Foxdenuk

iPad field test

e-learning, Technical hints, Uni-Key No Responses »

May 152012

Anne with iPad (and pen!) in Rome

In the Uni-Key project we have promised to make our proposed digital course accessible on mobile devices so when I took the family iPad on a work trip instead of my usual netbook, I was taking note of what worked and what didn’t so that we can be better informed about good practice when we come to design the learning activities in a month or two.

Why I took an iPad
I took the iPad to save weight and bulk on a complicated trip which started with a trip to Italy and ended in Lithuania and became even more complicated as one of the airlines in my cunning plan went bankrupt. I was unsure whether this was a good idea as I knew that I had to do a lot of digital work while I was away, the biggest of which was to make a website from scratch with a group of university students.

How it performed as a work tool

I needed to use the iPad to:

Access email including sending emails with attachments
Access web pages including a Moodle based course and a Ning based community
Use Skype
Use the online website building tool, Weebly
Use the online asynchronous audio tool, Voxopop
Copy and paste text and URLs from one application, eg website to another, eg email
Write extensive pieces of text
Print out airline boarding cards
Record audio which can then be transferred to a PC based audio editing tool
Access my YouTube account, not just YouTube videos generally.

On the iPad, web sites automatically present in mobile format which meant that I often had only a stripped down version of the site. This meant for example, that I could not access my Google account to find out if it was linked with my YouTube account. At home I am always logged in to my YouTube account so I failed to log-in and could not access my Favourites.

Attaching files to my emails was back to front. I had to find the file first eg a photo and then ‘share’ it through email rather than starting an email message and then attaching a file. Also I found I could only attach one file per email message which was annoying when I had five documents to send.

Anything using Java or Flash was either problematic or impossible. For example I could do most things to build a website on Weebly, but adding links was something I had to delegate to those in the group who had Windows. Similarly, although I was able to record audio quite easily with an app called simply, Recorder, editing it would have required yet another app. The much acclaimed Mynah, part of the Aviary group of media tools, for example has not yet had its iOS version of their app approved by Apple and the web-based version does not work on the iPad. With Voxopop I could neither record nor listen to any audio as that is flash-based.

Skype worked fine but the Skype app does not seem to give you access to your account details, which I had wanted to change after learning that our house in Denmark had been broken into and our laptops stolen. I guess the solution would have been to go to the Skype website and do things from there instead.

Secure passwords are also a pain to key in, swapping between the three keyboards.

I think the iPad is heavy on connectivity. It seemed to me that web pages re-loaded every time I came back to them although a very few persisted in the browser when I returned.

Using Moodle and Ning was fine just as long as you only wanted to interact in the forums. As soon as I wanted to edit material in Moodle I was faced with the bare bones html view which made preparing the new week of my Moodle course a real challenge as I tried to pick my way through the code. Ning on the other hand seemed to work as normal.

Multi-tasking is not really practical on the iPad and I found that extremely frustrating. Even the so-called multi-tasking task bar is nothing of the sort, as every time you swap from one application to the other, you are effectively opening the application from scratch so everything takes an age.

Some challenges I just never took up. I could, for example, have tried to host a Blackboard Collaborate session, which was due as part of my online facilitation work but I didn’t want to experiment on my course participants, especially as a host. So that was delegated to my co-facilitator in London instead.

Printing I managed to do only by attaching the image of my boarding card, which I had screenshot to my photo collection, to an email using the Share option and sending it someone who had a Windows machine.

It could well be that many of these things could have been done more efficiently on the iPad but I just never discovered how. Some things I learned along the way, such as how to copy and paste across applications, which one of my student group revealed to me, while with others I just gave up.

My verdict
The iPad is a great consumption tool. I noticed that Air Baltic use iPads to offer their inflight entertainment and I expect that works really well. What I am less convinced about is when you want to use the iPad for more than simply opening a file (whether text, audio or video) or use an app with pre-determined functionality. Some universities are distributing iPads to their students and my immediate thought is that if I were one of those students I would also want a ‘proper’ laptop with which to do my work. Is it progress when you need two items of equipment instead of one? I also know that iPads are very fragile. The first one I ever saw was at a conference about 10 days after they had first been released and the screen was already broken. A school district here in Denmark equipped all their school students with iPads last September and were surprised at the rate of breakage. It looks like what they saved on iPad covers is going to be more than used up in replacing iPads dropped by exhuberant or careless 8 year olds.

