One of the early challenges outlined by the Year 3 team was the inability to tell the whole story of learning for every child. Record keeping procedures and other assessment strategies never had the capacity to take ongoing records of every child in the class. The records that were captured often relied on the adults telling the story – this is hard to scale and impossible to capture every moment of learning that occurs in a busy primary classroom.

NoTosh’s Tom Barrett presented to the senior leadership and teaching teams the idea of being able to search tagged learning reflections from across a whole year group.

“Imagine being able to search an archive of learning reflections captured by the children for the tags “happy” or “struggling” – we could tap into a unique view of a bubbling stream of learning right across school.”

The project kicked off with the whole staff at Rosendale working with Tom Barrett and Ewan McIntosh in an adult learning session titled “Debunking Assessment”. During this session they sought to reset the ideas around traditional assessment practices and challenge what we believe to be important to learning. It also proved a good opportunity for the Year 3 based project to be introduced to everyone and lots of other year groups expressed an interest to be involved especially in the early years.

The central difference between portfolios traditionally collated and this project, is that the focus is shifted from teacher to pupil. By empowering the pupils, in this case Year 3 students, the whole year group is able to collect many more reflections of learning and a much richer portfolio of learning.

In order to do this technology has a key role and once the team had spent a great deal of time establishing the purpose and intent for the project, the technology decisions were easy. Through a shared Evernote account (Evernote is a note taking tool which works across many platforms, Mac OS, iOS, Android and Windows.) the children have individual notebooks in which they can capture moments in their learning using many different devices. It is an ideal tool for a primary classroom filled with lots of different types of technology.

The key to the success of this concept is that the children have an open invitation to reflect on their learning. And this is supported by the provision of a range of technology to do so including:

• iPod Touch
• iPads
• iMacs
• Windows Netbooks

If you were to visit one of the three Year 3 classrooms you would see the children taking pictures of their work, recording audio notes, writing up reflections as well as making short films, using all of these devices.

Tagging the learning notes not only helps organise and archive them properly, making them more searchable in the future, the NoTosh and Rosendale team have been exploring this process as assessment as learning. The decisions around how children should tag their learning is an exciting and challenging discussion. In fact it has led to prototypes of learning tags in place of learning objectives which have often been cited to get in the way of the flow of the lesson.

The children in Year 3 have taken to the project extremely enthusiastically and have recorded over 1000 learning notes in their shared account since they begun. The teachers involved have been continually reflecting on a shared blog on the practical steps needed to be successful, the lessons they have learned and the larger concepts underpinning it all. One teacher remarked during a reflective blog post:

“Some of the points that stuck with me were the issues of printing photos as evidence, being able to capture learning moments and store them to review and assess especially when talking about a child’s progress in a subject. Also, the control of collecting assessment that was very much in the hands of the teacher. I have realised that the iPad has allowed these points to be addressed. We have printed less photos- saving paper and money, we have been able to capture the ‘missed’ learning moments by having flexible technology which allows me to save to an individual’s folder and then I am able to select evidence quickly (using the tags) that potentially show progression.

Above all this, the dialogue about learning that has been exposed has been the most interesting point. If a person has a destination they can plan their steps to get there. It might not be the easiest of routes and there is a chance that failure is around the next bend but if they can reflect on the positive steps and know how to plan from these, they will reach their end goal.”

The assessment project continues this term and Tom Barrett has recently worked with the Reception team to begin implementing a similar structure for record keeping and portfolio building in the early years. Year 6 teams and PE staff will soon be working with Tom to establish the infrastructure for their own learning portfolios.

“In the remainder of the Summer term I am keen to help the Year 3 staff establish the key ingredients that would make this successful in any year group and we will be rolling the portfolios out across the whole school from September 2012. It is a challenging concept with little or no map to follow, the staff have been amazing at not only pushing ahead and exploring what is possible, but reflecting on the steps they take so we can all learn from it. Our next steps involve asking the teachers involved to capture some of the most powerful aspects of the project to date and the impact it has had on pupils in their classes.”

To find out more about the project or if you are interested in working with Tom and the NoTosh team to establish something similar in your school please get in touch.

Ford was Assistant Head at the British School of Amsterdam when he quietly became one of the first teachers in the world to blog in the early 2000s.

