I have tweeted about and pointed people towards Lewisham for examples of how BSF can still maintain bubbles of innovation but what about smaller examples? What about when a school is finally sorting out their change management? Will innovation still be remembered?

Well, I prepared the following video for the EdTechRoundUp TeachMeet as a possible answer of translating change management into innovation management, shamelessly using up other ideas I have come across over the years … most of which I honestly can’t remember where they came from. Some have directly come from previous schools, Brooke Weston Academy and mainly from Lodge Park Technology College … but others from schools visited with the SSAT Futures Vision tours, ICT Register or generally chatting with folk online. If you see something you recognise then let me know … no slight is intended for forgetting things.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The course is actually the “Level 4 Certificate in ICT Support in Education: Practitioner” and is delivered via accredited training partners using materials from The FITS Foundation. In Northamptonshire our training partner is NEOS IT and we had the pleasure of George coming to Lodge Park Technology College on Tuesday and Wednesday to deliver training to the Technical Champions plus a few others.

A key concept across the whole course was the use of the word management. I know that I joke (quite frequently) about that particular word … even to the point of never using it but substituting the word ‘manglement’ instead … but it is really important in a heck of a lot about FITS. Once you get past the first stage of a service desk pretty much everything else has an element of management in there and this builds into the idea of Change Management.  I’ve written about the importance of Change Management before but it is explicit in the training materials. Without it then any significant change or choice your school makes with technology and learning … well … it is likely to fall flat on its face and it will probably end up being the missing piece of management from the FITS materials … Blame Management!

Why will some technicians, IT Managers and SLT not like what this means? Well, it introduces a large amount of accountability via a group that is central to Change Management (often call Change Advisory Board or Change Advisory Committee) and is likely to contain people like the IT Manager, a member of SLT, whoever looks after finances and then we get onto representatives of the stakeholders at the school. The training was quite interesting when we discussed who should be a representative. Of course people remembered about teachers, some mentioned about admin / office staff, one person mentioned about governors but I was disappointed that I was the only one to raise the students. And this was with a forward thinking bunch too … it got me to thinking that we still don’t communicate 2-way with our students enough and that this is partly down to the ethos of the school more than anything else. At this point people really understood who deep FITS can be involved with school change and transformation … and people were excited by that, a little daunted perhaps but the excitement is important.

My question to those reading this is how would you set up a group to manage change at your school? Do you have one already? Does it also deal with IT changes? Who is involved in the group? If you have student representation how do they feel about being involved?

I know … a typical Tony-style blog … talks about stuff and then asks a heap more questions. Oh well, you should be used to it by now.

One of the things I will be prodding the Technical Champions to do over the next month s to set up their blogs and I will share their links here too.

Take the above title. To many it means nothing to but a number of Northants schools it now means that their IT Managers have a chance to be part of that forward-thinking mindset. Since I have been out of a school now for a good 15 months, and before that I was more out than in for the previous 15 months, and not having done a heck of a lot of hands-on techie stuff recently (or at least not officially) I feel that the LA and schools need a group of technically knowledgeable people to develop good practice, become stakeholders in what we do at the LA with regards to technology and to ensure that technology and educational need match up.

So, we are accepting applicants for the role of Harnessing Technologies Technical Champions. These IT Managers (selected via a panel including LA staff, RBC and Becta representatives) will be trained with the new FITS v2 pilot program and supported in implementing FITS in their schools. They will be able to provide support and advice to other schools, to be critical friends to their peers and the LA, to develop and document good practice and then to share it with the world in general.

I hope to make sure they all blog their experience too as part of their development of communication methods so will publish links to these as and when they get created.

The deadline for applicants is the end of this week and we have had good interest so far.

Best of luck to all those who apply.

A fantastic day with many wonderful sessions but I thought I would point out my own one first. Tasked with talking about how IT Support teams are making a difference with Open Source I chose to talk about a number of core facts by which I work with schools and projects I have asked IT Managers in Northants to complete.

The presentation can be found here

And twitcam stream for the afternoon session is here and I am the first speaker so no need to scrub through. The morning session can be found at http://twitcam.com/3xoh and http://twitcam.com/3xpf

Further information about the day, discussions about open source in schools and access to other information is available at Open Source Schools.

The various sessions generally hit the mark or provoked thought and discussion and rather than do a single post of it all I’ll summarise most of it and the break down a few sessions.

I would recommend you go to http://blackpoolconference00.naaceblogs.org and have a look through the blog posts and comments, the available presentations and the videos when they are available.

The opening address was a vid clip from Jim Knight with JK on twitter answering questions. A record of this twitter session is on the above site.

Anne McFarlane challenged a number of preconceptions around the use of mobile devices and we could look where there are opportunities to make a difference with that.

Mick Waters spoke about the curriculum, the problems with it and why the shift looks as if it is happening to a skills led, information accessing model that operates across the curriculum. There were no Q&A at this session but it did seem as if the curriculum is still being done *too* schools. His parting comment about us having come to the conference to find out where to go next showed this a bit. Perhaps an acknowledgement that many at the conference will tell QCA where to go next… on the curriculum that is! This should not take away from a good session with a healthy dose of reality in it.

The masterclass I went to was looking at what Microsoft had been doing over the last year in pushing things forward and I have to praise the innovative teachers network here… some really good and novel uses of kit going on.

This was followed up with the keynote on day 2 by Mr Bean. Martin G Bean, the General manager Education Products Group, Microsoft that is! OK a fair chunk of it was a sales push for how MS software can push the boundaries, and yes… it can. The innovative teachers network is showing this and whilst the Surface may just seem like a gadget it has potential depending on how good the tools are to allow teachers and students to build high quality resources for learning and teaching. Martin was honest and said that they are looking to us for ideas too and that content providers are also working on adapting existing or making new content. I’ll wait a bit before making a conclusion about it really. In the hands of the right teacher it would be brilliant, but them so coils a snooker table I sometimes feel!

The next sessions, promoting ICT in BSF and change management, I will leave for the moment as they need dealing with separately. One session cleared up a few things but the other pricked a nerve!

The afternoon exhibition was handy to just have an explore of ideas with a few suppliers.

The last two sessions I went to were both with John Davitt, a keynote and then I stayed on for his breakout session. A truly fun guy who seems to have more ideas per minute than I do all day. (no comments on that, please!)

Day three will also be a separate post too. Too much to squeeze in!

So, I am nearly home now and will have to have a break tonight to recharge my brain. Thanks to all who kept up with my tweets and I’ll try and link to the naace capture of that soon. Alternatively you can use http://search.twitter.com and search using the hashtag #naace2009

This does not include the keynotes and networking / BoF sessions (normally known as ‘the bar’).

Whilst NAACE is often thought of as full of consultants there are plenty of teachers in it too and getting their good practice out is essential. There are also techies in NAACE as well and there are those out there who have a lot of educational experience and knowledge to be pulled into the pot.

Do I think this conference will answer all things with where technology should go? No, but it is part of the dialogue at least.

Oh … I seem to have given the impression that I am going along to heckle a bit. Perhaps the better phrase would be ‘to ask appropriate and pertinent questions when it is obvious that blagging is taking place!’