So how to evaluate my experience? I have a feeling that the answer to many of my problems were apps but I didn’t know which ones. I would estimate that overall I was able to do about 90% of what I wanted to do on the iPad which is pretty good but it was irritating trying and failing to find out how to do the remaining 10%, while much of the 90% was also hard-won through much trial and error. Much is made of the intuitive iOS interface but I don’t think it’s intuitive until you’ve experienced it. … Which makes it … not intuitive, right?

So would I do this again? To save on hand luggage weight, I guess so, but I can’t see the iPad becoming my primary working tool on a day to day basis.

This article was written on an iPad but I waited until I got home to upload it to my blog as I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to use the WordPress dashboard with it.

Five Tips for Native Speakers

Language learning, Projects, Uncategorized No Responses »

May 142012

Having just completed another very successful Intensive Programme in Lithuania, I witnessed once again the challenges of working in a second language. As a native speaker and a teacher on the programme, I was acutely aware of the huge extra efforts it takes to understand the different variations of English which are common in the various countries represented in the project such as Spain, Lithuania, Portugal and Hungary. If you are Spanish you get used to hearing Spanish English and find it difficult to understand Czech english for example. It poses a particular dilemma for me when I can see that two people are talking at cross purposes. When is the correct time, if ever, to intervene and say ‘ I think he means xxx while she’s talking about yyyy.’

In this situation I was the only native speaker (though far from the only good English speaker). But as well as facilitating advantages, native speakers also have responsibilities which I don’t think they are often aware of. In a mixed meeting of native and non-native speakers, the native speakers have an obligation to:

1. Speak more slowly and more clearly. When they don’t have the language skills to use anything other than English, I think that this is the least they owe their non-native speaker colleagues.

2. Try to moderate the accent. This may be tough but you will only have to do it occasionally. Even native speakers have trouble with some accents. My bêtes noires are Falkirk and Texas!

3. Avoid slang and idioms. This may seem obvious but I have seen this happen so often that it seems that it does need to be pointed out explicitly.

4. Use shorter sentences so that the non-native speakers don’t get lost in umpteen sub-clauses.

5. Avoid country-specific references which will only be understandable by people from for example, the UK, Australia or the USA. Dr Who and Top Gear are just about OK but I don’t think that Boris Johnson or Bisto gravy travel well.

No wonder non-native speakers baulk at the thought of having native speakers present at their meetings when the scope for misunderstanding is compounded by the lack of these five strategies. I have heard of meetings where the native speakers have been asked to have a care for the non-native speakers and who have been able to control themselves only for about five minutes before reverting back to old habits. This shows that it’s tough, but surely not as tough as working in a second language?

Of course, if you are involved in high stakes win or lose negotiations then you might want to deliberately employ the opposite of the five strategies!

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0

A Guide to English Pronunciation

Disappearing women

Projects No Responses »

May 142012

Spot the women

While making a website documenting an Intensive two week programme with 35 student participants from Poland, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, the UK, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, I and my 6 students suddenly noticed that on the website we had been building for three days there were no images of women except in group photos. Perhaps this was just a statistical quirk because in fact the group was composed of almost exactly 50-50 between males and females. But then I noticed that the four people I had earmarked to ask to be in the Absolutely Intercultural podcast were also ALL male. Well maybe that was just coincidence? But then one of our lecturers gave a lecture in which he had used images taken during the project period to enhance and illustrate some of his main concepts about competition, globalization and the effects of monopoly power and all his photographs were also of males. So three instances in less than a week indicates that maybe something is wrong.

Mentioning this to one of the teachers on the project, she pointed me to a visualization of a study that had been done of the incidence and portrayal of women in the media. One of the interesting results was that in fictional works 66% of the female characters appear either naked or only partially clothed. Could there be a link between the way in which women are portrayed in the media and our willingness to think of them as case studies and role models when we are thinking of a professional context?

In our website workgroup we had been looking briefly at viral videos and flash mobs to explore the possibilities for presenting our work at the end of the project. Examples included the Grand Central Station freeze and the Belgian drama but even here, there was one example which was new to me, a video made to spread the anti-trafficking message but whose message, I felt, was ambiguous because at the end, the slogan calling for an end to human trafficking points to the women making the video. So are we to understand that they have been trafficked?