In his new NoTosh consultant position, he’ll head up projects at the expanding firm, including a learning programme for one of the world’s largest creative industry companies, developiung The Design Thinking School programme in Australia, Europe and the UK, and continuing his existing engagement with school leaders in his native Northants.

Key to his work will be harnessing his past successes at engaging those who find themselves struggling in traditional education formats, to see how we can engage every potential learner in new experiences, in physical and virtual environments.

The Design Thinking School is NoTosh’s most successful programme to date, taking the creative lessons learned from the firm’s ongoing work with technology startups, film and TV companies, matching them to what current education research says is working in the classroom, and creating high-achieving, student-led classrooms around the world.

Australia is one of the company’s biggest growth market in this respect, as the team lead work throughout nearly 40 schools in both the Brisbane and Sydney Catholic Education Offices, as well as with independent and international schools around the globe. The firm plans to open an antipodean office in early 2013.

Ford began his tenure earlier this year helping design a programme to build learning centres around Scotland; he’s now leading on a new design thinking programme with one of the world’s biggest companies in the creative industries.

“Peter is one of my education heros,” says NoTosh founder Ewan McIntosh. “It had been seven years since I last saw him, working on a European-wide blogging project in 2005, when we needed to pull him in on an ambitious project to rethink the learning experience throughout Scotland’s historical sites. His work was outstanding, his relationship with our clients a class act. Having Peter join us was an easy decision.

“We might be small, but whereas most other educational consultancies have a plethora of part-timers or occasional ‘drop-ins’ for projects, we now have the best mix of full-time, dedicated talent in our niche of creative, education consultancy, of that I have no doubt.”

CV

Consultant
: NoTosh Limited (April 2012)
Harnessing Technologies Manager (Schools)
, Northamptonshire County Council, (September 2009 – December 2011)
Silverstone Study Centre Manager
, Northamptonshire County Council (June 2007 – August 2009)
Senior ICT Consultant,
 ICT4Schools Ltd (Nottingham), (September 2003 – June 2007)
Co-designed a programme to re-engage young people who had been “lost to education”, using technology in particular to give them their first taste of success in what, for them, represented a “make or break” programme.
Managed a three-year technology-based project for the European Centre of Modern Languages in Austria that incorporated educators from 28 different countries.
Assistant Head of Upper School, The British School Of Amsterdam (BSA) Amsterdam (September 1998 – August 2003)

Education
University of Greenwich, 1994-1995 Post Graduate Certificate in Education
Erasmus University Rotterdam & Hull University, 1991-1995 
MA with Distinction, Area Studies – Britain and the Low Countries
Hull University, 1987-1991
 BA (Hons) Modern Dutch Studies

A powerful close to the keynote was asking every participant to commit to their next, pragmatic next action, all of which formed in a multicoloured display of post-it pragmatism around the doors of the venue (above).

So what? Who cares?!
On the 2nd & 3rd March 2012, 540 educators of young children from Sydney Catholic schools came to together for a two-day conference to explore the theme: Inspire, Inquire, Imagine & Create – Teaching and Learning in the Early Years of Primary School. This was the 4th Early Years annual conference held by the Catholic Education Office (CEO) with the goal of providing inspiring and imaginative provocations for teachers and school leaders.

What better way to do this than invite Tom Barrett and Ewan McIntosh from NoTosh to give the keynote on imagining possibilities and creating robust young students?

‘So what, who cares?’ was a challenge mentioned many times throughout the keynote as Ewan encouraged teachers to allow students to justifiably follow their passions and learn via issues that were important to them. This takes courage and self-determination – building robustness as a learner. The Early Years project run by the CEO also requires a robustness of their teachers and themselves. Traditional ways of teaching and the day to day running of schools will not be challenged unless teachers and school systems follow their passions in creating inspiring learning environments for young learners.

CEO teachers are asked to formulate a question of inquiry into their teaching practice that will help them unpack their passion. Just as Tom and Ewan explained the importance of a child being able to answer their own questions, so, too it is important for teachers to investigate areas of their daily practice that they are interested in. Teachers build their knowledge of a child, the syllabus, a content area or contextual issue that is important to them. This form of research or practitioner inquiry helps build field knowledge and exposes possible pathways and horizons that may otherwise have been obscured.

