rhymes I have to master but her work has shown me the possibilities that exist once I move beyond my perception of what a Cello can be used for (although I am still concentrating on my Grade 1).

Overcoming ‘functional fixedness’ in relation to technology, teaching and learning can only happen when we are open to continually testing our own conceptions of what we think ‘works’. A pretty hard job but if we can’t do it, how can we expect our pupils to?

Cello image: Marty.FM @ Flickr

I was reminded recently how much I love Gustave Flaubert after absorbing Denis Shemilt’s latest chapter on improving historical understanding and developing historical consciousness in pupils (a later blog post). I was introduced to Flaubert by my departing A Level English teacher Mr Johnson and I was struck by Flaubert’s turn of phrase and the awe I felt when I learned that he would spend weeks on a single sentence. Reading Shemilt’s chapter I wondered how long it took Flaubert to think of the arresting sentence that ‘writing History is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful’.

This vivid image captures a lot of thinking I have been doing recently on educational technology. The BETT show clearly demonstrates that educational technology is big business and this was reconfirmed with figures from last week’s TES estimate that nearly £600 million is allocated to schools to spend on technology. You would think that with all this money being spent and the many conferences arranged to discuss and showcase the technology on offer, the teaching and learning aspect, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ (not the ‘what’) would be fairly prominent. Over the last year I have felt this to be lacking and I kept returning to a simple but often unanswered question; where is the teaching and learning? It seems, following from Flaubert, that general encounters with educational technology is like drinking an ocean but pissing a cupful of learning.

I approached a variety of people about the idea for a journal where the above recurring question would be the central theme. Doug Belshaw mentioned that James Michie had discussed with him something similar and I contacted him. What happened next is discussed on James’ blog and the result is that #edjournal is here. Written by educators for other educators, we aim to share our educational technology experiences guided by the simple question: where is the learning?

We are currently gathering together articles for the first and second issue. If you feel that you would like to contribute, get in touch. I hope, no, I believe, that collectively we can produce more than the tepid cup.

Image: Gunjan Karun@Flickr

Prime Minister Cameron in happier times.

I suspect that you would have seen/heard David Cameron’s comments about the ‘Special Relationship’ this week. One comment in particular has drawn a lot of attention:

“We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.”

On the surface, it does display a poor grasp of the Second World War but I think it shows two deeply important, but contradictory, lessons. The first lesson is that History is important. In a day and age where the threat to the subject appears to loom larger than ever, it shows that getting key events wrong can offend a large majority of the population and might even lead to questions about your ability to do your job. Pretty serious stuff.

The second lesson to be drawn from the reaction to Cameron’s comment is the difficulty teachers face in creating an ethos where mistakes are seen as a normal part of the learning process. It seems clear to me that Cameron is learning to be Prime Minister and although he may be gifted in certain areas, unfamiliar situations cause people to react in different ways. Within the context of the rest of his discussion, the comment made sense but it was a small error not a terrible threat to the social fabric of British society. It is therefore unsurprising that students can sometimes battle with a classroom environment where mistakes are seen as a necessary element of becoming better; the pressure to get things ‘right’ the first time from society seems overwhelming.

Who said teaching was an easy job?

Front and top image: The Prime Minister’s Office@Flickr

Over a week ago I was invited by Toucan Computing to give a brief presentation on Felsted’s use of mobile technology at Apple’s European offices in London (just above the Apple Store on regent street). Other schools also discussed their experiences/programmes too and it was interesting to note the high proportion of primary schools seem to be leading the way in using the iPod Touch in the classroom. The one notable exception at the briefing was Essa Academy in Bolton (I will return to them later). A few Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) were also on hand to offer (sometimes very strong) opinions on how they saw mobile learning. Although I found what they said useful, I really wanted an ADE who still worked at a school to voice their opinion. What was clear from the mobile briefing is that a few schools are starting to move away from the ‘office’ dominated view of ICT to one that complements teaching and learning.

