Learning through lockdown: The value of relationships in a crisis - part 2

The ISC Digital Strategy working group has maintained the information on HomeLearningUK thanks to Abdul Chohan and using #HomeLearningUK on social platforms. A smaller working group headed by Caroline Keep and Ty Goddard created the latest bulletin Protecting Learning. This Bulletin ended up being 51 pages in an attempt to digest all the best practice from across the world and included quotes like "Students have to Maslow before they can bloom” from Swayne Reed and “If we can’t reach we can’t teach”. As well as drawing on the UNESCO Educational International advice collated from 105 countries, Teacher tapp and more specific summaries of good practice like this one on staff wellbeing

Our next Summit, The Brighton EdTech Festival, is booked for Brighton College for 27 November 2020 and will include a chance to have study tours of the local schools and an evening of celebrating the best uses of technology by a cornucopia of Brighton creatives. Planning this event takes me back to thinking about what we learned last November when we collaborated with the Education Foundation and Intel to stage the Brighton EdTech Summit at Brighton college. In this 1 day conference, colleagues in collaboration with EdTech companies shared cross phase, cross sector stories of how they were using technology to support teaching and learning and reduce teacher workload. The summit was attended by over 200 people and supported by over 20 companies including the DfE, stepping up, significantly on our previous conferences and bringing together partnerships to produce resources that will make a difference for teachers and learners alike. Setting expectations for schools to be more demanding of their use of technology and EdTech companies and asking important questions from schools of how best they can be supported.

You can watch a video of the Brighton EdTech Summit 2019, thanks to @myschoolportal, and hear how others thought this #edTechSummit was a great success.

The summit was live streamed and you can watch videos of many of the sessions from the 42 speakers.

This great collaboration produced objective resources like Changing face of the VLE which Mark Anderson the ICT Evangelist wrote in conjunction with Frog Learn and moved forward the Schools Guide for Developing Digital which ISCDigital has been crowdsourcing since 2018.

The Developing Digital a Guide and Toolkit for Senior Leaders initiative has been on hold as so many of our well-developed projects, like the next magazine, currently are so we could best support schools through the crisis but the Guide is now ready for the next wave of sharing.

These collaborations illustrate the great value of working together and forging new relationships. The partnerships have produced new objective resources like Changing face of the VLE, which Mark Anderson the ICT Evangelist wrote in conjunction with ISCDigital and Frog Learn. Together, we have also moved the Schools Guide for Developing Digital forward, which is now ready to be shared.

This crisis has reminded us of the importance of developing relationships with all those involved in the education of our students. As ever, thank you for supporting ISCDigital this year.