But these banks of new knowledge or understandings go nowhere unless shared with others in a bigger conversation. Tom spoke about “synchronising a community” – using global networks of educators, industry, government and the arts to share in the conversations, help inform each other’s answers in creating deep understanding and ultimately publically sharing passions.

Thanks to NoTosh for an inspiring day, one that filled many with ideas, wonderings and a commitment to following passions. So what – who cares – we do!

Participants learning to prototype with Marshmallows, spaghetti and sticky tape.

In September 2011 I gave a TEDx talk, part of the independently organised TED events, on “The Problem Finders”, my contribution to getting students doing more of the work of learning.

It’s a linguistic nuance that requires significant changes in a teacher’s pedagogy, approach, way of thinking and way of of collaborating. It’s a change that we’re enjoying working through with hundreds of educators on at NoTosh, throughout Australia, the Far East, Europe and, from next year, the USA.

Not on the video, now released by TEDx, is the pledge I was asked to make:

I pledge over this next twelve months to help 10,000 young people discover a problem-finding curriculum, through the development of confidence and skills in their teachers.

Well, with some help from some friends, we did manage to get 10,000 young people discovering a problem-finding curriculum: and we did it in 21 days.

We’re working every week now with schools across the world in building The Design Thinking School, a pedagogical framework that borrows from enquiry-based learning and problem-solving curricula to bring new meaning and relevance to students, and we’re finding that such a framework works regardless of curriculum, country, culture or language. In independent schools with parents wanting top marks, in city schools where students are disengaged, in suburb schools were students are successful but bored… in every case it’s leading to more engaged students and better academic performance, in both elementary and high schools.

These Are “The Problem Finders”:

I’ve been lucky enough to see our education system from several sides. I’ve been a teacher, an education advisor for government and I’ve worked as a talent spotter for TV companies and digital startups in the creative industries. I’ve noticed something in the way that we teach our young people that has a negative knock-on effect on their very ability later in life to contribute to a creative, sustainable world. With my teams of educators all over the world I’ve also seen the impact of a simple mindshift that every teacher in every classroom can make.

When I worked with the television corporation, my job was to seek out ideas that people had come up with and invest in them. The key: they had to find a problem that no-one else had solved. Out of 3000 ideas, this past three years, I think I’ve recommended about 30 of them. That means that our most creative people have about a 1% success rate in finding problems that need solving.

Currently, the world’s education systems are crazy about problem-based learning, but they’re obsessed with the wrong bit of it. While everyone looks at how we could help young people become better problem-solvers, we’re not thinking how we could create a generation of problem finders.

I’ve discovered just how many per cent of our learners are working in a problem finding curriculum. This summer, I met Simon Breakspear, a young educator from Sydney living in Cambrdige. He told me that the biggest headache he had in his current venture was finding a problem that no-one else had looked at. He went on to point out that he had never had to find a problem like this until this very moment, 25 years into his life. Simon was part of the one percent of us who undertake that bastion of quality learning: a PhD.

Another educator and good friend, Alan November, told me story a little later this summer. He once taught a Community Problem Solving course where, on the first day, he set students the task of finding a problem in the local community that they could then go off and solve using whatever technology they had available.From the front row a hand shot up. “Mr November?” began one of the girls in the class. “You’re the teacher, we’re the students. It’s your job to come up with the problems and give them to us to solve.” This was in 1983.

All our students, their parents and the people teaching them, have been indoctrinated that is teachers who sift through all the things we can learn, find the areas worth exploring, and make up theoretical problems for students to solve. On top of this, most educators believe that it is their job to invent problems at just the right level of difficulty to appeal to every one of the 30 children in front of them.

So we see this disingenuous belief that framing fake problems in different coloured books (the pink ones for the clever kids, the yellow ones for those “who need support”) is the best way to create problem solvers.

It is not.

Teachers, for too long, have actually been doing the richest work of learning for their students. Teachers find problems, frame them and the resources young people can use to solve them. Young people get a sliver of learning from coming up with ideas, based on some basic principles upon which the teacher has briefed them, and the teacher then comes back on the scene to run the whole feedback procedure.

How about something different?

