TTS Easi-View reviewed

The Easi-View from TTS is a cost effective visualiser designed for the primary classroom.

What’s a ‘visualiser’? Effectively, it’s 21st Century epidioscope – an ICT device that lets the whole class see a physical artefact – or even a sheet of text or an image – projected on a screen.

Teachers have been using visualisers since digital projectors started arriving in classrooms, but so far they’ve tended to be expensive products. The Easi-View, which is another TTS education-centred design and has a starting price of £75, makes them much more affordable.

There’s a detailed review on Merlin John Online, and – of course – Easi-View will be on display at BETT 2010.

Ofqual endorses e-assessment

In its second Chief Regulator’s Report, Ofqual (the regulator of qualifications, exams and tests in England) identifies use of e-assessment technology as one of its six key suggestions for the longer-term approach to the qualifications and assessment system.

The report says:

Technology is second nature to today’s learners. They must be allowed to embrace its potential and maximise the new opportunities it provides for them to demonstrate their achievements. The use of ICT in assessment raises issues ofcentral concern to the regulator, but we must seek ways of dealing with the challenge rather than hiding from it.

The Regulator goes on to discuss, in depth, how and where technology could be used. Significantly, the Report makes it clear that by ‘e-assessment’, Ofqual means going well beyond solutions such as on-screen marking. What’s being discussed are approaches where:

…the learner responds to questions or tasks on a computer

Worth noting that this is an area where RM has already got considerable experience, most notably with the Key Stage 3 ICT test.

As you’d expect, the Regulator sets out pros and cons for the use of technology, and the Report isn’t a technologist’s charter. However, it has to be significant that so much air time is given to emerging uses for ICT – the direction of travel is clear, something that wasn’t lost on the Daily Mail.

Annual Report – 2009

RM’s 2009 Annual Report is now available from our Web site.

Pre-Budget Report confirms education spending

As was widely predicted in the press, Alastair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report has held to previously announced education spending plans for 2010-11. Darling has also indicated further real-terms increases in 2011-12 and 2012-13.

The Report sets out unchanged plans for 2010-11 in a detailed table of departmental expenditure limits (Table B17, page 194). This shows planned UK education spend spend for 2010-11 remaining at £89.2bn, with estimated outturn for 2009-10 remaining at £88.0bn.

Beyond next government year, the Report has this to say (paragraph 6.28, page 104):

The 2009 Pre-Budget Report makes an assessment of the resources necessary to protect front-line education and announces a package for 2011-12 and 2012-13 that will ensure near-cash funding for front-line schools rises in real terms by 0.7 per cent a year, and near-cash funding for 16 to 19 participation rises in real terms by 0.9 per cent a year.

Public sector efficiency

The last few weeks have seen the Government ratcheting up their message about public sector efficiency.

In November, the Department for Children, Families and Schools published Securing Our Future, a discussion paper intended to kick-start a debate about how schools can get more for their money. It suggests that cost savings could be achieved by schools pooling their collective buying power – ICT is is specifically mentioned as a target. We’d go further and suggest that by working together and opting for an outsourced approach, schools could probably improve effectiveness as well. That’s certainly our experience from the various managed service and BSF projects we’re involved with. More generally Securing Our Future is positive about ICT, but makes the point that not every schools is getting the full benefit from its investment.

Today, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a speech about ’smarter government’, headlined putting the frontline first. Again, education is mentioned – this time the proposal is that good ICT systems can make schools more efficient. The particular example is providing information for parents – something that RM’s Kaleidos Learning Platform and Integris school MIS system do. It’s a reminder that technology is increasingly the way schools get things done – and are expected to get things done. Technology is no longer optional in the education frontline.

Equally significant – but with a bit less PR push – is a piece of work from the Office of National Statistics. It sets out to measure changes in ’educational efficiency’ by looking at changes in inputs and outputs over time – the summary document explains the approach adopted. The conclusion of some rather sobre statistical analysis is that education efficiency has remained steady over a decade. In its coverage, the Times is rather more polemical, pointing out that by far the biggest change in inputs was an increase in staff numbers, and suggesting that this hasn’t yielded the expected benefits.

Interesting background to the Pre-Budget Report, due on Wednesday 9 December.

US Department of Education appoints Director of Education Technology

Karen Cator, a career educator, has been appointed as the US Education Department’s first Director of Education Technology. It’s a further signal that the Obama administration is taking educational ICT very seriously.

Cator will launch the first draft of a National Education Plan in the next couple of months. Ahead of that, she made a keynote speech in New York on 1 December where she said:

Technology will be in play in every aspect of the education reform agenda.

