foolfillment: the blog

The week before last I had the fantastic privilege of visiting Islay High School, on the invitation of Ian Stuart. I’ve been pretty busy since and haven’t had the chance to blog about it until now.

The whole time I was impressed with what I saw. The island itself was beautiful but it was what is happening in the school that is really exciting. Anyone who already reads Ian’s blog will know a little about what they are doing and there’s no point me reiterating it here but I’ll try to summarise briefly.
All the teachers have a tablet PC and a wireless projector in every classroom, in the coming session each pupils will be given an Ultra Mobile PC that they will do a majority of their work on. Each day the UMPCs sync all work with the school’s network so no work is lost.
There are clearly loads of opportunities for using all of this technology, but the other changes being made are perhaps more interesting. Rather than a drive towards specialising on one subject area there is more of a push for widening out opportunities for the pupils. One big change to the usual way of working is the removal of age and stage restrictions, by doing this pupils can take new subjects later in school that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, it also means that there are classes all operating at one lever but with different ages of pupils. By doing this there is now more space in the timetable so every Wednesday and Friday afternoon is open for different project activities that the pupils can choose.

I really enjoyed seeing all that was going on and wish I’d had more time there. I think there’s a lot we can all learn so if you haven’t already done so, go and subscribe to Ian’s blog or better still try to arrange a visit to see for yourself. Next session will be really interesting to read about as all the pupils should have their UMPCs, the second batch of which arrived while I was there.

Thanks for letting me come over Ian!