In the classrooms in which I work, students explore the twenty or so themes upon which our planet really depends, immerse themselves in the ideas and information their teachers, peers and whole communities can impart, find the problems they feel are worth solving, theorise which ones will work and then try them out in a prototype. In their world, we don’t just write an essay or create yet another wiki or blog to describe what our idea is, but we actually build the solution to the problem with our own hands – in this case, these seven year olds built the world’s youngest TEDxKids event, and talked about their research and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing – or simply most interesting – problems. Do animals talk? Do babies have a secret language? Which cancer should we invest in curing first? Why do slugs needs slime?

Others in a Brisbane primary school we’re working chose to explore living for 24 hours without technology to immerse themselves not just in what makes technology so vital, but also the challenges and problems to our wellbeing that technology brings.

It takes courage for a teacher to let go of the reins of learning sufficiently to inspire problem finding where no textbook, teacher or standardized test knows the answer, where the teacher’s voice is but one of 30, 300 or 3000 others chipping in, guiding, coaxing and coaching through the ether. But this kind of learning surpasses the depth of thinking demanding by any traditional textbook, teaching or standardized test.

I began with a story about my friend Alan’s class, his students protesting that “he was the teacher, and they were the students”. Well, he persisted. After a year of problem-finding, those students insisted on the school opening up over the summer vacation so they could continue to find problems and solve them. When a new computer arrived, a student broke into school over the vacation – he didn’t break in to steal the computer, but to practice coding it. It’s rare we hear of students breaking into school to learn. But, I guess that’s what Problem-finding does to people.

Photo credits: Sophia Schorr-Kon 1 | 2

Over the next six weeks we are looking for small and medium sized businesses in a wide range of business sectors who have a challenge that technology – and some bright thinking – could solve.

To help create some new enterprises around these problems, we’re also looking for smart technologists and creative designers with whom these businesses from around Scotland can team up.

Small and medium sized businesses, technologists and creative thinkers need to form a team – big or small. They must include:
1. a problem that needs solved from an industry partner outside the realm of technology and tech startups
2. someone who can build technology solutions

We’re encouraging potential team members to meet and work through the challenges they find at one of four StramashLabs around Scotland: design thinking camps to get to the root of the problem and source potential solutions that can increase the bottom line of the companies involved.

Ideas can also be submitted online and, if they impress the judges, the best ones could win an amazing prize of worth over £20,000, ranging from business development, marketing and pitching advice, to help turn their idea to a reality.

Any Scottish business, technologist, potential mentor or investor can sign up for a StramashLab, float their idea, form a team with an industry partner and a geek and present their idea to the judges.

Here are some ideas around the kinds of problems and solutions that we might find, if we can get the right mix of business together:
a) You could build a digital app that helps the food and drink sector reach new customers
b) You could design a range of textiles that charge the products the wearer carries
c) You could create an app that helps you measure how much electricity you are using
d) You could make an app for the financial sector that helps you measure how much you spend
e) You could manufacture a product that enables you to survey your own home
We are actively seeking a range of partners from different sectors who want to work with technologists. If you’re in one of the following sectors, please sign up as an industry partner!
◦ aerospace
◦ chemical science
◦ construction
◦ energy
◦ financial services
◦ food and drink
◦ forest and timber
◦ manufacturing
◦ technology
◦ textiles
◦ tourism
◦ creative industries

The competition takes entries online until 5pm on the 19th March.
What are you waiting for? This is your chance to put Scotland on the map.
Stop dreaming. Start Doing.
www.stramashlabs.com

The leaning away from talkshop and into seeing what this group of entrepreneurs could help make happen added ever more increased sense of urgency. We covered vast ground once more, and once more the Commission’s capacity to explain these critical issues of digital inclusion, education and entrepreneurial support in plain, simple, appealing language came to the fore. Commissioner Kroes has updated her own blog with many of the ideas that stemmed from the discussions we led.