The speech set out four key focus areas:

• Learning: Enabling unprecedented access to high-quality learning experiences. Everyone, including English Language Learners and students with disabilities, should have increased access to meaningful, well designed, and readily available learning experiences, throughout their lives.
•  Assessment: Measuring what matters and providing the information that enables continuous improvement processes at all levels of the education system. Students, teachers, parents, and administrators should have access to the kinds of data that can enable better instructional decisions and provision of educational resources.
• Teaching: New ways to support those who support learning. Technology can enable mentors, coaches, and peers to better support learning both in and out of school. Teachers can benefit from resources provided through technology and from anytime-anywhere professional interactions, including collaborations to share and refine effective techniques and resources.
• Productivity: Redesigning systems and processes to free up education system resources to support learning. In an era of scarce resources, education systems need to take advantage of new technological and content solutions to reduce spending tied to inefficient systems and processes. This effort includes more effective approaches to education R&D to increase the pace of innovation and the scaling of effective practices.

More details of what’s ahead in the National Education Technology Plan are here, and there’s an article covering the speech in eSchool News (you have to register, but it’s free).

Green light for twelve more BSF projects

Partnerships for Schools, the government agency responsible for the delivering the BSF (Building Schools for the Future) programme, has approved twelve  new projects. The announcment is strong supporting evidence for the point RM made in its results announcement, that the BSF programme is moving faster than ever.

The projects, which include ten local authorities new to BSF and two authorities with follow-on projects, are backed with total funding of £1bn. They are expected to start procurement between January and March 2010. The authorities involved are: Brent, Darlington, Devon, Havering, Kingston & Croydon, Lancashire, Norfolk, Plymouth, Sefton, Tameside, Wakefield and Warrington.

Full details are in PfS’ press release.

Changes in BSF procurement ahead?

Last week, Partnership for Schools Chief Executive, Tim Byles, gave the clearest indication yet that the BSF procurement regime may be changed to embrace more ICT-only projects.

Speaking at his organisation’s second Annual Design Conference, Tim announced a major procurement review. The review will have four main areas of inquiry, including this:

ICT procurement: looking again at whether this can be done in a different way, including early funding for ICT in schools that are in later phases of BSF, and in what circumstances separate ICT will be permissible.

The Partnerships for Schools announcement provides full details of the review.

Change won’t be immediate – projects already into procurement are unlikely to change. The direction of travel is clear though: in the not too distant future, there’s a real possibility that consortium bids will no longer be the default right answer for new school build programmes.

Tim Byles also spoke at the launch of Beyond Building: Procuring BSF Sustainably, a report from the Westminster Sustainable Business Forum setting out the findings of a major inquiry led by Barry Sheerman MP. Barry is the highly-respected Chair of the Children Schools and Families Select Committee and his inquiry team took evidence from a wide range of participants in the BSF programme (including RM). It’s a thorough analysis of the BSF programme so far and a number of its recommendations are directly relevant to RM, most obviously:

• Recommendation 24: PfS must ensure that procurement is structure to promote innovation in ICT. This may involve promoting different procurement strategies for ICT depending on the authority.
• Recommendation 29: The DCSF must ring-fence 5% of the capital budget to guard against a lowest cost mentality in the procurement of FFE (furniture fixtures and equipment).

RM receives ICT Excellence Award from Becta

Becta, the government agency which leads the use of educational technology in UK, has named RM joint winner in the Support for Schools category of its annual ICT Excellence Awards. Details of the award, including a video showing why RM was selected as a winner, are here.

The Support for Schools  category rewards organisations that support school improvement with ICT by encouraging the innovative use of appropriate technology.  It’s significant that these awards are typically given to schools and local authorities; receiving the award as a commercial supplier clearly marks RM out as an education specialist, firmly embedded in the front-line delivery of teaching and learning.

RM selected as ICT supplier for Oxford Academy

The Oxford Academy, a new school built under the National Academies Framework, has chosen RM as its ICT supplier. The Academies programme provides new, state-funded schools, independent of local authorities and supported by sponsors. In the case of the Oxford Academy, sponsorship support comes from the Oxford Diocese.

The Oxford Academy will ultimately be a 1,450-pupil school, housed in a new purpose-built facility. As well as a secondary school specialising in mathematics, ICT and sport, the site will also be a leadership centre (run in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University) and a football centre of excellence.

RM will be supplying a five-year managed ICT service, including products and services from Apple, Sun and Cisco, as well as RM’s core learning technologies products, including the Oxfordshire Learning Platform. The Oxford Academy will also feature a wide range of other RM Group solutions, including SEN products, EasyTrace access control systems, ISIS learning spaces solutions, and Lightbox curriculum software.