On the Friday, I visited Neal Watkin in Ipswich. Neal is an Advanced Skills Teacher in History and over the last year he has been looking at incorporating some of John Hattie’s effect size research into his lessons. What impressed me the most was the collaborative nature of the work; the county advisor (Dale Banham) had brought together a group of ASTs in English and History to come up with the general principles for the project and as a result, it had been tested in a variety of schools. Neal has managed to bring the latest research on teaching and learning into the classroom and and gained support from a variety of quarters. I look forward to the presentation of the results at next year’s Schools History Project Conference.

On the following Monday, I went to visit The Bishop Stortford High School, courtesy of the incoming Head of Sixth Form, Tom Capewell. Tom organised a great series of observations and I was most struck most by the English lesson I saw taught by Nick Patterson, the subject leader for English. He had the boys get to grips with the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth on London and used a great strategy to get them to compare the poems in a table using only one word to describe each poem, giving a clear structure of points to would later be used to write an essay. I thought this was inspired and will have to adopt this method in my use of source work next year. I also spent a a good amount of time talking to the Head of ICT about their use of the iPod Touch next year. They are asking every parent of the incoming Year 7 to buy one so they can use it as a personal organiser and web device for work. The school is in an affluent area and many of the students already have an iPod Touch so this seems sensible to me, especially when the students have access to the latest technology and schools are always playing catch-up.

I then made my way to Bolton with the Head of Classics to see the work of Essa Academy and Abdul Chohan. Achievement had previously lurking around the 20-30% pass rate for 5 GCSEs including Maths and English but projections show an incredible upsurge and they are looking forward to August. The work at Essa covers many areas but the one aspect they have gained attention for is by giving each student an iPod Touch. This has had a dramatic effect in terms of student organisation and curriculum delivery in particular as the school has subscribed to a company providing podcasts covering all GCSE subjects so learning can happen anywhere. After spending the morning there, it was very clear that this is a school going places. The innovative approach to teaching and learning at Essa is remarkable. One aspect was teaching Year 7 in ‘pods’ of 40 under the watchful gaze of a secondary specialist, a primary specialist and a teaching assistant as they go through different topics to enhance their basic skills. Another was the novel approach to giving students a broad education by giving them the ability to change subjects every 6 months (everyone would study the core of English, Maths and Science but the other subjects did not have to be a full GCSE in a particular topic although they could choose this).

After leaving Essa, we went to visit Heathfields, a local primary school. Dianne Spencer (the Head) and David Mitchell (the Deputy Head) kindly showed us around and some of the work of the students. I was very impressed with the extended writing one young lady; her use of connectives through the VCOP method made me rethink how I get students at secondary level to write essays. Continuing the primary theme, I visited Flitch Green Primary School on the following day to teach a lesson to Saturn Class on the Vikings with Chronology as the key conceptual focus. Flitch Green is also an Apple Regional Training Centre and the use of technology to support learning is something to behold. In preparation for the lesson, I visited the school a week before and I saw some wonderful animation work with strong narratives which sparked the use of Ian Dawson’s work on active learning in History. The pupils and I worked together to construct a narrative of the Vikings as part of the History they had studied.  This worked really well especially as the tabards they wore gave them a nice visual and physical reference of the overlaps between the Romans and the Saxons. I then got them to sequence a series of pictures by telling them a brief history of the Vikings which seemed to work well. What I did not expect was the lovely messages and feedback about the lesson from the pupils. I would like to thank Katie Coburn for allowing me to hijack her class for the morning!

Feedback from Saturn Class using Wallwisher on the Viking lesson

So, after all this wandering and wondering, what have I learned? There are a lot of people, both primary and secondary, who are also ‘travelling without maps’ in terms of curriculum design, lesson planning, pastoral care and the thinking about the environment students work in. What guides them in this creative uncertainty is the conviction that the children in their care deserve their best. I am very grateful that they have allowed me to share in their journey.

Front image: half alive@Flickr.com

World Map - 1689

‘We could roll up the map of the Cold War and travel without maps for a while’
E P Thompson on the possibility of social groups affecting the Cold War in 1982.