By the end of the day, there were several actions that remained strong in my mind:

1. You said we did
   On many of the school rebuild projects I’ve been on, the construction firm will show that they are learning from the client’s feedback with a board, outlining what the client asked for, and what they firm did about it. A similar “You said we did” wall would help meetings like this, and consultations with the public and with industry, to pick up from the last interaction they had together, rather than recapping old ground unnecessarily.
2. Kill the project
   What would happen in terms of entrepreneurial success in Europe if the significant ‘spend’ of the EU on projects was instead ‘invested’ in funding potential businesses? I’d like to see that mindshift, with demonstrable changes in the way that calls to action for funding are marketed: they should be marketed to entrepreneurs in the same way the great incubators and accelerators do.
3. Insist on entrepreneurs advisors in project teams
   Entrepreneurs do not stand on an equal footing to academia in the funding of European projects, particularly in R&D. What would happen if entrepreneurial skills were valued on an equal basis to where academia stand currently, to increase chances of a) finding better projects and b) increasing the chances of their sustainability and survival at project end date?
4. Insist on PR/sharing to begin on projects from day one
   Portal pages are not enough. We need learning logs, regularly updated with the goings on of funded projects, every week, so that similar projects can find each other and avoid duplication, and so that business outside the funding model can look in and potentially partner up at a later date to commercialise what has been discoved. These activities, though, also have a somewhat PR role: they should make it clear what is in the project for a particular european-wide set of citizens.
5. Create a clear language simple English policy on all research
   Tag research and make it highly searchable for startups who could make ideas viable products and services.
6. Make curating action through projects an EU mission
   The curatorial power of the EU is immense – if only it were harnessed to the maximum. One might consider doing more smaller pieces, but joining them up so much better to realise the economies of scale that we should be.
7. Provide incentives for enterprise and public authorities with empty space to open it to Startups and other businesses
   Offer profile, attraction of euro talent or hard cash tax benefits to Local Authorities who give up space that’s not being used anyway. No startup should be investing half its cash in rent. It should be investing in finding the best talent to make their idea a reality.
8. Insist on high minimum standard for all new home builds to include 30mbps connections
   It’s unacceptable that new properties are not plumbed in to a network that will match the homeworking needs of 2020.

“…Our experience of working with NoTosh on this project has been a real success. From the initial development stage of the project, through the planning and delivery and up to launch NoTosh has worked as part of the team. Tom and Ewan quickly understood our needs and company values and Tom has helped to produce a site that has exceeded all our expectations!” Andrea Carr, MD, Rising Stars

http://www.switchedonict.co.uk

Switched on ICT is an innovative and creative new scheme of work from Rising Stars which enables teachers, regardless of their confidence and experience, to really put ICT at the heart of their teaching. Find out more about the Switched on ICT scheme and download a free sample unit.

Launching at the BETT educational technology trade show the Switched On Community site supports new and existing users of the Rising Stars scheme by providing a:

• Platform for contributing new ideas and examples of work from the classroom.
• An opportunity to connect easily with fellow teachers from around the world who are using the scheme in their schools.
• A space for anyone to share great ideas and resources for the teaching of primary ICT.

NoTosh’s Tom Barrett led a partnership once again with the talented design company Telaco who handled the development of the ITU Metaconference site which proved so successful in October of 2011. The Switched On community site was built around the community and ideas at it’s heart. Clearly tagged and categorised ideas are easily accessible and the author profile for teachers sharing contributions clearly displays further links to social media contacts, websites and blogs.

Although primarily designed for the Switched On ICT user the site will be an excellent resource for anyone to find and contribute ideas of great primary ICT going on in their classroom. The Rising Stars team will be choosing STAR posts every two weeks to be featured throughout the company’s blogs and social media and the school involved will receive a small prize as well.

The site was developed rapidly in under 3 months and already has some excellent examples from teachers using the scheme in their schools. For example Jack Sloan from Ferry Lane Primary School has shared some of the work his Year 6 pupils have completed from unit 6.4 – ‘We are web developers’. Here is a snippet from Jack’s post on the community site:

“…we created websites which linked with our topic on Ancient Egypt. The kids began using Weebly, which was new to me, and were very quickly exremely adept users. They considered audience, content, design and copyright; they peer-reviewed their websites; they thought about how to promote their websites and how to add the basic html coding that they brought with them from blogging; they discussed media, scanning and uploading artwork; they thought about how to write for the web; they looked at other websites and analysed their content. They did some of this at school, but their work was largely done at home, undirected.”

