Digital Leaders

Perins School (www.perins.net) is proud to take part in the Digital Leaders scheme and have the opportunity to work with some fabulous teachers and students throughout the South East of England.

Perins is a co-educational community school based in the attractive Hampshire town of Alresford. Alresford is home of the Watercress line and Thomas the Tank Engine comes to visit us twice a year. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perins_School) we have 4 quite famous ex pupils: 

• Alexa Chung (Channel 4 and MTV presenter)
• Russell Howard (Mock the Week panel member)
• Dan Kieran (author of Crap Towns!)
• Chris Geere (pretend teacher on Waterloo)

 Perins School has specialist sports college status and High Performing status.  It has just over 1,000 pupils aged 11-16 (students continue their education at 6^th form college). It became a trust school in 2009. 

Perins School has a well developed e-learning scheme that is now in its third year of operation. The aim of the scheme is to enhance students learning and understanding by supplying them with a range of effective 21^st Century tools that will foster independence, collaboration and personalisation.

The scheme has six main areas:

• the development of a electronic curriculum using a Moodle Virtual learning environment (http://moodle.perins.net)
• Notebooks for teaching and non teaching staff (based on a 3 yr cycle)
• Support of  internal and external communications network
• Notebook for students scheme –offered on entry to year 7 (currently  a 3yr cycle)
• Individual e-mail address and access to school network resources
• Access to an electronic curriculum on the VLE for all core subject at KS3 and for all subjects at KS3 by 2010-11.

Supporting the Digital Leader Scheme
Gideon Williams (williams@perins.hants.sch.uk) is the Director of e-learning at Perins School; a post he has occupied for quite a long time. His role is to co-ordinate the development of e-learning across all aspects of school with a particular focus on the school’s VLE, http://moodle.perins.net and the students notebook scheme; now in its third year. Gideon still maintains a fairly full timetable teaching amongst other things AS Level, OCR Nationals, iMedia and ICT innovations. In his role as a Lead Professional ICT teacher, he works closely with other Moodle schools within Hampshire. When not on Twitter  (sorry marking), Gideon is particularly interested in developing gaming technology in schools; in his continued (and still unsuccessful attempts) to compete with his 9yr old son. He is a proud Scot and supports all teams Scotland and anyone who plays England.

Nottingham High School is an all boys school, based in the centre of Nottingham. The school houses three elements in total; an infants section, a junior division and a high school section. I became Director of ICT in September of 2009, overseeing the academic nature of ICT, the school network environment and supporting teachers in their ICT development. Creating a group of digital leaders in our school would provide a much needed extra curricular opportunity for our students in the field of IT. It is also important for our students to get involved and “own” the growth and development of our new VLE. By acquiring these new skills, they will be better placed to enable the facilitation of IT skills within our school.

I’m delighted to be a co-ordinator for digital leaders and hope to drive this forward at our school. I was formerly Head of ICT at Wolverhampton Grammar School where I taught for nine years. I’ve had a teaching career which spans more than twenty years and am originally from Durban, South Africa. My father was from Wiltshire and I’ve always wanted to live in and work in the U.K. as I do now.

During my eighteen year career as a teacher in South Africa, I was Head of the following departments: English, History, P.E.  and ICT. I was also a Media Centre Manager and served a short spell as a Deputy Head. At  WGS I was the Data Base Manager and taught Computing and ICT courses at A level and Key Stage 3 and 4 ICT. My role involved the development of ICT at WGS and assisting with the implementation of the ICT systems. I believe in a combination of traditional and web-based teaching methods and was responsible for the implementation of the FROG Learning Platform at WGS.

Fort Hill Community School is an oversubscribed secondary school in Basingstoke, North Hampshire with ~720 students. Though steeped in history, Fort Hill is a forward thinking school always striving to develop a ‘Learning For Life’ curriculum.

The school has gone through a technology transformation in the recent past (in terms of provision) with a new MAC Media / Music suite, a sitewide 802.11n wireless blanket with netbook trolleys that turns every classroom into a potential ICT suite, revamped ICT suites, some awesome software provisions eg Dartfish, AEGIS 3, Adobe Master Collection, and the latest whole school addition, a bright new VLE and website built in Frog, that will deliver our mission of a ‘One Stop Shop’ for all learning, teaching, administration and community requirements in Fort Hill. The VLE has really grabbed the students attention and provided a great opportunity to nail Government targets through the Parental Enagement Portal.

As a result we are now ready to make the transition from tech to teach, or te(a)ch, to promote our latest CPD endeavours to convert the new tech into tangible enhanced attainment through advanced and engaging teaching and learning methods and tools.

John Wareham, ICT Development Manager, and a couple of enthusiastic and tech curious teachers are together leading the charge to embed new and exciting ways to transform the curriculum and to stimulate our students.

With the te(a)ch CPD sessions demonstrating cool webware and with ongoing projects and programmes in place such as Microsofts Digigirlz, an Extra Curricular Media club (BBC News Report etc) and with break and lunchtime ICT clubs for students, a natural platform already exists to introduce formal Digital Leaders and to help support e-learning at our school and maybe wider.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be part of an esteemed team involved in shaping our children’s future learning through a Digital Leader Programme. Thanks Kristian.