Grumbledook Blogs

This week will see a few blog posts go up.

First will be one already writte, exploring a bit more about sharepoint and web 2.0, next will be talking about why we filter emails and what impact the management of it can have, then finally I will be asking around about how different people feel about the different between hosted and local solutions for sharepoint.

It should be a busy week of meetings as well (when is it not) but I hope to squeeze all three items in.

What a wonderful week it has been. After a chance to catch up with schools involved in a local Apple RTC project (lovely to see and hear of teachers and pupils excited and engaged by the chance to try something different) we had the first piece of training for our new Technical Champions.

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.

I have a number of things to blog about at the moment after the NAACE conference 2009, but I am still aware I have a pile of notes from BETT to put up and some more sharepoint stuff too… too many conferences / shows, too much operational work and not enough time to sit down and think about what things mean and how things change because of them.

Oh well… for the moment I will just collect my thoughts from the last few days and see where we go from there. Perhaps a few more hours over the weekend to work a bit more on the generic ICT Vision Statement that Peter and I are putting together. NAACE 2009 definitely sparked off a number of things to put in there… but a number of things need to be taken out!

It’s true you know … there is a real world example of using web 2.0 for student voice and parental engagement. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it was something so simple, easy to duplicate and it only took the brave step of one Head to think that something that had been in place could truly be pushed to see how for it could go.

Many thanks to Andre Field for this example … http://opensourceschools.org.uk/utility-open-source-school-blog.html … I’m sure we can add to that over the coming weeks. We already have plenty of examples of use of twitter and wikis with students …