Re-creating America

Check out this film about creative learning in Oklahoma:

For much of its history, the word "America" has stood for the brightest ideas, the most resourceful solutions and the most provocative insights. Is this still true today, and if not, what can we do? The film explores the importance of creativity in education by highlighting four schools in Oklahoma and assessing how the state's teachers are attempting to teach and promote creativity: Educare Preschool in Tulsa, OK: serving a low-income, at-risk community; Flower Mound Elementary School in Lawton, OK: integrating the arts into the entire curriculum with the A+ Schools initiative; Odyssey of the Mind, a creative problem-solving competition at Piedmont Middle School; Santa Fe South Charter High School in Oklahoma City: helping students overcome the challenges of poverty and the high drop-out rate in America's urban high schools. The program asks teachers, parents and national experts: what appear to be the most effective ways to promote creativity, while still teaching the three Rs, and even improving test scores?

Learners Y Factor

On Sunday 9 January, members of the Creative Tallis group attended the Learners Y Factor event in central London, part of the Learning Without Frontiers conference. We had been selected to present our experience of creating a Pop Up School at the Creativity World Forum in Oklahoma last November. Billy, Raihan, Seb and Tom performed brilliantly, despite some technical hitches, and co-ordinated a live Skype call with Joseph, one of the students from Howe High School in Oklahoma, during the Q&A session. Thanks to them, the story of our Pop Up School adventure has been shared with even more folks interested in creative learning and the future of schools.

Learners Y Factor

Tomorrow, four Tallis representatives will tell the story of our Oklahoma adventure to an audience at the Learners Y Factor event in central London. The event is designed to showcase innovative approaches to learning and ICT by young people. We are presenting the story of our Pop Up School and our disruptive presence at the Creativity World Forum in Oklahoma in November 2010.

Our presentation begins with a video (above) outlining the project from its inception several months prior to the trip to Oklahoma. We are then going to describe how we used social networks, scavenging skills and a mixture of handheld and online technologies to propose that the future of learning might look quite different to the schools, classrooms, corridors and textbooks of the present.

Learners Y Factor presentation on Prezi

Our presentation ends with a question and answer session with the judges which will be attended by Joseph Horton, one of our collaborators from Howe High School in Oklahoma, via the magic of Skype.

We are competing against several schools who have each demonstrated that young people have the potential to radically transform the learning process, in part through their innovative use of new technologies. We are both proud and excited to be involved in the event.

Oklahoma!

We have just returned from a really exciting trip to Oklahoma to present our thoughts about creative learning and the future of schools at the Creativity World Forum. Representatives from Thomas Tallis and 2 other London schools (Stormont House and Gallions) took part in a 3 month long collaboration with partner schools in Oklahoma that culminated in our presentation to 1500 delegates at the conference and the establishment of a Pop Up School.

The idea resulted from our investigation of the Pop Up phenomenon in London and beyond - dance, architecture, shops, galleries, all had appeared and disappeared as quickly during the summer of 2010. At Tallis, we had commissioned a Pop Up Gallery/Classroom for the school concourse in which we had installed The Measurement Shop in collaboration with Tangled Feet Theatre Company during our arts festival.

We were interested in the idea that school might become more of an event than a building in the future. Our Tallis Lab curriculum is concerned with exploring the benefits of Web 2.0 tools and a more project based approach to learning and we have begun to make really effective use of blogging, web design and social media. We admired the work of visionaries like Sugata Mitra and the research of Charlie Leadbeater on education innovation.

Our experience at the conference was fascinating. We established a school (of sorts) in an unofficial corner of the conference hall (Booth 100.5) and engaged delegates with a variety of tasks hosted on our #popupschool website. We used Twitcam to broadcast live from the stage during our presentation. We made films, did research, created podcasts - mostly from our new iPod Touch devices equipped with the relevant apps - iMovie, Audioboo, Tumblr etc. The younger students sang songs in the foyer (rather like a Flashmob event) or asked a series of challenging, open-ended questions. We aimed to give our students an opportunity to engage with adults as equals, co-learners and to publish their thoughts and reflections to a real audience online.

The response was very positive:

#popupschool was by far my favourite thing at the #CWF2010 RT @shannoninottawa the future is unwritten http://bit.ly/dzpt4d

One blogger even suggested that the concept of a Pop Up School could apply to music lessons.