The academic year has finished and as you often do when things end, I started to think about my assumptions at the beginning of year. In some cases, I exceeded my expectations and in other areas I have been left with an uneasy gnawing feeling that only exists when things are left undone or have been completed poorly. Thinking about my role as Assistant Head in particular, I have come to realise that the plans I made were just guesses, contingent on a range of assumptions (succinctly and brutally put in Fried and Hansson’s ‘Rework’) that I was not really in control of despite my best efforts. Of course, there were variables I could control myself but my ‘map’ of how I thought the year was going to go did not lead me to plan for all the changes I was going to encounter. It is impossible to plan for everything but one thing I can do is to get better at preparing myself before I start. I have learned from experience that the best way to challenge and stimulate my own thinking is by seeing the excellence displayed by my peers. It was obvious that a journey around the country to see and experience excellence would help me create a more detailed ‘map’ for the coming academic year.

Source work at Diana Laffin's workshop

The first ‘stop’ on this journey is the Schools History Project conference in Leeds. This is a good place to start as it provides an amazing opportunity to see many History teachers and trainers at the top of their game in one place. One person I always try to see is Diana Laffin. Her work with her A Level History students always forces me to raise my expectations on what can be done with History in the 6th Form. This year was no exception and the source analysis activity she and Emma Kelley modelled using Enoch Powell’s speech was brilliant. They gave us the text of the speech but also said that an extra sentence/paragraph had been inserted and we needed to identify it. What this neat trick did was to force us to read the source a few times, getting a feel for the overall speech and looking for a specific phrase or wording which would betray the inserted text. This ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ reading worked brilliantly. They also asked us to annotate, in silence, the questions we would like to ask and any observations we wanted to make before we could discuss it as a group. Finally, we were instructed to make up a tabloid headline representing a particular point of view using a variety of sources, making the seemingly ‘dull’ topic of housing an engaging and ‘live’ topic. There are so many ways that their work could be deployed in my planning and I hope the students feel the benefit of Diana and Emma’s inspirational workshop.

Another stimulating experience was chairing the TeachMeet session with able assistance by John Heffernan, Sarah (Head of Classics at Felsted) and the brilliant ICT technicians at Trinity and All Saints. 39 people turned up to find out what other teachers were doing in their classroom and I was impressed and challenged by all the presentations. I would like to thank all the people who volunteered to present, Steve Bunce for booking the Flashmeeting and Doug Belshaw for keeping things running virtually. In addition, I also want to thank the sponsors: Beedocs, Vital, Heinemann and Toucan Computing. After the frenetic pace of the TeachMeet I had hoped for a rest but I readily volunteered to became a ‘common soldier’ in Parliament’s Army as part of Ian Dawson’s brilliant Saturday night extravaganza on the English Civil Wars in the North of England. Ian’s work is interesting as he has the knack of making the fiendishly complex easy to understand through active learning and this session was no different. The weekend was rounded off with a session delivered by Christine Counsell on Change and Continuity. What I loved about this session was Christine’s use of the Cambridge PGCE students’ work to illustrate her points and the understanding that her thinking on the issue was still developing. I was also struck by her use of Playdoh to get the delegates to represent key concepts in a visual way. This is a brilliant way to get the students to genuinely show their understanding of a concept even though it appears to be simply making shapes to represent a word.

Christine Counsell at the SHP conference.

