Posted by: carlsumner | February 20, 2021

Reflection and Focus

If nothing else, a year of sitting at home has allowed for more reflection than a hall of mirrors, and with such introspection has come a greater sense of purpose in putting words and thoughts into actions and deeds.  On a personal level, an improved focus on health and well-being with regular focussed exercise (skipping and swimming!) and better eating habits, including turning vegetarian again, has definitely helped fill the void that has come from far fewer social interactions.

But what about the wider world? What impact can we have on those lives around us? Keeping a positive mindset and a supportive ear to anyone who needs it is a responsibility that we should all share if we endeavour to make our society a better place to live and grow. As role models, helping others to see the benefits to an outlook that is both forward-facing and cooperative is far more powerful than fuelling negativity and consequence for perceived poor decisions or mistakes that people may make. We need to identify what it is that is within our control, and allow ourselves the freedom to remove negative thoughts and feelings from those things that you cannot.

What is this life, if not our one and only opportunity to endeavour and explore the world and attempt to understand what it means to be a human being?  Do our children understand this? Do they have a sense of the preciousness that this life offers them and the delicate nature of what is presented for us all? Are we open to any and all opportunities for every single one of us or do we close our minds to the possibility of hope and expectation that a new life should be born with?

To begin, we must demonstrate and embrace this mindset for ourselves, where we allow ourselves the time to consider who we are and what direction we would like our lives to travel in.  What are we doing to enable this? Do we surround ourselves with people who feed into our positive energy and support the decisions that we make?

Make a conscious decision to enable an aspect of your life that brings you both happiness and a positive outlook.  What can you do that improves upon your health and well-being both in the short-term (less sugar?) and then moving forward sustainably (no red meat?). Do you ever record your thoughts and feelings? How do you find the time to express yourself and develop your personality? Try and focus on what your strengths are (if you’re not sure ask someone close to you) and the things that you enjoy, and then challenge yourself to do more of that.

Only when we start to identify the way forward for ourselves can we begin to support and help others.  Ultimately, we need to foster a sense of spirit and togetherness within our own communities that will then come to benefit future generations with a shared outlook on life that embraces what we have and enables the creation of better opportunities for all. ❤️🌈

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Posted in Community, Education, Health, Social

Posted by: carlsumner | February 17, 2021

Moving Forward With Strength

Such a long time since posting but I’m determined to be more consistent. Part of the problem for me, I think, is that feeling that other people don’t necessarily want or need to hear others’ thoughts or even advice.
I’m always conscious of the movie quote that states “The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room” and coupled with an in-built sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ tend to feel reluctant to share too much.  Fighting, somewhat reluctantly, to have your voice heard can be one of the many reasons why a writer or speaker may feel inhibited.

However, when we are given compliments or told positive things about ourselves and the way in which we act, we should listen more and build upon these strengths.  We remember when people are negative towards us or when we make a mistake.  That stays with us for a length of time. Do the positives stay in our minds for the same amount of time? Probably not. And they should because that is where our focus for leading a more fulfilled and confident life should lie. 

What are your strengths? What do other people see in you that helps them or enables them to feel good? Is your self-awareness at a point where you could identify what it is that makes you feel energised or positive in any given situation?  What motivates or drives you when you wake up, or walk into a room, or plan for a specific event? I enjoy listening to others. I’m told that’s a real strength of mine and that I have an empathic viewpoint that enables me to see how people are affected or driven by events. I try to embrace this and use this aspect of my personality as a focus for how I live my life as a I seek equality and justice in the world around me.

Ask those that you are close to, at home or work, where they feel your strengths lie within your personality. Do you listen well, are you calm in a pressured situation, are you dynamic or forward-thinking? In a relationship that is built upon trust and reciprocity we can have these conversations to help us to identify what our drivers are and what may feed into our confidence.  Embrace this and use this knowledge to help you to move forward with a sense of purpose and clarity. 

