Posted on

Why everyone should want to become a ‘Digital Champion’!

Recently qualified MIEEs and Wimbledon High teachers Nicola Cooper, Nicola Higgs and Alys Lloyd discuss the impact being ‘WHS Digital Champions’ and part of the Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) community has had on teaching in their departments.

The concept of ‘Digital Champions’ – classroom teachers with a particular interest in exploring new and exciting ways of using technology to enhance classroom practice and student learning – really arose in response to a whole school initiative around innovation in the use of technology. With this aim and along with the introduction of BYOD, it was soon realised that in order to truly exploit the potential of ‘digital’, we needed the people using it, namely the teaching staff, to become the ‘experts’. From small beginnings, the ‘Digital Champions’ is now a team of 23 teaching staff from across the school. As well as regular meetings to discuss strategy with our Director of Digital Learning and Innovation, the group has also been involved in carrying out small scale action research projects looking into amongst other things; collaboration online, AI in learning systems and using hardware.

The Microsoft educator community, which is open to anyone, has been a great resource for all of us in our role as ‘Digital Champions’ providing as it does a vast range of professional courses that focus on helping teachers integrate technology into their teaching. Furthermore, qualifying as a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert gives us access to a global forum of educators through which we can connect with colleagues working in a broad range of settings, drawing on their experiences and learning from them.

Microsoft Trip

Nicola Cooper – Teacher of Biology

For me, being an MIEE and ‘Digital Champion’ has, most crucially, given me a platform through which to really engage with technology. Collaborating with colleagues across departments, observing and discussing concrete examples of how they use applications such as Office Mix and Sway in their teaching, has been inspiring and helped me to think more creatively about my use of the same. And the benefit isn’t limited to use of technology, indeed any vehicle that gets teachers together sharing ideas is immensely powerful. As a digital champion I’ve had numerous conversations around tech, that have digressed to talking about curriculum overlap and collaboration in other areas.

My particular area of personal focus has been the use of OneNote. Through completing online courses, available through the Microsoft Educator Community, I have been able to use the application to give more meaningful feedback to students; the record to audio function allows me to give verbal feedback (of which there is a permanent record), using the inking tools I can pose questions to students and thus enter into a dialogue that would be much harder to do offline. This is expertise I have been able to take back and share with my department. I have been in a position to reassure and encourage colleagues with their use of technology so that we are now in a position where the Biology department has wholly embraced OneNote. Not just in lessons with our students, but also as a means of collaborating with each other and sharing good practice. Imagine this replicated across multiple departments and it is clear to see the positive impact Digital Champions are having throughout the school.

Alys Lloyd – Teacher of Maths

Being a Digital Champion last year really allowed me to utilise my enthusiasm for and love of technology that works well. I wholeheartedly embrace technology which improves teaching and learning both in and outside of the classroom, but I would rather have no technology than tech which makes life more difficult. I saw a number of areas within the school where technology could be used better, and as a Digital Champion I was given the opportunity to add my voice to influence the way it could be improved.

I chose to be part of the team investigating hardware in classrooms, to influence decisions made about the next generation of hardware to be installed in classrooms. We created a questionnaire using Microsoft Forms, which asked all departments across both Senior and Junior schools about how they currently use the hardware in classrooms, things that worked well, and main issues they found with it. Additionally, I was part of the team who went to The BETT Show, where I was able to make positive contributions to IT decisions, giving my opinion on which hardware would work well in the classroom, for a teacher in our school.
Working with the IT Team, I was persistent in pushing for an improved way of accessing shared files and resources. Taking them a variety of different ideas eventually lead to an approach which seemed that it would work in a way that would be futureproofed and consistent with being a Microsoft Showcase School. A few departments trialled different ways of connecting last year, which lead to it being successfully rolled out school-wide this year.

I hope that being an MIEE will allow me to continue to build on my enjoyment of good tech that works well. I look forward to training more members of staff, individually and departments, in optimising their use of the technology we have, improving their experience of technology, and therefore positively impacting students’ learning experience.

Microsoft Trip

Nicola Higgs – Head of Geography

Since the adoption of BYOD, staff have been given great freedom to try out the newest of technologies, to be innovative and take risks, which is part of the ethos of the school and something we try to model for our students. A colleague in the Geography department had an interest in reaching the quieter, ‘less seen’ student, those for whom participating verbally in lessons was more of a challenge. I was keen to see how technology could give a voice to those pupils. Through my role as a Digital Champion I have been so fortunate to develop a truly collaborative relationship with the Director of Digital Learning and Innovation, who suggested that Teams, which was introduced for all staff and students last academic year, might be a platform that could achieve this goal. We devised a ‘silent debate’ for Year 8 who argued for their position solely using Teams. We were blown away with the results; all pupils were able to articulate their point of view, drawing on excellent research, incorporating examples to support and using terminology that we might expect of a GCSE student. Students’ feedback showed how much they enjoyed the opportunity to create and respond to specific points of argument in a timely but unpressured way.