Andrea Carr the Managing Director of Rising Stars shares some of her thoughts about the community site and working with NoTosh:

“Working with external consultants can be a bit hit and miss, but our experience of working with NoTosh on this project has been a real success. From the initial development stage of the project, through the planning and delivery and up to launch NoTosh has worked as part of the team. Tom and Ewan quickly understood our needs and company values and Tom has helped to produce a site that has exceeded all our expectations!”

–

We’ve also had some early feedback from teachers using the community site:

“After finding out about this community where it is possible to share examples etc may be this will be the most powerful feature of the Switched On ICT Schemes.”
David Mitchell, Deputy Headteacher, Heathfield Primary School

“Love the site – really professional and easy to access stuff.”
Jack Sloan, ICT Lead teacher and Year 6 classteacher, Ferry Lane Primary School

The most rewarding teaching experience I’ve ever had”
Class teacher  |  
St Francis Xavier Primary School, Brisbane

25 teachers and the entire education department team participated in intensive kick-off sessions over two days in June 2011, before embarking on individual and whole-school action research projects over five months, supported online by the NoTosh team and each other. They explored how students in both primary and high school could take more control for their learning through the planning, thinking, research and prototyping skills promoted in design thinking.

Now, as we head into 2012 we will continue working with new schools throughout the city, harnessing several of the staff who have been through the action research process as coaches. The Department has also created online and offline support material to help spread practice even further through the community.

The five-stage design thinking process provides a useful set of tools for co-designing a curriculum with students, parents, colleagues and even the wider community.

We took participants through the four-part Design Thinking process, with an additional concentration on how ongoing feedback and formative assessment can be best harnessed throughout learning. We then had them prepare their ‘pitches’ for change, in order to take their compelling one-classroom-at-a-time or one-school-at-a-time practice and spread it beyond their own walls (Pitch 1, Pitch 2, Pitch 3, Pitch 4, Pitch 5)

Why try this framework?

• It provides a useful structure for the learner to know where they are in the learning journey without needing told.
• It provides choice to the learner in what they’re going to learn, and how – the student needs to work out what knowledge and understanding they’re lacking in order to achieve what they want to achieve.
• It places the responsibility for finding a compelling area to learn and an interesting approach to learning it firmly in the hands of the learner.
• It always presents the whole game of learning, the big picture, even if students have to learn some ‘expert elements’ along the way, they see where they slot in to a bigger, more epic problem they are trying to solve.

1. Immersion: Observation and Empathy

Tom: At Mount Vernon School in the United States, as part of the ITU Telecom World conference that we helped to reinvent with the participation of 10,000 young people through design thinking, one picture sticks in my mind. As part of the empathy phase young students, no more than six or seven years old, carried water, large canisters of water, from home to school. They had pain on their faces, sweat pouring down their cheeks. All this to better understand what it’s like. Because they did that, they thought up better products, through a broader range of solutions.

Ewan: It’s hard to teach that empathy/observation part. Teachers want to cover what they feel they want to cover. But empathy and observation is going to go beyond what you need to cover in any six week period, because this isn’t a six week project. It’s a way of working, a way of learning that frees up so much time later in the year or in the child’s school career, with enough cooperation between schools. I wonder whether this is why 3-18 schools, independent mostly, are able to better understand the potential time saving and the ability to reduce the repetition most school students have to put up with.

Cassie: The immersion stage is a very difficult stage. It’s not about generating a solution, drawing in a sketchbook, or Googling ideas or finding information. It’s about finding emotions, people’s feelings, finding empathy for the problem.

Miriam: When we were in that immersion stage and we were really trying to create that empathy, we were trying to get out of the students their feelings, what they thought about it and then what action can we take to be better? It was sort of empowering to them to see that they can do something about it. It’s not just your teachers, your parents your school, you can actually go out there and do something about it.

2. Synthesis

Immersion encourages us to keep adding, adding, adding to the mess of knowledge and understanding we’re gaining on a given subject, and then the process of synthesis can finally take place, where some order appears. It’s a spell, between divergent thinking of immersion and coming up with ideas, where you’re naturally heading towards more convergent thinking.

Miriam: The first question we started with, which I thought sounded epic but wasn’t sure about, was “How might we read more?”.

