There I was sitting there thinking about the Computers in the home project (just about to announce an expansion to another school) and the Botanical Gardens project (children’s website to be launched and NESTA agreed development) when there was a credit card advertisement recommended by guinea pigs. Hell, who would agree to a proposal from a set of guinea pigs. Time for bed.
I am a governor of one of the biggest primary schools in Birmingham. We have 750 pupils, 100 odd staff and a budget of about 2.5 million pounds. This morning I (as a governor) and the head and assistant heads interviewed three members of staff for promotion posts. We have a policy, which you can have in a big school, of providing promotion opportunities for all significant staff when there is an opportunity. This morning we interviewed three superb staff for a Religious Education, Year Group and English at Foundation at Year 1 responsibility. They were all brilliant, but yet again the question that arose was where do we realise their real expertise within the school and curriculum structure. One of them was fluent in Russian, another was a pyschologist who had worked at some time with severly handicapped children and the last had for a year been part of a counselling service for women who were physically threated by their partners.
I come home to my wife who admits that she has just broken the curriculum structure – unofficially of course. So the children are now looking at myths and legends which resulted in a PE lesson on Nemo and corals and a lesson on ‘Bridge over Trouble Waters’ where the children talked about their troubles because Pandora’s box released so many . What were the troubles?
They were about separated parents, about death of relatives and pets and now and again about not liking school .. troubles but eventually what about the bridge across….
This was a response from a headteacher involved in the project:
I had a very exciting meeting last night which touched upon the project. I had an informal meeting with parent governors focusing on how well we are doing as a school and asked them for their views of the Home School learning project. The response was superb. Two mums have year 3 pupils and enthused for sometime about the impact it’s had on the whole family. Their daughters are finding it highly motivating and are using their PCs every day in a constructive way, but also the whole family are engaging with it. A mum told her how her daughter was teaching her and her father how to use the PC and helped dad create posters to display in his shop.
They see it as hugely beneficial to the community and said that their stories could be repeated by all parents 60 times over.
What was so exciting was that they were able to list the many examples of how we have met key outcomes from the project. They provided a very rich vein of evidence.
We are also undergoing an external evaluation of the project and it is showing continuing positive impacts in ways that were not envisaged in the initial stages
The software updating continues and with it the repair of computer systems. In my visits to homes I find that at least 1 in 3 is not working in some way. I suppose this was inevitable, this was the evidence from the trials that in the initial stages there was a good deal of experimentation by the recipients of the computers. This diminished when they realised that they could not circumvent the internet provision supplied and that messing around meant that there were long periods when they had no computer or internet access waiting for the repair.
This week I have met two classic cases. In the first instance it was not experimentation. The family were using the computer when they suddenly noticed that the screen image had moved dramatically to the right leaving a large black area on the screen. It emerged that this was a common fault in the monitors that we are using. Thinking it was their fault they carefully packed the computer away and decided not to talk about it…..until I asked the year 3 child about their computer because of my software obsession. “It doesn’t work”. I phone the home and cannot get permission to enter the house. It was only after the intervention of a translator and some persuasion that I was allowed to enter and find the boxed computer. What then? The computer starts up and somebody has somehow added a password to the administrator account and they have no idea of the password. “It was an experiment said the sister of the mother”. A re-image is therefore needed.
An observation: The computer was in the sitting room. The majority of the computers are placed in bedrooms. I have found, on quite a few occasions, that when I am installing software or trying an amateur repair that some person is in the bed. It might be a sick child or the taxi driver father. On one occasion I heard a sound behind me and looked around to find grandpa and grandma looking at me (they must have been in their 80’s). Back to the sitting room. As I tried to fix the computer, so that the software could be installed, the whole family was in attendance. Watching me was mother, sister, father and the four children. The computer was obviously important. An observation of the home indicated that there was no way in which this family would have been able to afford a computer with internet access.
The second case is even more bizarre. Something had obviously gone wrong with this computer as Windows need to be activated! We manage to activate windows and then found that the image was not that which was originally implanted. There was Norton antivirus not Sophos, there was no Internet Explorer and so on. It then transpired that something had gone wrong and father and uncles had tried to sort it out. These cases are both negative and positive. There is obviously a fear of admitting that something is wrong. Do they think they think it was their fault? They obviously did. However in the second case there was a sense of desperation and an attempt to right something on their own – even though this dug a deeper hole.
There was a great sense of relief in both families that the ordeal of the broken computer was over.
Because of Eid quite a few schools in Birmingham restarted on the 8th. This was therefore the first week of the New Year. Two weeks of wonderful problems now seem to have surfaced and are gasping for air. Five of these are linked to non-internet access, two are associated with moving, ten are linked to adding software to the computers (self imposed), three are parents who have decided that they don’t want to continue with the arrangement, five are families complaining that they have not been connected, four are linked to things not really working and the rest are the vast array of things that could and will go wrong in a project of this sort.
The week did however finish well as magically Giai, the wireless providers, appeared in the area and began sorting out the problems. Who would have believed that lack of Internet access could have been caused by a poor connection between the aerial and the amplifier box! At last the computer at 259 has been reimaged so I can load the school based software. Why did it need reimaging – the family member who choose to be the computer administrator had forgotten his password.
There are the positives. Training of parents begins on Monday, next week. This is at the heart of the project – it begins the process of the pupils training the adults. There was also the vison in the ‘My Documents’ files of all the dissertation references in one home I visited. Firstly, I don’t deliberately look into these files, one of the software packages has me downloading to the computer and installing from that region. In this case the 6th former living in the house was using the computer very effectively. I also came across one our teachers introducing blogs to his year 3 pupils – wow.
I am beginning to think that the exciting times are just beginning. Roll on next week.
To contain those who think the project might be in disarray, it is not. There are some very positive strands emerging from the initial term where one school had all their children with a computer with Internet access at home. There are indications of greater meaningful interaction of parents with children’s work in schools. This was indicated at a parents evening. There is also evidence of parents interaction with the lack of access to the Internet and the school based software that had been provided.
I am now moving onto the provision of software to one of the other primary schools in the area. This is looking to be a very positive process. Parents are very welcoming and continue to be very positive about the project.
