CESI: Challenges to innovation in the classroom and shaping attitudes

So, you're enthused and you want to blog, podcast, publish video, audio and text on a website which can be found by people easily. You want to be the most Googlable school around so that students take pride in their online work and readership. But a number of things, which are perceived wrongly as barriers, have to be dealt with first. Most of them come down not to equipment, money or resources (other than time) but to attitudes, and how well you can change the attitudes of those around you.

I picked up on a slight sense of resignation to the "powers that be". This needn't be the case. Teachers are the only people who can make decisions about what goes on in their classrooms, if those decisions are to stand any chance of success, that is.

1. Safety
Safety's important, but how we approach it more so. The wooden egg box is an excellent device to stop the egg's contents leaking all over the kitchen when the box is dropped. It is, however, hopeless at preventing the egg being broken in the first place and provides no flexibility when you want to fit a dozen into your shopping bag. So, we come up with the novel idea of the plastic egg box, moulded to each individual egg to hold it in, hug it close and, in the process, increase the price of the eggs without making them taste any better. Finally, some bright spark came up with the idea of the cardboard egg box. Flexible enough to bend, strong enough to resist and thus stop egg-breaking, cheap enough to mass produce. It's not the safest - the egg will still break given enough pressure, but no-one would be silly enough to press too hard on the egg box. Or if they were, it would just be malicious in the same way cracking the egg on my head would be.

Web safety in the age of the Live Web is pretty similar - the machine doesn't have a brain so please use your own.

2. Security
Keep your web security closed enough to keep the viruses up, open enough to let people in. If they're not welcome in your living room, chuck 'em out. But if you fill in all the windows on the house then we can't see outside.

3. Simplicity
If you're thinking of bringing in a piece of new tech, then keep it simple. What do you want it to do for you that existing means could not? Why is this a better/simpler/more efficient/more fun way of doing things? Does it help maintain or increase the attainment of your kids? Yes? Brilliant. Now think about what your users (parents? fellow teachers? students?) are going to want to do. Publish video? Work out what tools you can use in school. Publish audio? Make sure that the blogging platform you use for showing your work can handle big files and lots of use. etc etc. If in doubt, ask someone who's done it.

4. Flexibility
Make sure the work you are thinking of allows the kids to breathe, to make mistakes, to go off on tangents. That means your role as teacher changes: you are delimiting the resources they can use to start off, giving them a broad stroke from which to pick a narrower band, giving them suitable space(s) in which to work, finding the technology and encouraging them to use anything they ahve of their own. If you're going all out on building a blog system from Wordpress then make sure you can expand it on demand. Before they are needed, find the ways that teachers can include Bubbleshare slideshows on their blogs, calendars and the like. Just providing them in East Lothian has led to people using them - kids even make unprompted digital stories for their homework.

5. Findability
Blogs we like. Websites à l'ancienne are hard to find. Get some Googlejuice.