How do we read, what do we read, and where do we read. And it was the “Where we read” that caught their imagination. We talked about how they read at school – around a green desk, in groups of six. We went on an adventure and started looking at all these amazing reading spaces. It got them out of their bubble. Out there, people have amazing reading spaces that they have access to, and we don’t. They really had this sense of “we deserve that as much as anyone else”. That took us to our next question: “How might we persuade corporate business to provide an amazing reading space for us?”

Ewan: Key to synthesis is the Project Corner. While schools often have student work on display, it’s the final draft of their work. It serves no learning purpose as by the time it’s up the children have moved on to learning about something else.

Miriam: At the beginning of our project we set up a project corner, and once we had those immersion elements up on the corner we were able to starting bringing things together. We used some of the techniques: combinations, opposites…

Then there were the outliers. There weren’t a lot of these, and you knew that they belonged somewhere else, but you were still able to have them there.

3. Ideation

Miriam: Ideation is trying to get the students to be what you’ve always wanted them to be: risk takers. Any idea is a good idea. it might be a far out idea but sometimes there’s a little part of that that you might be able to bring back to something else. We had so much fun looking back at different concepts, and asking ourselves what we want again, talking about the reading spaces that they wanted. Their ideas were amazing.

Cassie: During the ideation phase we brainstormed some of the ideas around our problem: “How might we make multiplication more fun?”

Kelly: We had an ideas quota – where the children were asked to come up with 100 ideas in a 10 minute time slot.

Anthony Lucey, Principal, Our Lady of Delours Catholic Primary School: Ewan talks about listening to people who are different to school and listening with new eyes and I think that’s the thing about generating new ideas. Tapping into our freedom to come up with new ideas. Encouraging us to think big and not to be limited by what we think are the constraints of our ideas. It’s reignited my passion for the fact that kids can do anything. What we’re doing with learning communities in our schools is the opportunity for kids to be passionate enthusiastic committed learners who can take risks and ultimately make changes.

4. Prototyping and Feedback

Prototyping from Danielle Carter on Vimeo.

Miriam: When we started out our project and we got through to the prototyping phase, that’s where we needed to convince administration that we really needed a secret (reading) space within our school. We had to make a presentation to our administration team. The kids had to learn how to inject empathy into what we’re doing, but they also had to have data to support what they were doing. They were learning about not just asking for something and getting a result. They had to realise that there was every chance that the answer would be ‘no’ and that if the answer is no that’s not a failure. We just have to go back to the drawing board and work out how we’re going to go about making it.

How can we make sure that what they’re doing is really their own work, and not something that as a teacher I’ve contracted and said that they must do it?

Ewan: When I went to New Brunswick on a teaching tour and saw how they did French immersion, a key part of the process was keeping a learning log, or a journal de bord. In it you write down what you think you’ve learned, what you think you want to do tomorrow, and what you have to do between now and then to be able to do what you want to do. Vitally, keeping this log up to date is in the student’s hands. It’s nearly always self or peer initiated, it’s not the teacher telling them to do this. And the minute you have generated a culture of self-reflection it can happen anywhere – on the bus, at home, or in the classroom. You’ve finally freed the student from only being able to learn in a classroom.

If you look at it from a teacher’s point of view, the whole notion of being a teacher is that you are self-reflective. And sharing that reflection isn’t an extra. It’s absolutely part and parcel of being part of a profession. Every other profession shares through journals, conferences or online. In teaching, it’s a minority who share what they do, publicly. I don’t think one can call oneself a professional if you don’t share what you’re learning and doing differently with your colleagues, at scale. And that means more than teaching once a year at a conference. Most teachers could manage five minutes at the end of a day to write down the one thing they have learned that day, on a blog.

Kate Campbell: I have really enjoyed it. It has really challenged me to think of things really differently. I like to have control and I like to know what’s going on, and through my degree that’s been the thing that everyone said: “You’re really organised” etc etc. It was really a big challenge for me to step back and give up some of that control. But that has been the most useful learning experience ever.

I can sit there and try to create resources for them to get engaged and motivated, and get frustrated when it doesn’t happen. Whereas if I sit with them and talk with them and spend quality time with them working with them working towards something of quality that’s they’re learning and you’re enjoying the whole process of learning.

