Programme Notes L4LTV Programme 3 - February 2014 !

BETT INTERVIEWS! The L4LTV programme has not appeared for a few weeks because I have been involved with establishing joint projects with teachers and institutions to do with content making for the station. I have also been working on updating the design and look of the whole programme.!

! CONTENT IS KING ! ! !

However, like the monarchy, access is restricted. Content has been the stumbling block - getting permissions and signoffs for it and/or just getting video and audio from teachers has been half the battle.! Teachers are busy people - anyone who has tried to doorstep or cold call teachers in schools never really gets it; teachers are just too involved in the process of teaching and planning to be available at the drop of a hat unless its them doing the dropping and that will entail a whole set of school-based contexts to happen before they can become involved. Only very eager and dedicated people will put themselves forward at an early stage in this project. It is building that rst base of media savvy teachers that this whole enterprise is about.!

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Making content is time consuming and technically difcult. Writing a blog is a breeze compared to the process of making a good lm. I have seeded, with the help of Iris-Connect, Igloo in Education, Rising Stars and Computing at School, lighting, audio and cameras to be sent out to several teachers. They have been busy making content or learning to make content. It is a slow and timeconsuming process and we are making headway but very slowly. Life/ work gets in the way.! I'm happy to say that, out of this, have come a few fruitful collaborations. A teacher-to-teacher TV station needs content, a lot of it, on a regular basis but it also needs to come from teachers themselves not just me. So putting in solid foundations for this, is my main concern no matter how long it takes over time. All this also needs careful archiving which I have yet to crack but Im working on some software solutions.!

! ! TEACHERS USING GREEN SCREEN TECHNOLOGY TO PRESENT ! !

So I'm pleased to include the lm from Ashley Williams of the rst day's training we did at the University of Northampton. I will be blogging about each of the features in this month's L4LTV 3 separately, each day, from the programmes release. The TV Programme is merely a brief magazine view of what is happening in CPD up and down the country. The longer form video of the rst days feedback from training has taken the time this month.!

SCIENCE LEARNING CENTRES CPD!

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Dr Carol Davenport and her team, especially John Swinburn, responded very quickly to my request for content. They made, in my opinion, exactly one of the sorts of things I am looking for in their concise, informative lm about CPD in Science Learning Centres in York.! L4LNews is trying to drill down into the subject associations and make active links with teachers involved with CPD whom we think are doing interesting CPD in the classrooms, schools and wider institutions. The process is then to either lm them or provide them with resources to lm themselves or get allied sponsors or organisations to lm them and then disseminate this as widely as possible.! I thought to go down the route of offering to lm annual conferences and this is one rich seam but I am nding more and more that the people who are on twitter and actively blogging about that they do, are the rst ones I follow at grass roots level before they even get to show at conference. The communication with them is more immediate and they seem to understand the model.! I do think there should be plenty of top down initiatives as well but there needs to be an open and active dissemination of practice from the grass roots rst; that is where the most interesting activity always starts.! I have found several subject associations to be a little hard to communicate with and, mentioning no names, theres been a certain amount of gatekeeping going on. There are only several times I will try this route and then I just wont bother - its too time consuming, bureaucratic and not very agile - organisations have to be atter and more agile to be able to take advantage of L4LTVs services when we offer them for free. ! I do understand that we can be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion but as everything we do is free (people do sometimes pay us!) and open to scrutiny and criticism and a right of reply, then I cant really see what holds people back from making decisions or putting barriers in the way.!

Fortunately Carol and her colleagues were more than willing to take up the challenges of making videos about CPD and we are happy to collaborate and give airtime to anyone in subject specialist elds who wants a platform for their CPD!

! MONTHLY LIVE VIDEO STREAM BROADCASTS! ! !

So much is happening in the education world right now and not very much of it is covered by mainstream media. They tend to go for the big targets and easy options; they dont want a nuanced, more granular insight into what is happening. That isnt their role but it is one of my aims - it may prove too large a task but I am rebooting a few services from the start of March.! Another reason I started up the station is to cover such issues and events in a deeper way but the magazine format of the L4LTV productions cant possibly go into such depth so L4LTV's live streams service broadcasts between 2 - 4 events every month now. Some organisations pay us and some we do for free depending on their budget (nil usually).!