We tried to remedy the immediate problem by taking a good look at our website and making sure that the gender balance was more equal. However that sub-conscious bias against featuring the women in our project really shocked me and I wanted to pursue it further. So I asked my group of 3 males and 3 females about their ambitions and hopes for the future. These were mainly economics, financial management and management students and they have high ambitions regardless of gender. So I then asked the females whether they felt they would encounter any barriers and the response was that they did not anticipate any barriers apart from the challenge of mixing professional success with motherhood. Even so, one of the male students admitted that if he were in an employing situation for a position as engineer he would be inclined to think that female applicants would be less competent than male applicants.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, we were reminded in a lecture about non- verbal communication that the higher-pitched female voice sounds more hysterical and less reliable than a lower-pitched male voice! So what hope for female professionals?

I think that all this shows that there is undoubtedly a huge bias against women which is for the most part sub-conscious. I also feel that the feminist agenda has really disappeared and that this is extremely dangerous. The feeling is maybe that now that gender equality is enshrined in the European Union and its member states through legislation, that that box is ticked and we can forget about it. But society does not stand still and although freedoms and rights may have been won, I think that what we have witnessed here is that they need to be actively maintained otherwise they will be lost. The need for the problem to be addressed right now is maybe reflected in the fact that the May/June issue of Foreign Policy was totally devoted to the topic of the status of women’s rights around the world. And the picture painted is not a pretty one.

The same process is happening with democracy. Here in Europe we have ticked the democracy box but the proportion of people who vote decreases with every year that passes, while in other parts of the world people are still losing their lives for the right to vote.

When we told the student group as a whole about what had happened with the photos, we asked what they thought the reason might be. Their response was that maybe it was because the males were louder than the females. That was literally true, but if it is also metaphorically true then that means that women must once more make themselves heard. I have participated in several IPs before and the mixed group of students usually spend a great deal of effort exploring national and cultural stereotypes but I never imagined that this time we would be confronted by the much more basic gender stereotypes in such a clear way. So this was one powerful and unexpected lesson from the RECEIVE Intensive Programme for me at least and, I hope, also for the group.

21st century treasure hunt

e-learning, Language learning No Responses »

Apr 202012

I have been exploring the use of SCVNGR to make a location-based treasure hunt using mobile phones. We have now got to the stage where the 6 way points are ready and I went out with the class and their teacher to test the route just over a week or so ago. Being out and actually there alerted the children to some things which needed adjusting. For example they directed us to a road but did not specify where in the road we should head for, so I had chosen a random house to aim for. It’s only by standing in a small group of confused people that it comes home to you that this post really needs tightening up.

One thing which has struck me is the way in which the potential audience for this treasure hunt has grown and grown. When the teacher and I initially discussed it, we foresaw that the other half of the class would be the main users of the game but the children are well aware that in the summer there will be up to half a million people streaming to the local theme park and golf resort and that’s who they want to target!

This means that we now have to devise a little marketing plan about how to make people aware that the game exists as they drive through the village. On our test run, the group I was with decided to visit the local supermarket immediately and ask the manager if he would be willing to put up posters with QR codes to get visitors started and he agreed. So we have a plan!

You can hear more about it at the upcoming Virtual Round Table where I will be presenting the project at 6.30 pm GMT tomorrow Saturday 21st April.

You can find a lesson plan for this activity at The Consultants-E in their repository. Note that although my version has stretched over many months, this activity can in fact be done in a few consecutive lessons.

Calling micro-entreprises!

Learning, Uni-Key No Responses »

Apr 192012

Do you own a micro-enterprise (9 employees or less)? Could you use some help? If so, I would appreciate your help in finding out what would be important when deciding whether or not to take on a foreign intern. Maybe you have never considered it, in which case I would be interested to know why not. It does not matter where in the world you are. I am interested in all responses. The survey will not take more than 5 minutes of your time. Use one of the links below.
English: http://t.co/NmgEJw4K
Danish: http://t.co/yMPAitjp

Start-ups are where it’s at in the entrepreneurial world. In a sense that’s where the glamour is. Think Dragon’s Den, think Silicon Valley, think crowd sourcing of finance through Kickstarter leading to extraordinary stories such as Pebble.