This doesn’t mean we ignore those areas of greater discomfort in our personality or shy away from mistakes that we have made. It just means that we prioritise the positives and strengths that we are aware of, as they are what will ultimately allow us to grow and develop in a meaningful and personal way. ❤️🌈

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Posted in Community, Education, Health, Social

Posted by: carlsumner | April 15, 2019

They’ll Get Over It…

Imagine the familiar messages that we hear everyday when we hear of children in difficult circumstances.

Children are tough.

Children are naturally resilient.

Children are able to overcome adversity because of their lack of experience of the wider world.

What if we learned that this wasn’t the case? What if we were told that being exposed to prolonged and toxic stress actually affected the potential future health and well-being of a person? That unaddressed toxic stress “can negatively affect a developing body and brain by disrupting learning, behaviour, immunity, growth, and even the way DNA is read and transcribed.” Centre for Youth Wellness

When I first heard this, I thought that it sounded like common sense.  Difficulties in upbringing can lead to difficulties in later life.  But it’s actually much more profound than that.  Significant difficulties in a human being’s early years can have a lasting impact on a person’s life including a higher risk of chronic disease and potentially early death.

So, what do we mean by significant difficulties?  Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are stressful or traumatic events that may be experienced before 18 years of age.  They may involve witnessing or suffering domestic violence, neglect, abuse, a family member who suffers from mental illness, addiction or who has been to prison, or losing a parent through separation, divorce or bereavement.

An initial study from the late 1990’s in America produced startling correlations between childhood experiences and a person’s current health status and their behaviours.  ACEs were found to be common across all populations and the more ACEs that a young person recorded, the greater the risk for negative outcomes later in life. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention

The first questionnaire used to identify potential ACEs, looked at 10 areas of trauma although this could now be broadened to include any experience that could be defined as causing toxic or chronic stress.

Dr Nadine Burke Harris, California Surgeon General, offered this TEDMED talk that explains how she first came across the shocking statistics behind ACEs and how this has spurred her to champion the identification of preventative measures and services that could be utilised to help people recover and regain positive outcomes.  She describes this knowledge as something of fundamental importance to healthcare, education and social service providers to enable society to get a grip on what otherwise would be the single biggest threat to public health.  Nadine Burke Harris

The original study found that of the 17000 people questioned around two-thirds had reported at least one ACE and just over 10% had experienced four or more ACEs and these numbers have been seen in further studies both in England and elsewhere.

This Public Health report from Cumbria helps to identify what ACEs are, the potential consequences for individuals and an approach that can aim to identify ways to tackle the wider problem. Cumbria Public Health Report 2018

“Giving every child the best start in life is crucial to reducing health inequalities across the life course. The foundations for virtually every aspect of human development – physical, intellectual and emotional – are laid in early childhood.” 

To put some context to the numbers, reporting at least 4 ACEs made an individual twice as likely to die prematurely or develop cancer, three times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes and four times more likely to develop lung disease.  Feeling suicidal or potentially self-harming was nine times more likely.

Similarly, compared to people with no ACEs, those with four or more were twice as likely to binge drink, three times more likely to smoke, eight times more likely to have been involved in violence in the previous twelve months and eleven times more likely to have been to prison.

An exposure to ACEs does not necessarily mean that someone will develop mental or physical health problems as a result, but without supportive and protective relationships we can see that this is more likely and also means there are potential negative impacts to be felt across society as a whole. Adults who have experienced ACEs themselves are also potentially likely to expose their own children to them too creating a cycle of adversity and poor health outcomes. Public Health Wales

What this has made me realise first and foremost is the constant need to empathise and understand the potential story of an individual’s life.  Poor behaviour and choices is never excused but the underlying reasons will always be there and this is what must be identified and addressed. How to do this is complex, requiring patience, expertise and potentially a range of resources and services to provide the necessary support and guidance to either overcome trauma or prevent it from taking place.

Sharing understanding of ACEs becomes a moral responsibility and for an educator a key factor in enabling positive outcomes in all areas for the young people that we come across.

