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Engage parents in platform design
Parents have to be involved with the development of learning platforms from the beginning if they are to prove effective in bridging the divide between home and school, a recent conference heard. Addressing The National Learning Platforms Conference 2009 in Manchester last month, Dominic Tester, deputy headteacher of Costello Technology College in Basingstoke, highlighted a Becta report in March 2009 to support his view that more parental engagement was crucial.
 The report, Oh, Nothing Much, found that 82% of parents felt left in the dark when it came to their child’s schooling. Pointing to the efforts of his school, Mr Tester told the event, organised by education technology specialists Frog: “Stakeholder – parental – engagement, alongside teachers and pupils, is vital to secure our initial vision and shape key performance indicators. Last October we set up a focus group and about 15 parents were really eager to get this going. Parents are involved from the outset. They wanted to have access to attendance/behaviour data, the college diary, all learning resources and all printed communications, as well as seeing the school playing a greater role in the community. We recently became a Microsoft Academy and can now offer a number of courses to adult learners.
 While Costello Technology College has successfully embedded learning and parental engagement platforms in its daily work, Mr Tester is not complacent, recognising that the school is lagging behind some of the more liberal users of social networking: “It is very hard to keep abreast of technology in the classroom. While we have currently blocked Facebook and Bebo in school, there is a huge potential for social networking sites to develop learning partnerships.”
The Frog event took place on 10 June, featuring contributions from teachers and education professionals from around the world. Featuring interactive workshops run by pioneering schools the event offered delegates suggestions that might enable the effective implementation of online systems of real-time reporting ahead of the government’s 2010 target.
It also featured suggestions for the sort of content that an effective platform can host, with Frog customer David Grant, deputy headteacher of Hertfordshire and Essex School, among those to share the work his school is currently carrying out:
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“Using freeware I made training videos for staff which sit on the VLE and are easily accessible to people who have missed a seminar. In the lead up to our recent inspection I created an inspector’s zone, which gave teacher’s somewhere to put their resources and took the panic away. Student and staff members have really started to take ownership of this and it is being lead by the people. In the future we will develop the parental portal and primary online liaison zone, as well as seeing podcasting, vodcasting and i-phones playing a prominent role in the learning environment.” |
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July 2010
May 2010
March 2010
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FrogTrade Ltd
Dean Clough
Halifax
West Yorkshire
HX3 5AX
T: 01422 250 800
F: 01422 354 232
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