The most valuable lesson we learned was just how easy and powerful it is to connect with other learners and learning professionals (we're not very fond of the word teacher) in far off places. Tammy Parks at Howe High School was our partner in the project and has proved to be an inspirational colleague and a leading figure in our PLNs (Personal Learning Networks). We conducted several Skype conversations with her and her students in the lead up to the conference and we were inspired by her story. Howe is literally in the middle of nowhere. It is 3 hours from the nearest town. The school is smaller than one of our year groups at Tallis and, apart from the school building, the only other significant architectural features in Howe are the convenience store and the lumber yard. Despite this, Tammy and her husband Scott (the superintendent of the school district) have created an ICT rich learning environment using state of the art equipment. The school uses a satellite truck to conduct virtual field trips. They have high quality video conferencing equipment and lead learning experiments across the United States. Their physical isolation has been a spur to innovation. In order to give their students access to 21st century learning they have harnessed the power of the internet and the skills of broadcast journalism to connect them with the rest of the world.

Oh, and we met Sir Ken Robinson too. What a trip!

Action Research Group Meeting

We met today for the second time this year. I updated the group on progress made since our last meeting as follows:

• The Year 7 family learning with mobile technology project (we need a better name for this!) is progressing well. We have purchased 20 new iPod Touches with parasync and protective case. We are writing home to parents about the project and will launch it officially at a parents' consultation event next week.
• The trip to Oklahoma for the Creativity World Forum was a real success. More info can be found here. We made several great connections with other educators, particularly in Canada and in Oklahoma (Howe High School).

I have invited new members to the group to become authors of this blog.

We took a quick look at the Manifesto for a Creative Tallis and agreed to refresh it. Here is a link to the Google Doc version of the document.

We agreed to meet next out of schedule on Wednesday 15 December at 4pm.

The agenda for the next meeting includes the following items:

1. Reviewing the Manifesto
2. Contributing to the ARG blog
3. Researching examples of best practice in promoting creative learning and sharing the evidence of the website.
   

Skype

I've just had an interesting Skype video chat with Michael Dubois, the A+ regional coordinator in Oklahoma. He's responsible for setting up the partnerships with our three schools. We're going to try another Skype call at the next meeting on Monday 14th June but possibly on a bigger screen!

Oklahoma update

I had a really interesting day yesterday but have been too busy to blog about about it until now. For starters, I met with two really interesting practitioners. Joe Walking came in to talk to us about Dance Spinner. We've agreed that one of his colleagues will come in for a week next half term to work with a group of 12 Year 7 students. They will get used to using Dance Spinner to create aleotoric choreography (dance created according to the laws of chance) which they will the perform at the Past, Present & Future events. I hope they'll also be able to show some of the process of their work during the week in unusual sites around school at break, lunch and after school. Next in was Guy Connelly from Clock Opera. He'll be in with Tangled Feet for a week but we've also offered him an extra week's residency to work with Sarah (Dance Spinner) and the year 7 students, composing aleotoric music to accompany the dance. We also want to experiment with other kinds of sound installation for the evening events at the end of the week. One special project involves creating a ghost steel band.

I spent the afternoon in Stormont House School in Hackney discussing our plans to attend the World Creativity Conference in Oklahoma next November. We will be able to take a total of 9 people to the week long event and need to decide who those will be quite soon. Our task will be to collaborate with some American students from schools that belong to the A+ network on a keynote presentation to the delegates at the conference. There are three UK schools involved - Tallis, Stormont and Gallions - each of whom are dedicated to promoting creative learning. As such, we all felt it was important to think about how we could make our presentation as interactive, engaging and challenging as possible. I remembered a presentation I saw at last year's Handheld Learning Conference from John Davitt who created a school in 30 minutes using Google Docs. Our theme seems to be something to do with regeneration (schools,communities, cities), 21st century skills and creative learning. This needs to be refined somewhat. Tallis is hosting the next group meeting on Monday 14th June at which we hope to Skype with one of our American colleagues - how exciting!

It would be great to have a few young people at this meeting so, if it doesn't disrupt your exams too much (Year 11) and if anyone else in the ARG can make the meeting at 3pm, we'd love to see you there. I'll post more information soon about the new website for the project. I'd also be grateful of any offers to help out with the Past, Present & Future events on the 15th and 16th July.