Posted in Curriculum for Excellence, ICT, Ideas, Partnerships, Vocational on Jun 2nd, 2008 4 Comments »
I met this morning with Chris Mullender, a games developer from Dunbar, Ollie Bray, Graham Sales (a student of gaming technology at Abertay University) and David Gilmour to explore how we might make better use of gaming technology within the East Lothian education system.
I was intrigued to find out that schools would be much better making use of [...]
Posted in Assessment, Culture change, Curriculum for Excellence, ICT, Ideas on May 31st, 2008 3 Comments »
I recently bumped into a former colleague and briefly chatted about “A Curriculum for Excellence”. My friend has responsibility for developing learning and teaching at his school and was telling me that the school are going to give every pupil comprehensive course support materials for each of their certificated subjects - once the course has been completed. [...]
Posted in Culture change, Entrepreneurs, Ideas, Parental Involvement, Partnerships, Public Services, School Systems on May 31st, 2008 No Comments »
In the spirit of provoking a dialectic of possible worlds I came across an interesting model of football club ownership this weekend when I read about Ebbsfleet United Football Club:
Fans’ community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United.
The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have each paid £35 to provide a £700,000 takeover pot and [...]
Posted in Brain, Conferences, Curriculum for Excellence, Ideas, Learning Logs, Learning and teaching, Personal Lessons on May 31st, 2008 2 Comments »
I felt enormously privileged today to be able to attend the Tapestry Conference in Glasgow to hear Jerome Bruner give a spellbinding performance.
For a man born in 1915 (93 years ago) he displayed humour, warmth and humility which would bely most men half his age - quite aside from his iconic intellect. In what was a [...]
Posted in Accountability, Culture change, Finance, Ideas, Management, Planning, Public Services, Strategic, Unions, honesty on May 28th, 2008 4 Comments »
The challenge of providing a high quality education service at a time when expenditure is growing faster than the available budget means that change, in some form, must take place.
There is a tendency in education to always reflect upon such an issue from the moral high-ground and simply state that more money must be forthcoming! As the person who [...]
Posted in Children's Services, Conferences, Culture change, Ideas, OUtcome agreements, Parental Involvement, Partnerships, Planning, Public Services, Strategic, Uncategorized, Using data, school based management on May 15th, 2008 4 Comments »
I’m attending the Association of Directors of Social Work conference in Crieff.
One the key themes emerging is that of personalisation of services to users. The social work field is light years ahead of education in terms of using a mixed economy system for delivering services, by commissioning others from the private and voluntary sector to [...]
Posted in Allegiance, Communication, Culture change, Ideas, Positivity, Unconditional Positive Regard, professionalism on May 11th, 2008 2 Comments »
“THEM” Vs “US”
I reckon one of the greatest challenges facing Scottish education is the way in which people use the third person plural in a negative sense.
Listen to any conversation about education and very soon “they” will emerge as the problem. So teachers will talk about “them” (management), management will talk about “them” (teachers and the local authority) [...]
Posted in Blogging, Communication, Community Learning, Consultation, Corporate, Edubuzz, Elected Members, Ideas, Learning Logs, Public Services, Social media on Apr 21st, 2008 No Comments »
We held a meeting last week where we explored the potential of weblogs to assist the community planning process - based on the edubuzz model -although not necessarily using the same platform.
Community Planning is a process which helps public agencies to work together with the community to plan and deliver better services which make a real [...]
Posted in Ideas on Apr 15th, 2008 2 Comments »
It was our anniversary today and we walked up this evening to our friends’ farm. They have been working flat out for the last four weeks and the fruits of their labours were running all over the fields.
I love it at this time of year when the lambs gang together and run as a group from one place to another. [...]
Posted in Ideas, Leadership, Management, Planning, Seven Sides, TESS on Apr 6th, 2008 4 Comments »
It was George H.W. Bush (the father of George W. Bush) who in 1987 responded to the suggestion that he turn his attention from short-term campaign objectives and look to the longer term by saying, “Oh, the vision thing”. I wonder sometimes if many of us in Scottish education suffer from Bush’s same discomfort with [...]
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