Christine’s activity with the Playdoh resonated with most of what I had seen that weekend in terms of the role ‘play’ has in learning; being a journalist or a common soldier increased my enjoyment and understanding of the topic we were looking at. How could I thoughtfully use such activities to increase engagement but also develop ‘deep’ thinking to allow my students to see and touch the different textures of the stories within my lessons? A possible answer to this question was given by visiting Dawn Hallybone at Oakdale Junior School in East London. This was an unusual place for me as a secondary teacher but Dawn is well known in UK educational technology circles as an advocate and leading practitioner of Game Based Learning. Seeing her class ‘On Safari’ radically altered my perception on Game Based Learning and my own teaching. Using the Nintendo Wii game, ‘Wild Earth: African Safari’, Dawn’s class roamed around the virtual Serengeti national park taking ‘pictures’ and recording information meticulously about the animals they encountered. When they were given a task by the game to find an animal they did not know, Dawn directed a student to find out and they shared the information with the class (like the case of the Zorilla, which I had no idea about). Always mindful of the environmental impact of their exploration (due to the bar on the top of the interactive whiteboard), they continued to record information about the animals they encountered in their notebooks until the game clock had elapsed. From a secondary school point of view, the level of concentration displayed really impressed me and what happened next really made me rethink writing at secondary level. Without the use of a writing frame, the pupils in pairs (via Purplemash) began to produce fantastic descriptions of the animals they had seen, using the facts they had gleaned from being ‘On Safari’ in their notebooks. I realised in that moment that what I had just seen was a creative approach to knowledge acquisition augmented by the intrinsic motivation of the pupils within a context where saying ‘I don’t know’ was seen as a necessary and normal part of learning. Dawn did guide her class at times but they were merrily recording information and writing without much external pressure. For a secondary teacher, it was revelatory and I would like to thank Dawn and her class for sharing their learning with me.

Both the SHP conference and the visit to Dawn’s school made me challenge my ‘map’ of priorities for next year. I still have two more schools to visit this week but it has become clear that in order to renew my focus and deal with the rapid changes and demands, I need to roll up the map of my current way of thinking and travel without maps for a while.

Front and first image: Chuck ‘Caveman’ Coker @ Flickr.

‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions’ – Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon is one of my favourite writers for a number of reasons but mostly because his work opened up to me a world of understanding I could only touch the edges of before. His quote, seemingly out of place in a blog about education technology and History teaching, sums up one of the things that I strive to do, even when I ask the questions myself. Who benefits from me asking? Do my students? Do I? Do the people I lead, the institution I work in or the various groups I might represent? It seems to me that two types of question that I can ask – authentic and disciplinary ones.

Questions can enable the person asking them to reach a position of understanding that was previously beyond their present understanding. This is what I would call an authentic question and the questions I am asked in my classes are a good example of this. Questions can also be used to ‘speak truth to power’ when the people asking the questions have no power at all and want to highlight the injustice of a particular situation (the Civil Rights Movement, a topic I am exploring with my Year 10, would be an example of this).

However, one of the most valuable things that I started to learn as a research student is that people sometimes ask questions they have already formed an opinion on, or have an answer for. In other words, some people ask questions not because they are interested in the truth, but they want to confirm their own version of the truth. These questions, can be used as a means of exerting power and influence, becoming tools to discipline people or ideas and excluding people by creating false boundaries and pushing people ‘beyond the pale’ of engagement. These types of questions are what I would call ‘disciplinary questions’ and I was very fortunate in my graduate studies to have supervisors who asked ‘authentic’ questions rather than the ‘disciplinary’ kind.  Why the talk of ‘authentic’ and disciplinary’ questions? Well, I was reminded of their power this week in very different ways.

The first event that reminded me about the power of questions was the work at Cramlington Learning Village. Cramlington is a hotbed of ideas, achievement and awards but they are not quick to judge the development of others, as they believe they are still developing. The key question they asked when re-examining their curriculum was, ‘what do you think it is important for young people to learn’? From this, they developed an impressive system to help students attain these skills. The school was already known for its innovative work but it asked the question to improve its own work, not to show how brilliant it was and how its methods were the only way for students to progress. Most impressive is its desire to share its understanding and where it thinks it needs to go next.

The second event that reminded me about the power of questions is the date for the first ‘official’ Apple Regional Training Centre event at Felsted on the 16^th September. What brought this into being was a genuine concern about whether the History and ICT conundrum had been solved (we were unhappy with what we did and wanted to provide something better for our students). We believe that in sharing our work with you, you can join us on our journey to create something unique for our learners and yours.