5. 8-minute Overview of the NoTosh Design Thinking School process

Design Thinking Brisbane from Danielle Carter on Vimeo.

Some of Dell’s Education team leaders, including Bob Moore and Adam Garry joined NoTosh’s Ewan McIntosh and Tom Barrett facilitating discussion about the changing educational landscape. The discussions were framed by those attending and contributing live via Twitter and covered many areas including:

• What are your happiest and least happy moments of learning?
• Is school setup for serendipity?
• How can we make learning more efficient in schools?
• What is the role of collaboration in schools?
• Can we sacrifice grades for happiness and confidence?

Throughout the day the group connected with educators from the US who recently participated in a similar Think Tank, sharing best practices, ideas and thoughts back and forth across the Pond and from around the world.

The team at Dell Education did a great job of capturing the day using Storify which you can see below:

All pics by Dell

In late 2011, for the United Nations agency for ICT, we designed and delivered an innovation competition and accelerator programme for young entrepreneurs and not-for-profits whose ideas could solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. The idea was developed in partnership with Katz Kiely, long-time NoTosh collaborator on education and creative industries programmes.

Shortlisted participants developed their nascent idea into a workable business model through our workshops, and delivered a pitch to an audience of global leaders in technology. One of the winning pitches was Andrew Benson-Greene’s, and he was given CHF 8500 to take his idea to its first prototype.

The “Digital Hope” programme has now been unveiled in the Northern suburb town of Makeni, at the Oslo amputee camp. The B-Gifted Team journeyed from the Sierra Leone capital Freetown, some considerable distance to the project site, with technology and expertise that can now bring a voice to the victims of amputation, who are largely marginalised from mainstream ICT, and as a result do not get equal access to education and services. The Chairman at the Oslo Camp, thanked the B-Gifted Foundation for putting into reality a dream centre. He said that ‘these technologies will help them to share their pains and hope with the rest of the world’.

Prejudice

Andrew Benson-Greene, pictured left, above, explained in his video pitch why this technology issue was key to opening up services and education to large numbers of amputees in Sierra Leone:

Even though many amputees could work despite their injuries, prejudice in Sierra Leone often means they are passed over for jobs. It’s a double blow for those who have been victims of the war, and are still held-back by the past.

From the time peace was declared in Sierra Leone in 2002, leading to the holding of elections, the country has been graded as one of the poorest in the world, hugely depending on international aid for survival, and meaning help for war victims has become one of the serious challenges in the country.

Over 50,000 people died as a result of the war, with thousands of people having their hands and legs chopped off and many more people displaced. Although there is peace across the entire country currently, most of the war victims, amputee survivors of war, still cannot live as normal human beings. Even though many have professions in wood carving, farming, capentary, Honda maintenance, gara dying and so on, they can hardly make a good living without a way to sell their products.

A “unique chance to communicate”

An amputee Mohamed, who is a student at one of the Higher Institutes of Learning in Makeni Town, noted that “the challenges we face as amputees are huge and nobody seems to have time for us, not even government, but with these technologies we expect soon, and the opportunity created, we will ourselves informed and share our voices so others around the world can hear us and know our plight”.

Another student, Archippus T. Sesay, said that “these technologies will help us at the time when many people in Sierra Leone feel or believe that having time for amputees would only waste their time or make life more uncomfortable for them in their current harsh conditions”. He added that “with the thought of the unique chance to communicate now, with these technologies and support created by B-Gifted and ITU, we are full of hope, even as much as we were full of hope when the 11-year conflict ended in 2002”.

Archippus affirmed that “our major challenges are discrimination against getting access to education and health, and gaining employment, and this can be achieved through ICT.”

Andrew Benson-Greene, after attending the design thinking and business workshops run by NoTosh and receiving investment from the ITU, said that “in a country with very severe economic and social challenges, this is even more of a challenging situation when it comes to amputees and disabled people in the country”. He said that “for us Sierra Leoneans, we need to help our fellow compatriots who as a result of a decade of brutal civil war and carnage that has left behind thousands of maimed children, women and men, we must not make this disability of amputee a distant notion anymore but to think it as a reality close to our hearts and work hard to help them, or else the reality of suffering will continue.

“I believe that these technologies will help to inform, educate and change the lives of people from these established amputee camps.”