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Merlin John

Social networking, along with the blogging, podcasting, vodcasting and wiki tools collectively known as Web 2.0, have swept through the consciousness of young people and adults alike. Take-up statistics are staggering and many teachers are already using Web 2.0 in their personal and professional lives. Some are pioneering with their secondary students, but what about primary pupils? Will they miss out because of fear of the ‘world wild web’?

Internet safety issues are even more of a priority in primary than secondary, and many primary schools wouldn’t dream of letting their pupils anywhere near a blog without stringent safeguards. But commercial offerings are emerging that look capable of alleviating fears while providing impressive creative tools for online work. And for curriculum use they look more engaging and appropriate than some of the learning platforms schools are expected to adopt.

Safe online environments have been available to primary pupils for some time. They came in with the earliest e-mail services like Campus 2000 and developed through to the imaginative collaboration for home-school between Channel 4 and Oracle that produced GridClub and then went on to spread into Superclubs Plus and a GridClub mark II.

Now primaries are starting to try out secure, media-rich services that allow children to do everything that older students and adults are doing on sites like Flickr, YouTube and Facebook but without the concomitant risks. With Honeycomb, from Softease, a subsidiary of RM, and Edujam, from the eponymously named outfit which is a new Community Interest Company (CIC), they are staging ground-breaking pilots.

Caroline Tribe is a class teacher and senior management team member at Milverton Primary School, Leamington Spa, a 300-pupil school on the edge of the town centre. She used Honeycomb for a six-week pilot with her Year 3 and 4 pupils.

The children were already familiar with Softease’s word-processing and design programs and the facility with which they could place words and images anywhere on a screen document. So they found it easy to use Honeycomb, which extends those attributes to sound and video and allows children to develop wikis without even knowing they are doing so. It incorporates the kinds of features available through Web 2.0 sites but with greater ease of use and transparency, and with safety built in.

“I wouldn’t use blogs out on the internet with primary children because of the safety issues,” says Caroline, “even though they are taught about e-safety. It’s not something I would feel comfortable with because I don’t think there would be enough control.”

“The thing is Facebook and similar sites are very popular with teenagers and adults, and children are aware of that, but I don’t teach in secondary school. I know it’s a scary world out there in the sense of what they might put there and the fact that it stays out there forever.”

Honeycomb’s passwords set-up means that “anything the children put up there, like their reading and writing for example, is looked at by a teacher before it can be published”, says Caroline. For the pilot, carers and parents could look at their children’s work but they couldn’t add comments for publication.

“Children have to be educated in primary about using the internet and how exciting it is, and using it as a place to put and share their learning,” adds Caroline. “But Honeycomb comes with its own restrictions so we simply didn’t have to worry. Their safety on the internet is my primary concern.”

Children researched their classroom work for history on Ancient Egypt and posted it online through Honeycomb. The school is abreast of digital media so the Digital Blue cameras came out and video records of their drama productions were then shared through the school and with their parents at home - a major step forward.

And the pupils’ reactions? “They absolutely loved it,” says Caroline. “And the reluctant learners loved the idea that they had their own website and they could go home and show it to their parents. Their parents could log on with them and see their work.”

Caroline feels that parental involvement is a key issue. “They could talk about what they were doing and then log on with their parents and show them and talk it through. That was, I thought, the primary benefit for future use, especially with the homework activities because the children at this school do homework every week.

“On a long-term basis you could easily build up a better relationship with parents. Because this was a trial project, and we only did it for five weeks, I did talk to parents about it and they were very excited.”

Headteacher Andy Davis started blogging on a safe Wordpress site with his pupils at Clunbury Church of England Primary School, a small rural school in Shropshire, a couple of years ago. “It was great for written work,” he says. “It’s interactive and kids comment on each other’s work and learn to collaborate.” Great care was taken to ensure internet safety, which was something that children were advised about from day one. Personal information was a clear no-no, and posts were never made before getting teacher approval.

Then he came across the Edujam online service, which uses the metaphor of children presenting their work on a ‘stage’ to promote a culture of creativity and collaboration. It has a firm but sophisticated approach to security. For example, inside school the pupils can use their own names and photos, but accessing it from outside they only see their nicknames and caricatures or other images that they have picked themselves.

“I liked the look of it,” says Andy Davis. “It was professional looking yet homely, and it was not patronising in the way that some services for children certainly are. We can work in class and then upload the work to the servers to share in the school. I will approve their work for public show on the school portal, and it’s not approved until it’s their best attempt.”

As with Milverton, parents have become more involved in their children’s schooling. “Children develop their love of work in school and can then share it with their wider family, for example with their grandparents who don’t tend to see them every week. It’s such a good way to store and share their work and it helps with personalisation.” Pupils upload their work at school and at home too, in a range of media formats.

Experience with Edujam has helped develop parents’ aspirations, says Andy, and gives them insights into what their children are doing. The school has also helped parents with ICT access by redistributing computers no longer needed in school. Courses are also run for parents and a Friday evening animation course is over-subscribed.

Andy says Edujam is used across the curriculum, and has proved very useful for PHSE and for developing e-safety with the pupils. “The more we use it the more we discover its potential,” he says. Like the little book of children’s poetry that was published by Edujam after collating children’s contributions online.

Clunbury also finds it good working with a company that is committed to ploughing back a significant part of its earnings into the service. It’s not often that a school gets to work with a company that is, by its very definition, committed to community benefit and not just to personal profit. The company is also interested in making elements of its service open source once it is established.

Edujam co-founder Andy Prest explains, “Being a CIC alters perceptions, and also helps to develop great relationships with customers and suppliers. It feels like we are all working together to explore opportunities and the benefits of empowering creative practice in the curriculum, along with safe use of digital media within a creative learning platform.

“Our solutions adopt open source, in terms of what Edujam is built from and the way media for a range of art forms is captured. It can safely flow between pupils, staff and parents, removing the technical and commercial barriers that have existed. We are, after all, simply holding in trust the most precious creative outputs of the children themselves. As a CIC we can evolve in a way that offers this sustainably, while recognising that the pupils, parents and schools are the real stakeholders.”

Merlin John is a freelance editor and writer who also runs his own website at www.merlinjohnonline.net .

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