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From March onwards we are working on bringing people a more frequent news broadcast service using video and audio around the issues of the day that are emerging. Some will be quick ephemeral, short pieces; others will be more in-depth looks at one issue only.!

! ! TOUCHPAPER PARTIES! ! ! !

The other thing L4LTV is aiming to do is cover events that will never be seen on mainstream media - two cases in point recently were the TeachFirst Seminar featuring Dr Robert Coe and Laura McInerneys Touchpaper Party (http://lauramcinerney.com/2013/12/08/announcing-the-1sttouchpaper-problem-solving-party/ ) that emerged out of a seminar she gave at that ResearchED conference last year.! Part of the process of making and archiving media is to keep a record of activity in and around emerging trends in education and, where possible, I want to document these stirrings of reection on pedagogies that might work based on current research (or research that needs to be done!).! At the TouchPaper party I was able to record the audio from the day from two of the 7 groups involved - you can hear the whole process from beginning to end in separate audio les here. (https://soundcloud.com/l4lnews/sets/touchpaper-party-audio)This should help give people an insight into what was a fairly ad hoc process but turned out to be a one that could lead to applying for research through the EEF (Education Endowment Fund) and further modication of the process in bringing teachers together to pool expertise to determine possible ways forward.!

This section of the programme shows brief interviews with the people organising and attending the day. It is almost impossible to capture the avour of the day using media but as a taster for those

interested in taking things further you know who the main players are and can get in touch if interested. !

! MINECRAFT AT BURNT OAK JUNIOR SCHOOL! ! ! ! ! !

A lot of what I do is to search out practice that may not be easily replicable but is of interest to individuals who may want to go down similar routes or to modify and adapt activities that arent shrink-wrapped or run of the mill standardised content that t easily into the traditional curriculum. ! These necessarily involve cross-curricular exemplars involving people with a lot of knowledge and expertise but doing things that are atypical. The arts have taken a back seat and been somewhat marginalised in recent years so here is chance to showcase possible ways forward in some contexts and subject domains.! The installation of a MineCraft server at Burnt Oak Junior School is a case in point. I have been following developments at the school over the last two terms and seen the progress of the resource over time.! The ICT teacher Peter Barrett has now involved students from the local drama school to help enrich childrens written and spoken language within the school by way of the King Midas story from Ovids Metamorphoses. The project involved several people with expertise coming together to contribute to a showcase day where the performance could take place. ! People like Adam Clarke, a MineCraft artist/ coder recently shortlisted for the Tates IK Prize; Mike Jupp the Local Authority Computer expert who helped install the server (when I last met him he showed me how to control an Arduino buggy hed built with his mobile phone!). Peter Barrett whose ICT and computing experience stretches back decades and Ive never known him to rest on his laurels (where most research shows that teachers peak after 2 or 3 years Ive never known Peter not to be involved in some ground breaking innovative project that involves a fair amount of risk!). I merely helped lm the day.!

Whatever your opinions on this approach to learning in the Primary sector - have a look at the lm and remember all the work that may not be evident that has gone into making the day a success with the school community as a whole. I wish that the project could have had a researcher from beginning to end to document properly the process and outcomes. !

! Genevieve Smith-Nunes - CAS Master Teacher Series! ! ! ! ! ! !

As part of the ongoing Master Teacher interviews Im doing - this week it is Genevieve SmithNunes whose readysaltedcode organisation has just been awarded a prestigious Google RISE award.! As part of the Computing at School Sponsorship I am doing 13 interviews with Master Teachers between now and September 2014.! Each interview with each Master Teacher is fully transcribed and a free book of all the interviews will be released in the Summer Term. ! Genevieve is another teacher who works across the curriculum and is well placed to co-opt people from the computing and games industries to build arts and code based projects. ! I hope the next edition of the programme wont take so long - I have been assiduously learning more and more about Final Cut Pro and Im getting faster day on day. Keep sending me your content please.!

! Leon Cych ! !

leon@L4L.co.uk!

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