The training provided by College of Life was outstanding and helped to provide a valuable insight into both a personal viewpoint on ACEs and the wider implications for society.

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Posted in Community, Education, Health, Research, Social

Posted by: carlsumner | March 27, 2016

Still Missing the Point

Education, as with all areas of public life and service, is such a divisive subject, not least within the profession itself as to what best practice should look like.

Personal viewpoint, pedagogical opinion and social complexity create a foundation for debate that engages many to question their own practice and to look constantly at improving method and processes. Too often the debate can turn political as agendas are hijacked for greater social constraining but the point is still that the conversation always looks to further educational causes.

However, much of this appears to miss the point of what education truly means to people and what it is fundamentally for.

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”

If the concept of learning, wanting to discover and mentally grow, is instilled, promoted and endorsed then learners will look for opportunities to do this.  They will actively engage with what they need and want. They will be self-driven and motivated.

This becomes a much wider issue.  One of social acceptance that education, in its wide-ranging forms, is a positive thing, a good thing.  And can look different depending on the individual.  This will challenge the concept of standardised testing. It will challenge how resources, in particular adults, are utilised, how timetables are managed, how this is measured through ‘value’ and how the nurture and development of our professionals should be enabled to provide the very best learning opportunities for all and a system that is itself looked up to.

It should challenge the very fabric of what we consider education in this country to look like.  The complexities of how best this is delivered almost become moot points.  Because the learner decides, identifies, creates their own challenges for what is best for them and what works for them.

By respecting education, you will also, by definition, respect educators and all those related to the practice. As a young teacher, I will never forget a conversation with a parent of a local musician who had performed at our school one summer. She enthused over the work that we did and proclaimed that in her native home in Asia the work of people in education was held in the very highest esteem.  She simply couldn’t comprehend why this was not the case here.

The best school system in the world?

This article is far more articulate in making the point that our whole approach seems flawed and the future direction even further away from an ideal – and thus individual arguments over best practice appear redundant.

The question is how do we get there?

 

 

 

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Posted in Community, Research, School

Posted by: carlsumner | February 20, 2015

One to One Mobile Technology in the Classroom

For the past 18 months as a school we have invested heavily in Apple technology as fixed classroom and breakout area resources ( iMacs) as well as mobile devices (iPad and iPod) and related software that has provided additional enrichment opportunities (Green screen; Synergy radio) and integrated management support ( Emerge, ClassDojo reward system ). To begin with most classes had a set of iPads (14/15) to be used between all children.

A natural development has been to move towards a mobile device for each child. This has a number of notable benefits but also raises a serious question over value for money and the measurable impact on the quality of educational provision.

Rationale

The benefits of mobile devices can be seen through the support that additional applications can provide in specific situations. The independence offered by having a device that allows you to browse the Internet, record ideas in a variety of ways and automatically save and edit work as you progress helps to develop learners who have more responsibility over their own learning as well as retaining the ability to share and collaborate.

The move to one to one increases the independence and responsibility placed upon the children when managing their own learning. Each iPad is assigned to a specific student (alphabetically ordered and numbered with labels) with a specific school-based email address linked to each machine.

A student pledge was created that each child was required to sign along with their parents to ensure the responsibility was understood and as a potential precursor to allowing iPads to go home to aid learning. Each pledge was sent to their related iPad for reference.

image

In conjunction with the new iPad roll out, a set of apps and specific software was agreed upon in order to create a uniformity across school in terms of resources available to children. These were designed to provide the necessary blend of support and engagement to cover all aspects of the curriculum.

Aligned to this was our use of the app Showbie which provides users with a centralised learning area to interact with documents, video, voice comments, image and web links. This functionality creates a new element to the independent features of the iPad and a greater value to having one each.

The children are also developing a better understanding of the need for regular maintenance of their tablet through deletion of unnecessary images, videos, web history and documents. They are responsible for charging the device, ensuring they are replaced carefully and to keep to appropriate use of them at all times. Our e-safety work will cover these areas and more.