In these uncertain economic times, a sharpened sense of entrepreneurialism would seem to be no bad thing among university students and on the face of it an internship should help. However for most students, when planning an internship, their thoughts turn to the leading companies in their field, the Siemens and the Microsofts of this world, and in many cases this means going to an organisation whose modus operandi is far from the original entrepreneurial spirit which gave rise to it in the first place. So to experience entrepreneurial skills in action it might be better to work in a small company or even a micro-enterprise with fewer than 10 employees; in fact just the type of company which raises money through Kickstarter.

For every Kickstarter company though, there are dozens of micro-enterprises working away quietly and the question is, how does a university student find such companies and what do such companies think of the idea of having an intern in their very small teams or even one-person businesses? An added element is that in Europe students are strongly encouraged to do their internships in another country which adds a language and cultural dimension to the mix.

So let’s find out. What’s stopping you from taking on a foreign intern? You hadn’t though about it? The language barrier would be impenetrable? You’re so busy you don’t have time? You don’t have the finance to pay for an intern? Something else? I need to know.

Full disclosure: The Uni-Key project is developing a very practical and hands-on learning experience which students can follow before, during and after their internship to raise their awareness of the entrepreneurial outlook. Ideally following such a course should also be accompanied by doing your internship in a small or micro-enterprise where contact with the original creator of the company is close and frequent so that what is learned on the course is reinforced by what goes on during the internship. As well as having an advisory board made up of business people, former students and universities, the project is also doing some research into how to make the intern experience more attractive to all parties involved. My responsibility is looking at what factors are important for micro-entreprises when deciding whether or not to accept an intern. And as part of that research I have devised the very quick survey for micro-enterprise owners to complete which is linked above.

If you are interested in following up on the idea of having an intern then I can put you in contact with a great network which makes the process very simple. If you are interested in the results of the survey then watch this space or go to the project website where you can follow our progress and find out more about what we are doing and what we found out from this survey.

But don’t forget to fill in the survey!

Short, sharp globalisation lesson

e-learning, English, Language learning No Responses »

Apr 172012

by the Abode of Chaos http://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/5287303391/

Over the past week I’ve been talking to a European company about being an online teacher of English. Everything seemed to be going well. They liked me. They wanted me on their books. These people seemed professional and fair. The internet is bristling with online language teaching sites. Most of them seem to be thinly disguised dating agencies, while those which really are in the business of language teaching will go as low as $8 an hour in the case of the very worthwhile Glovico which bills itself as Fair Trade language learning.

Then we started talking about a fee. Even though I quoted a price which would immediately raise accusations of cheap labour here in Denmark, that was too much for the company and we have gone our separate ways. That is a problem of living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world which also has the highest taxation rate in the world. Obama pays 20%? Your ordinary Joe or Jørgen here in Denmark pays an average of 40%.

This was never going to be my full time job. I was only looking for a couple of hours a week to keep my hand in. But even I have my limits. I risk being investigated by the tax authorities here for possible fraud if I accept too many assignments under the Danish norm.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you globalisation! I’m not complaining. Just observing.

Digital handshakes

e-learning, Learning, Professional development, Teacher training 1 Response »

Apr 162012

The digital handshake is a critical point in any online interaction. Handled well, it will lead to successful and rich communication. Handled badly, it will take a long time to recover and get group process on track. I am thankful to Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay for this evocative name for a vital part of online collaboration.

I have long admired The Flat Classroom project almost from when it started in 2006. The story of a collaborative project between the US and Bangladesh which just grew and grew is inspiring on many levels. The two teachers, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis, who started the project have just brought out a book on how to get such international projects off the ground called Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time. Having run flat class projects, as they have come to be known after the first project which explored Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, every year since 2006, the two are expert in what works and what doesn’t. I will probably come back to the topic of this book in more depth at a later date because I can see it becoming a classic must-read for today’s educators. The experience is aimed at schools but really transcends age and could work equally well in a university setting as well as all the way down to about fifth grade.

One thing I like about the book is the mix of evidence-based theory and hands-on advice. I’m not done reading the book but one thing which jumped out at me was the idea of a digital handshake. This was the expression used by Davis and Lindsay to describe the importance of the first contact between groups who are going to be working together. The groups in Flat Class projects are always in different countries and so cannot physically meet. Therefore the members of the group only exist if they show signs of contact online. This is a two way process, hence the term digital handshake. Davis and Lindsay give the example of groups sending out emails to their partner groups and not receiving replies. It doesn’t matter if the recipient group has diligently read and prepared their response to the emails or acted on advice or requests made in the emails. If they don’t reply then the sending groups feels as though they have been ignored. They have not grasped the proffered hand in the digital handshake and things get off to a shaky start.

