Teachers as Innovators
Virtual-Workspace
Dave Thomson, Worcestershire LEA
Pupils go home and message their friends on the internet. They visit their favourite band's MySpace address and let their curiosity roam. Now a group in Wolverhampton is beginning to harness that natural curiosity to develop a virtual workspace for pupils to access a school away from school.
Keywords: community, debate, remote working, support
Dave Thomson, an educational improvement advisor for Worcestershire local authority, is organising and promoting the Virtual-Workspace (www.virtual-workspace.com) for the Wolverhampton area, an online community of students and teachers extending the school day to the 24/7 world of the internet.
“It's not a replacement of what you do in school but it's a massive extension,” he says. “Secondary school classes are 50 minutes. Online you can extend that much further, you can encourage more engagement. If you have a student from a rural area this is where they can make contact after the school day. She's quiet at home and school but loves the noise she hears in the Virtual-Workspace.”
The Virtual-Workspace changes the relationships between teachers and learners, allows learners to take the lead, and gives them the ability to work on activities from home, at school or anywhere else. There are increasing numbers of students involved. “Basically what it is, is an online space for 14-19 year-olds in the area with the aim of trying to create personalised support for those learners and giving them an opportunity to lead the learning process,” says Thomson. “One of the key features is to provide freedom for communication and collaboration outside the school day; the school day is not restricted by organisation or time. We build learning online.”
Each learner and teacher gets their own private and secure web space, which they can access from any computer which is online. They can use the chatrooms and discussion forums dedicated to different subjects, then message one another to take the debate further. Although there are sections dedicated to pupils' hobbies, one of the longest running debates is whether zero is an odd or equal number. “We have a whole set of global communities that cover the project - some are subject areas, some are hobbies or interests. Dialogue occurs between students through maths to politics and the issues of the day,” says Thomson.
For 12 hours every weekday from 8am there are teacher mentors online to help them, and a bank of over 4,500 interactive learning materials supporting the 14-19 curriculum. Teachers can set assignments which are stored and assessed online along with back-up materials, and there are programmmes to support staff on how to use the resource in their everyday teaching.
And the links pupils can make are international. Students working from the site have entered the Thinkquest competition (thinkquest.org), the first British team to go into the international competition to encourage online collaboration for learning. The students work in teams to build innovative and educational websites to share with the world.
Teachers can use it for their own needs, says Thomson. “You can use it to send assignments to your class, to run discussions. One teacher has set up the whole curriculum in the subject forum. She has older students from higher up the school who are members to mentor younger students, so dialogue is maintained at a sophisticated level.”
Virtual Workspace is part of an explosion in online learning communities in the last few years, fully supported by the government through its e-learning programme. There are many different national and local online resources for schools, and more and more are using the technology made popular by MySpace, Wikipedia and MSN Messenger as well as e-mail to make the links and build the communities needed for modern learning. Pupils are using the technology, so educationalists need to follow, it's argued.
Despite this, there are worries that online learning will undermine the community in the classroom, or that it is somehow ‘invisible’ and hard to measure what pupils are actually getting out of it. Then there are fears among some parents of a perceived danger in their children using the internet.
Thomson says that pupils who might not find the confidence to assert themselves at school can flourish online, and that teachers can, despite worries to the contrary, track who is using the service and who is not. “You don't allow students to get lost online. In the time they use this you know where they are, and that they haven't strayed off to MySpace. We provide reports to schools down to student level, tracking is fairly thorough. We provide overarching figures at the end of each month at a local level for every class.”
The site has acceptable use policies, behaviour policies and child protection policies, all to make sure it is as safe as possible for children to use. It provides a ‘netiquette’ policy to make sure pupils are using it responsibly.
The biggest potential pitfall, says Thomson, is that schools buy into the technology and think that's all they have to do to get pupils using it. “The ability to do something technically and set something up on a server is easy to do,” he says. “But the vast amount of effort is actually making that work and making it dynamic and getting teachers to change their practice to make use of it. It's a very big shift in pedagogy. The traditional classroom hasn't changed in a hundred years. Here we're talking about an online space which is nothing like that. You need to adopt totally new practices to make use of it. That's where the path lies: changing practice.”