Ideally, research into impact will focus upon raising attainment, increased engagement, independence and responsibility towards learning, creative development and increased collaboration within a 21st Century learning environment that better prepares our children for future demands.

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Posted by: carlsumner | December 9, 2013

A Day of Peace

Tomorrow, 10th December, will see a memorial service held in South Africa for the former president, Nelson Mandela, a true hero of the modern age.

Also on this day, in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel prize ceremony takes place to honour people from across the globe who have striven to provide benefit to humankind through physics, chemistry, medicine, literature or enabling peace across nations.  Nelson Mandela received this award, jointly with the then SA president F W de Klerk, in 1993.

As it is also the second week of Advent, of which the focus is Peace, it is the perfect opportunity to share with children the ideas contained within and to promote a better understanding of the wider world.

Nobel peace prize Mandela

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Posted by: carlsumner | June 23, 2013

IPad Management

The introduction of class sets of IPads at Flakefleet has led to a range of management issues for us to deal with, ranging from the security and integrity of the machines for the children to use, to the implementation of educational apps on a wide scale that is both manageable and useful.  The tablets themselves are housed in a locked charging unit in each classroom, each class taking responsibility for the charging and general welfare of the machines, which can also be connected to  an adjacent iMac for syncing and easy transferral of stored media.  Each IPad was set up with a designated e-mail address that associates it with that year group.

In terms of the day to day use of the IPads it was necessary to ensure that staff were aware of the need to regularly monitor impending updates and clean photos, videos and visited site history that may eventually begin to impair performance.  For example clearing website history from Safari (Internet Browser) and cached cookies and data from websites. photo (3)

Encouraging the children to monitor their own media use has been important, helping them to understand the good practice found in deleting photos and videos that are unnecessary or have already been utilised in a piece of software.  Ensuring the children knew how sites could be tracked or that media was stored on the hardware has also helped to create a better sense of responsibility towards the resource as well as forming an important part of our developing e-safety work.

From a whole school perspective it has been vital to establish an agreed list of preferences within the settings to ensure consistency in the management of the IPads across all classrooms. photo (2)

This has included removing a number of possible functions such as; in-app purchases, deleting apps, potential explicit content from videos and limiting the age level of applications that are downloaded.  It was also necessary to remove the app store directly from the IPad screen and turning the facility for changing accounts to off.

photo

To access the settings menus a number code is required to enable restrictions – the same code is used throughout school.  Each IPad throughout the school has been set up across the school iCloud account for potential media transfers (although these accounts may become year based) and there is also an iTunes account that allows the purchase and download of our designated applications.

photo (1)

To keep track of the Ipads we use the application Find My IPad to monitor the location of each one.  For remote system management, and the potential co-ordination of multiple settings we have begun to use the Meraki app.

With such a large number of tablets across the school and potentially a similar number of IPods to come, it has become vital to ensure there is a systematic method to managing the resources in a way that enhances their effectiveness for children’s learning and enables staff to utilise them to best effect.

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Posted by: carlsumner | April 28, 2013

TeachMeet Fleetwood

On Tuesday 23rd April we hosted the first TeachMeet at Flakefleet, primarily for staff in the Fleetwood area. Our dual purpose was to introduce the idea of TM as a way of generating enthusiasm and collaboration in technology across our local community and to demonstrate where we were in terms of the use of mobile technologies and how we were beginning to apply these to our children’s learning experiences.

A good turnout listened to a range of speakers sharing thoughts on Garageband, Book Creator, Augmented Reality, QR codes and their uses, advice on single IPad use, Foundation stage profiling and five minute lesson planning. A lot to take in but also a demonstration of where education could and should be going in the 21st Century, individualising learning opportunities in a manner that engages and enthuses with real purpose.

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Posted by: carlsumner | March 12, 2012

Angry Birds in Space!!

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Posted by: carlsumner | October 25, 2011

IPad in the Classroom

Having had an IPad 2 available to me for school use since mid-summer, I thought it was worth reflecting on any benefits or difficulties I may have found in that time.  This may be updated over time as I become ever more used to the possibilities and limitations, including a list of applications that have proved themselves worthwhile.