Davis and Lindsay also point out that they have noticed that the groups which get started the fastest are also the groups which get the most out of the projects and end up being the most engaged. I certainly found this with high school students. We were not doing a collaborative project but simply using the institutional LMS/VLE and those students which started posting first were the ones which stayed the course in a literal sense. I learned that I could spot who would need support within the first two weeks of a year long course using contribution to the LMS/VLE as my prime indicator. And in my online teacher facilitation, the first weeks are the ones where the facilitator is most active and most visible and this seems to work well in terms of creating a good group working relationship.

The implication for online projects is that the first weeks need to be extremely active to establish relationships and trust but that the rate of communication can be pared back once that trust is in place.

Scaling up projects

Professional development, Projects, Teacher training No Responses »

Apr 132012

The pilot problem is that you work very hard to develop and test an idea but once the pilot is over you are then faced with the problem of promoting adoption. In European projects where I do a lot of work, there is great emphasis on valorisation to use the rather inelegant name that the EU has given to this process. The need for a new word came about when project networks were mainly satisfied with getting the word out about what they had done whereas the whole point of projects is to blaze a trail for others to follow and adopt and adapt. So just shouting about your wonderful project products and results from a mountain top is not enough, you also have to show that the pilot can be widely embedded and preferably not just in your own instituion. What is needed is some sort of guideline about how to think about this valorisation process especially in terms of educational projects which is what I work on for the most part.

Over at Powerful Learning Practice where I have been flexing my muscles as a Connected Coach, I came across a really neat model to help educators think about what happens after the pilot. The model was developed with the support of Microsoft and can be accessed here. It’s called the scaling framework and divides the valorisation process into a number of different aspects. These are the different dimensions of scaling as described by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on her blog:

————————————————————————————————

Dimensions on scale

Deep and consequential changes in practice (depth)
Transformation change requires you to think deeply and base your design on research in order to understand what causes effectiveness and the change in practice to take hold.
Maintaining these changes in practice over substantial periods of time (sustainability)
Ongoing assessment and retooling based on need and adapting to negative shifts in context.
Diffusion of the innovation to large numbers of users (spread)
Deciding how you will modify to retain effectiveness while reducing resources and expertise required is the hardest part of shift for me. I simply do not want to create “light” versions in the name of helping more and more folks “get it”. I want to keep optimality even though it jeopardizes spread.
Ownership of the innovation assumed by users, who deepen and sustain via adaptation (shift)
This is the most exciting aspect of scale. Watching as the community becomes co-evaluators, co-designers, and co-learners. It is exciting to see how users remix your design into powerful aspects you never thought of during the design phase.
The innovation as revised by its adapters is influential in reshaping the thinking of its designers (evolution) This phase involves relearning from users’ adaptations about how to rethink the model.

————————————————————————————————

It is really worth going over to the Flash tutorial because there you can see the matrix building up and you can then mouseover the different elements and get a feel for what is meant by each cell. I really like the vertical items such as Traps to Avoid and Next Steps to Explore as this really gives a feel for how the matrix could be used in a practical way to move an implementation phase forward. Since my most common role in projects these days is quality assurance, I also think that this would be a great tool to use towards the end of a project when we are facing that massive wall which is valorisation and we are thinking ahead to what on earth we are going to write about in that part of the final report which releases the final tranche of the funding.

Connected coaches strengths

e-learning, Learning, Professional development, Teacher training 1 Response »

Apr 042012

In relation to the PLP Connected Coaching course I now need to address the self-assessment rubric in a bit more detail. The strength-based approach means that I should concentrate on strengths rather than deficiencies and while I don’t feel that I am unduly modest, I must admit that I am not entirely comfortable when applying it to myself. It feels somehow dishonest not to acknowledge the weaknesses. But, strengths only, so here goes!

The strengths I bring to connected coaching include seeing the potential of online tools for the promotion of collaboration, discussion and reflection, using these for co-creation and re-purposing. This includes the use of synchronous tools such as Skype and Blackboard Collaborate. I believe that I have a well-recognized online voice as I have had an online presence for over a decade and certain things such as the foxdenuk handle and my frequently used avatars (there are two) have stabilised.

