Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

It’s not often that I’m asked to come along to a school at 4.00 on a Friday afternoon, but last week I called in for a chat at Attleborough High School. Attleborough High are doing great things with their Virtual Learning Environment. In one year not only have all the students been keen as mustard in using it, but all, yes all, the staff as well.

Attleborough is only down the road from my office, and yet to my shame I realised I had not visited the school for around fifteen years. This year I had a chat with them on the Frog Trade stand at BETT having heard that good things were going on, and this was followed up by inviting Harry French, the e-Learning Manager to speak at a recent Naace event.

I met with Harry, Deputy Head, and ICT Co-ordinator to find out a little bit more about how they had created such a momentum for change. It soon became obvious that it was nothing to do with the technology, and lots to do with the vision the school had for learning. That vision can be summed up in a simple phrase, “enabling the staff to take risks and by doing so empowering the students”.

The pressures are much the same, but when it came to the VLE implementation, they handed a lot of the development of content over to the teachers who asked the students what they wanted to help them with their learning. In most cases the students then built the infrastructure in which that content would reside, and often the content itself.

Here’s Harry’s presentation, as he says it better in his own words:

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