The Purpose of Education

A Two-Way Street
Yesterday, I visited a group of 8 and 9 year old children taught by Peter Rafferty at Green Park School. I came home and deleted all I had written in several days of planning this blog post.

The way in which the children conducted themselves and the work they shared left me astounded. Several pupils discussed and explained their work and one boy took to the interactive whiteboard for 15 minutes to give a relaxed and proficient demonstration of how he customises his WordPress blog, adds his own widgets and edits the html code.

Only this weekend I had been discussing with other teachers whether WordPress was a suitable blogging tool for children of this age, and several teachers held the view that WordPress was too complicated. The pupils I met yesterday demonstrated with great aplomb that this is not the case. They made me view things differently and see previously unknown possibilities. That is, for me, the purpose of education.

Opening Minds
I was lucky to be brought up in a home where books were plentiful, school was supported and hard work expected (although as a teenager ‘lucky’ is not a word I would have used). However, my experiences as a teacher, particularly my time as head of year, have taught me that this is not the case for many children.

Someone* recently tweeted that during a reading survey, some children indicated that they had no books in their house. This is the reality for a large section of society for whom sensational and imbalanced red-top media, which serves merely to perpetuate stereotypes, is the only acceptable reading material.

For the young people, and indeed adults, for whom this is the case, education can and should help them to think more broadly about previously unknown topics, enabling them to see the possibilities of what they can achieve and encouraging them to fulfil their potential.

Education, for so many people, is their escape route; a way out of poverty, abuse or a lifetime of mediocre achievement and happiness. However, many young people do not have the confidence in either themselves or those adults around them to enable them to see this. It is very daunting for students who would like to break out of the mold that society and their upbringing has created around them. Education can ensure that they are given access to ways in which they can take alternative paths and help them to construct a roadmap to guide them through the minefield of life.

Giving young people, and adults, the confidence to think for themselves, challenge widely held opinions and present their ideas in a coherent and persuasive manner are all, in my view, key purposes of education.

Thus, supported, relaxed and collaborative learning environments in which children are encouraged to try new ideas and see different possibilities in their world, are essential components of any formalised education system. This was demonstrated deftly in the classroom I visited yesterday and I look forward to seeing them again to continue my own education.

*If it was you, please let me know and I’ll credit you!

Google Apps for Education UK User Group #GUUG11

Image cc Graeme Fowler

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Google Apps for Education UK User Group or #GUUG11 organised by Martin Hamilton at Loughborough University.

It was a fantastic event and a great opportunity to hear and discuss how Universities such as Loughborough and Portsmouth have rolled out Google Apps for EDU. Niall Sclater, the Director of Learning Innovation at the The Open University gave a particularly engaging discussion of how his organisation has adopted Google Apps for their students.

Similarly, it was interesting to hear from Jaguar Land Rover about how their business has migrated to Google Apps and given that the scale of these organisations is very different from the schools and businesses I usually work with, very informative. Much of the focus for these larger organisations was naturally, on the migration and use of Gmail as opposed to the entire Apps suite, so I look forward to hearing more in the future about how some of the innovative and collaborative practices that are going on in schools can be utilised at University level.

Interestingly, most Universities had also rolled out Apps to their students first, which replicates experiences in schools where students are the driving factor in change and Google is talking their language.

From a personal perspective, using Google Books , particularly the awe inspiring fact that over 15million books are now available to search and read online, and Youtube for Edu remain exciting opportunities for all educational organisations. Understandably, given the audience demographic, there was much interest in these fantastic resources during the panel session.

In fact, the opportunity to meet the hugely enthusiastic Google Apps for EDU team again was great, especially the open question and answer session at the end of the day. As someone mentioned yesterday, the opportunity to hear it from the horse’s mouth is invaluable when dealing with the ever-evolving innovation of Google Apps.

The Google team were keen to point out that they are focusing on usability improvements and that there will be many more exciting Google Apps announcements in the coming months. Great!

From a staff and productivity point of view, the ability for users to use Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office to sync their office documents to Google Apps is a great move and the promise of the reintroduction of being able to access Docs offline using HTML5, both of which which will be rolled out later this year.

Overall it was a suberb event, organised in a brilliantly slick and understated manner by Martin Hamilton and his great team who could teach many event organisers a thing or two.

In terms of my own presentations, I demonstrated using Google Labs in the Open Mike slot and shared the stage with Mark Allen to discuss how Google Apps for EDU is being used in primary and secondary schools. My slides for my second presentation are below.