I also believe that I ”engage in, demonstrate, and advocate for self directed connected learning.” Nothing pleases me more than to see and hear how participants in my tutoring work gradually find their own ways of solving problems and extending their skills. I would also say that I am open-minded after so many years exploring intercultural communication.

I guess this means that I am pretty comfortable using the online medium for coaching as I have been using it for so long and have seen the power of online communication in both training and project management situations.

Connecting & coaching

e-learning, Learning, Professional development, Teacher training 1 Response »

Apr 042012

When you are a course facilitator it is always salutary to go to the other side of the table once in a while. Some of my work involves being a tutor for The Consultants-E, mostly on very intensive 20 week courses. It can be quite difficult for working adults to sustain that level of commitment over such a long period and it is good for me to be reminded of that by reversing roles every so often.

So this morning I am bleary-eyed, as I have been every Wednesday morning over the last nine weeks while taking the amazingly innovative Connected Coaching course. The weekly meetings have been in the middle of the night for me at various times as the world transitions to summer time on different dates and also taking into account that I was not at home and in a different time zone for two of the meetings.

I have experienced the stress of tight deadlines and the feelings of guilt for my, at times, underwhelming contribution on collaborative tasks, but also the exhiliration of working with a great bunch of people, learning a whole lot and being led by extremely competent role models in the shape of Lani Ritter Hall and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach of Powerful Learning Practice.

Over the years I have worked with mentor training and coach training, used the GROW model and the SMART goals model both in theory and in practice. What was different about the Connected Coach approach was the strengths-based, appreciative inquiry approach which in the context of mainstream education, puts the teacher in the role of competent, striving expert rather than deficient, out of date, out of touch victim which is how many teachers feel when leaving traditional professional development events.

This has been a learning by doing experience so at the same time as I was doing my course tasks I also had five school teams for whom I was (still am) coach. I guess that these people are the trail blazers by definition but it has been breath taking to see how competent and how open to innovation these teams are. It made me wish so much that these teams were based at my daughters’ current schools but no such luck as my teams are all based in Canada.

One of the main aims of the Connected Coach course was to explore what the strength-based appreciative inquiry approach would look like when carried out online. And herein lay one of the main problems because the teams are for the most part based in the same building or in the same town and rely on face to face meetings to move forward. This means that there is hardly a digital trace for me, as one of their coaches, to follow and this makes it very difficult for me to get a true picture of where the teams are at. So this meant that I had to do a lot of chasing by email, on their under-used online space, to individuals and to the groups as a whole just to get a picture of where they might be at for now.

The Canadian teams are taking part in another PLP course carrying out Action Research projects and I know that the need for coaches was felt very differently across the teams. That feedback has been very difficult to get however. PLP have been very responsive to our suggestions and will introduce the coaches from the beginning in future iterations. I think that this will work much better and that the coaches will have a much higher chance of being seen as part of the team if they are there from the start.

But where I have had a chance of seeing coaching in action, this has been very impressive. This has happened during the webinars which the Action Research teams attend. Listening in afterwards to the recordings I can only aspire to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s scissor-sharp questioning and driving of the process. I have also seen how it is possible to brainstorm and then focus and drill down to a feasible Action Research question through an asynchronous discussion forum.

Although this is the end of the course, it is not the end of the coaching or the learning process for me. The course without the live coaching would have been pretty theroetical and the coaching without the course would probably have been fairly formless and aimless. The other important element has been the support from the course facilitators, from my buddy coach and from my course colleagues who have been fantastically supportive, insightful and talented. It’s a very powerful package.

For myself, it has been great to have an insight into what teachers are doing in public education and great to see masters in action. Stepping back a little, this seems to me to be a positive way forward into a future which everybody knows will be different to what we have now. Doing it this way means that those most involved are likely to end up with something they are proud of rather than something which they do because it has been mandated by others far removed from the situation on the ground.

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Foxdenuk

iPad field test

Five Tips for Native Speakers

Disappearing women

21st century treasure hunt

Calling micro-entreprises!

Short, sharp globalisation lesson

Digital handshakes

Scaling up projects

Connected coaches strengths

Connecting & coaching