http://www.sonyclassics.com/layercake/index_flash.html

As I work in schools with a wider and wider range of teachers, my ideas for the layer cake are starting to crystalise.  I was working in a school recently and the teacher I was with had an “Aha!” moment.  She had made a pedagogical, if not that then a conceptual breakthrough about e-learning and how it might look and be delivered within the space she teaches in.  It is her quote that is the title of this post.  I am still working on the full variant of the Layer Cake post, but do not want to release it too early, until I have fully ironed out the wrinkles myself.  However, in parallel with the Layer Cake e-learning methodology that I am developing I am also developing support materials in the form of templates, resources and rubrics etc to support teachers once I am not working with them.  I shall be devoting more time to this entire endeavour in the coming days and weeks, but work is un-relenting at the moment, which is good!  It is also clear that there is a desperate need for retro fitting the new paradigm/pedagogy/methodology, call it what you will that is e-learning to good many schools and teachers alike.  All new inquiries welcome.

I have been busy these last weeks working on a variety of projects, some of which are coming to fruition and others that have a distinctly long gestation period.  What is so exciting about all of the projects is their diversity and the range of clients too.

I have been working in a range of secondary schools working with different LMS systems, in fact across the schools I have encountered all of the MOE sanctioned LMSs.  What is interesting is how each of the schools are addressing how they will integrate these tools.  Last Friday I was speaking to a teacher who was recounting some behaviour that he witnessed in a class.  He is a keen advocate for the particular flavour of LMS his school has opted for and as such has put up lots of resources and assignments to his page.  The behaviour he witnessed was three pupils being completely off task during his lesson, they were not disrupting the others in class, just not doing the task at hand.  However what the teacher noticed was that when he checked the logs for his LMS page, those self same students who were off task in the physical space of his class had later, much later 1:00 AM later, gone to the LMS page and had completed the tasks as set.  This prompted us to further discuss the nature of school in a few years time.  Will it be necessary for example for students to physically (at the secondary level) to be at school?  Will it be a requirement of time credits, served either in the physical space of school or via the LMS, in order to have successfully racked up sufficient time at school to qualify for the 40 weeks attendance?

This has been a feature of several advisory conversations that I have had with other schools, how to plan for the future in terms of infrastructure for the school if the only certainty is constant change?  Interesting times and interesting conversations.  It is also very interesting to have the privilege to sit a broad swathe of  schools, both primary and secondary and see how differently they have all approached or want to approach integrating ICT into their particular environments and the unique challenges that each school is presented with.

There are many challenges ahead for these schools and for me.  I am really looking forward to them and to the challenge of guiding these schools along their individual paths.