First of all I need to make it clear that this is not a comment on the benefits of Apple versus Android – the school choice was made to go with Apple based on personal experiences of similar technology, the consistency of the software available and recommendations made as we were going through other design programmes to develop the school.  We also bought 5 for teachers on the leadership team to develop evaluations before potentially enabling all school staff to have one.  Essentially this is a look at the use of a mobile tablet as an educational resource.

From a classroom management point of view, the IPad has proved invaluable.  Using the Groupcall Emerge Application, access can be enabled to our SIMS whilst mobile. Ease of use for registering, up to date and handy information on pupils and staff and even the availability of Messenger to send direct messages home, particularly useful for praise and reminders. The system does depend upon a readily available wireless network but is easy to use, safe and best of all portable.

The addition of a camera/video camera facility to the IPad 2, that allows straightforward download to e-mail or cloud based file sharing, makes redundant the need for another camera source – a usual expense for schools’ budgets.  The size is not always the easiest to manage but the picture quality is adequate for usual classroom needs – assessments, display, upload to website and blog posts. However, if you require better quality for special events then you might want to have a particular high quality alternative available.  Additionally, the camera allows for the reading of QR codes through any number of free apps including Scan.

Whilst not wanting to just create a list of available apps (too many to mention) that I have found useful, a number do make the IPad an essential resource in the classroom for both teachers and pupils.

Office2HD allows the reading and creation of Word documents, Excel and PowerPoint – transfer can be made through e-mail and cloud sharing.  Both Box and Dropbox provide excellent cloud sharing apps with good entry-level free storage.  Next Thing is a handy app for organising and prioritising events and forthcoming tasks or the more advanced Evernote.

A number of apps, including Saisuke or Google’s own, provide organisation through a calendar but a huge advantage we have found is being able to link our school based calendar to the built-in calendar on the Pad (something we were told initially we couldn’t do) – this then links events and invitations in meetings and notes straight to the calendar which is updated instantly and passed on to all who are linked to it also.

The built-in voice recorder and notes applications are excellent in their own right for use both on a management scale and for within the classroom.  The fact that you may play music is an added bonus too and I have found this useful for stimulating ideas, creating atmosphere or generally entertaining myself and the children (Planetary is a fabulous app for storing and playing your music).

I have found the ability to group my applications an added bonus. Giving the folders specific names keeps organisation easy and where there are many available, makes particular ones easy to find.

In terms of working with children, the IPad has worked very well in small group settings and with individual children.  It can be used as a Whiteboard, a source of imagery for ideas and stimulation (Flickr), reference tool (Qwiki or Discover), or a specific learning machine with designed apps for a whole range of subjects.  It’s vital, as with any program used, to investigate the value of the software before use.  It is even available to children at lunchtimes with a specific games folder created.

Because it is on a tablet does not make it an essential educational tool.  What I have found is that it generates huge enthusiasm, can explain or reinforce ideas where ordinary class-based techniques do not and provides opportunity for both individualistic and group involvement that can be collaborative and fun – the fact that two or three children need to huddle around the machine lends itself to more thoughtful learning.

The fact that it also looks (and actually is) quite expensive has also created a sense of calm and better purposefulness around the resource that may not always be there.  Children take care of it and value it – this may be very relevant if the thought were to buy more in for a class – would it still have the same value for them?

As an aside, I recently visited a newly built school as part of an information gathering exercise into our own design proposals within Fleetwood.  The availability of an IPad was, for some staff, cause for interest and potential enthusiasm.  But within the school they were lacking – they still took registers on paper.  There was one LCD screen in a corridor, interactive whiteboards were poorly positioned and the ICT suite was a scrum of machines.  The distinct feeling is that, despite being in the 21st Century, our children’s education and their accessibility to the technologies that will dominate their lives, is clearly not.  Thoughts for another post, but a worry nonetheless.

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