Authentic questions drive authentic learning and are interested in dialogue as this leads to an understanding that did not exist before. Disciplinary type questions are merely self-seeking attempts to create a veneer of respectability and even-handedness; it is not about dialogue, no matter what the questioner says. There have been elements within the educational technology landscape of late that have fallen into asking disciplinary questions. Fanon’s challenge to himself reminds others and me that only when you ask the right questions of yourself, can you really ask the right question of others.

Front image: emagic@Flickr

This was my first RTC conference and it brought home how wide and diverse the RTC programme is for Apple covering schools, City Learning Centres (CLCs) and other educational organisations. The theme for the conference was mobility and we were taken through some astounding numbers in terms of mobile device adoption in relation to other kinds of technology. One thing was made clear in relation to the adoption of mobile technology; content, provided by the teacher/web/company, was a key driver for use. After the introductory sessions by Apple staffers, delegates and Apple Distinguished Educators took the floor. I was particularly drawn to what Gillian Penny, a Headteacher from a primary school in Scotland, had to say about ICT. She made it clear that the learning has to come first in the use of technology. Abdul Chohan, Director of IT at Essa Academy, echoed this but I fear the message may have been lost on the conference by the sheer scale of the project at his school. Essa made the news last year when it gave an iPod Touch to every student. Whilst the media focussed on this aspect and the cost, Abdul in his presentation touched upon the change of ethos that governed the use of the iPods; All Will Succeed. This belief has led the Academy to reshape its curriculum and its teaching methods and the interim results look impressive.

On the technical side of things, there were two highlights to the conference. The first was Steve Beard’s ‘Making an iPhone app’ session using Xcode and Freeway, which he did in about 10 minutes. The second was Chris Jinks’ talk about the deployment and configuration of devices using Snow Leopard Server and the free iPhone configuration utility which allows you to manage the use of the device (you can disable the camera or remove the ability to browse the web for example). My colleague, the Head of Classics felt this was a great feature and would help allay fears surrounding behaviour management issues.

I was also reintroduced to a technology I had first heard about in 2006 from Doug Belshaw. I have also been looking at it again in relation to discussions with folk on Ed Tech Round Up and Johannes Ahrenfelt (especially in relation to Augmented Reality). Richard Clark’s talk about the work at Leicester CLC and QR Codes has reinforced my desire to look at this technology again more seriously. He and his team have used QR codes in primary schools to embed links to video on worksheets to model the learning so the pupils could complete the tasks. The potential for this technology is huge and all I really need for this to be work within my classroom is an iPod Touch with a camera…

Overall, I found the conference to be an enjoyable experience – I learned some new things but the key aspect for me was speaking to other RTCs about what they are doing. It also left me with some questions about the emphasis placed on the technology and missing  the context that gives rise to the use of it in the first place. For example, Joe Moretti gave a workshop on Stanza and Calibre for producing Ebooks. It was useful to be reminded of the tool, but as a teacher, I was particularly interested in the way it was used to help literacy.  I could not get to grips with how the technology would allow me to do something beyond what I could replicate in the classroom with a computer or with a piece of paper. I suppose the reason why I was so concerned is because this is something I constantly struggle with/ask myself about; does the technology helping the learning process or not? Is there enough pedagogical thought behind it to make it a genuinely useful tool which allows you to do something more quickly or even beyond your current set of tools? I don’t think this is a particularly innovative thought; this is something I am asked by many people I meet and to be frank, this keeps me, and my work, honest.  Thanks to the Apple Education team and the Cornerhouse in Manchester for hosting us and for giving me the time and space to reflect. The next RTC conference is in November and I, alongside some of the other members of the mobile research team at Felsted, may present our project there.

The learning journey continues over the next month or two as I am heading to Cramlington Learning Village on the 25^th June for their conference on teaching and learning.  The following week sees me heading to the national Schools History Project conference in Leeds to present some work on technology and History teaching and chairing the TeachMeet session there. I’m really looking forward to the sessions on Change and Continuity by Christine Counsell, Diana Laffin’s presentation on A Level History teaching and Ian Luff’s workshop on active learning.  After the conference, I am going on a grand tour of Teaching and Learning. First on my list is  Neal Watkin‘s classes to see how John Hattie’s work on visible learning has affected the progress of students in the History classroom. I am then off to Essa Academy to learn about their framework for the use of technology and finally, I plan to see Dawn Hallybone’s school in action.  I am also hoping to teach some History lessons at the local primary school (Flitch Green, also an Apple RTC) in the last week of their term.  If you have any other ideas about what I should see, let me know. I will document each visit here on the blog.

Finally, a word about the mobile learning project. I’ve had a few requests for information about it and once we have ‘sharpened the saw’ on a few of the research issues, it will be publicised on the school website and on this blog. It is taking a little longer than expected but we want to make it as good as we can before the end of our term. I’m really excited by what the team here have come up with and we can’t wait to share it with you and our students.

What really matters is how the iPad will fare in everyday use in a school environment. It is patently clear that this is a great tool for busy Headmasters/Headmistresses; the ability to respond to emails on a large keyboard, view diary events/reminders in a familiar format and to edit/present documents in a lightweight package is something they will cherish. My Headmaster will be using one as soon as we receive our batch from Toucan.

Of greater interest to me is its potential in the classroom. Applications like iStudiez Pro and Todo clearly show the iPad’s ability to help organisation (the students and myself) and applications like eClicker can help in assessing students quickly and easily. What really excites me are applications like Alice, The Elements and Wired Magazine. Rich interactive content practically leaps out of the screen, giving clear indicators of the way future textbooks/educational resources should be redesigned to be more engaging with tightly woven learning activities. By this, I mean a way where completing a chart/graph can be done within the application and shared with the teacher, class or the world by publishing the work to a virtual learning environment or the web. Not radical stuff but it removes the steps that often occur where students move from textbook, to page, to computer and then to the web.

Doug Belshaw and I have a few interesting ideas for History applications that we are putting together for the iPad over the summer based on rich interactive content with a strong thinking skills element (living graphs are an example). If you are a publisher and are interested, get in touch. My aim is to trial it with my students next academic year as part of the school’s mobile learning/Apple Regional Training Centre project and everyone is welcome to come and see what we are doing.

Where should I be?

Typically for this time of year, I have put off doing non-essential things like updating this blog to focus on the ‘business end’ of the year. My IB History students have now finished their exams, I have marked/moderated the A2 History coursework and I have been prepping my Year 11/Year 10 for their GCSE exams. The hardest thing I have had to do this term was coming to terms with the fact that I am not Rick James and should not attempt to sing ‘Super Freak’ to help a student’s Music Technology coursework (I have asked him to use the ‘autotune’ function liberally). If it were not part of the Assistant Head job description, I would never have done it (I am praying it does not make it on to Youtube).

Another enjoyable but less terrifying aspect of my work this term has been the reading and planning in preparation for the mobile learning project that will be launched at school this year. I am really looking forward to see how we will use the technology to enhance the learning of the students and to the professional dialogue surrounding it; there certainly is a ‘buzz’ around the proposal and I hope to elaborate on the specifics in a few weeks. As a happy coincidence, the Languages Department have bought into the idea of mobile learning and are moving towards a new Language Lab next year that will be made up of iPod Touches and Flip Video cameras. Combined with the upcoming use of the new information management system and Moodle across the school, it is easy to be carried away with big plans for the future and forgetting the pull of the immediate. I was reminded of this earlier this week when I returned an iPod Touch to a student. He clicked on it and I noticed a strangely familiar picture on his screen. He noticed and said, ‘It makes it easier to find out what class I have’. He had taken a screen shot of his timetable from the school website and saved it as a background picture on his iPod. Genius.

Innovative and effective ways of teaching and learning using mobile technology is great, but sometimes it is more than enough if it can help you get to where you need to be. I went back to my office and did the same thing. Now if only I could find out a way for cover lessons and appointments to show on it…

Image: Leo Kan @Flickr