I am now exploring more ways to amplify student voice both in the classroom and the wider school community. I look forward to learning more from other educators through the Microsoft platform and collaborating with my colleagues at Wimbledon in the Digital Champions group.

 

The future

As MIEEs, we are planning to visit Microsoft’s store during the Christmas holidays where we will meet MIEEs from other UK schools, as well as representatives from Microsoft who want to hear all about what we are doing at Wimbledon.

The Digital Champions met a couple of weeks ago to agree the vision for the academic year ahead. It was thrilling to see colleagues bringing their own ideas and areas of interest as foci for research this time around, and our working groups are already getting stuck in to reading and trying out new ideas. We will report back to colleagues later in the year to share best practice and hints and tips.

The technological journey at Wimbledon High feels like it really is beginning, and we would urge all colleagues to consider becoming a member of the Digital Champions, it is an uplifting and ambitious group, and we always have tasty biscuits too!

https://education.microsoft.com/

Posted on

Can you smell blue? The changing beliefs of synaesthesia and ideasthesia

Talia, Year 8, explores the concept of ideasthesia and how our understanding of it has changed over time.

To understand what ideasthesia is, first we must look to its cousin, synaesthesia. The word synaesthesia literally translates as ‘union of senses’ and comes from the Greek words ‘syn’ which means ‘union’ and ‘aesthesis’ which means ‘senses’. It is a phenomenon in which some people associate external stimuli to a sense. For example, people with letter-colour synaesthesia can see individual letters as different colours. Other types of synaesthesia include musical sounds-colours, pain-colours, vision-tastes and many more.

The original understanding of synaesthesia was taken almost directly from the translation of the word. Scientists thought the sensory parts of synesthetes’ (people who suffer from synaesthesia) brain were somehow connected and, when given certain stimuli, would trigger each other. Later studies made on synesthetes suggested that this theory was not entirely correct; in one study, synesthetes made new synesthetic associations to letters they had never seen before. These associations were made within seconds which is not enough time to form a new physical connection between the colour representation and letter representation areas in the brain so this proved that the senses could not be linked.

In another study, letter-colour synesthetes were shown what could be a ‘zero’ or an ‘o’. When the shape was shown in the context of letters, the synesthetes interpreted the shape as the letter ‘o’ and viewed it as one colour; when the shape was shown in the context of numbers, the synesthetes interpreted the shape as the number ‘zero’ and viewed it as a different colour even though it was the exact same shape as before. This study shows that the inducer of these experiences is semantic rather than purely sensory.

Croatian cognitive neuroscientist, Danko Nikolic, came up with the name ‘ideasthesia’ for this new theory coming from the Greek word’s ‘idea’ meaning ‘idea’ or ‘concept’, and ‘aesthesis’ meaning ‘senses’ – it translates to ‘sensing ideas’. During Nikolic’s research, a woman came to him with a very rare case of synaesthesia called mirror-speech synaesthesia. She said “I hear any sound made by a human and it feels like I’m making that sound… in stomach, body, throat and mouth…but only in my mind. I don’t get throat pain for ‘singing’ too much.” Nikolic ran some tests on this woman to dig deeper into her curious case. He discovered that, when the woman was told that an animal was making a noise, she wouldn’t get the sensations. However, if she played the exact same noise again and was told that a human made it, she would get the sensations.

The woman in Nikolic’s study appears to be a rare case but there is a bit of ideasthesia in everyone. When asked to name one shape ‘Bouba’ and one shape ‘Kiki’, most subjects chose to name shape A ‘Kiki’ and shape B ‘Bouba’ based on the shape that the mouth makes as it is forming these words and how the words sound – this shows that we all have a basis of ideasthesia in all of us – we link concepts to sensory stimuli whether it’s shapes, colours or others. Furthermore, the subjects went on to describe ‘Kiki’ as nervous and clever, whereas ‘Bouba’ was described as lazy and slow.

Perhaps this theory of ideasthesia could help with the long-lasting mind-body conundrum: is the mind a separate entity that controls our body externally? Or, if it is part of the brain, how does it translate the input of physical senses into the non-physical state of thoughts? Some scientists are now saying that our mistake is assuming that there is a barrier between these two functions – that thoughts and senses are linked together in a complex network, comparable to our language network.

The traditional view is that the senses grasp a collection of vibrations or colours which our brain translates into the sound of a voice or the colours of a flower. Ideasthesia suggests that these processes happen as one – our sensory perceptions are based on our conceptual understanding that we hold of the world. This is what helps us understand metaphors that make no logical sense, such as the comparison of a cushion to air based on the shared sensation of fluffiness, and the apparent weightlessness of them both.

Posted on

Nicola Adams

Nicola Adams retired from boxing just last week and has been a huge inspiration to many women in sport for example, Demi Stokes who is the England left back in football.

She was one of the first women to go pro in boxing, and the first female boxer to win an Olympic title. In a very much male dominated sport, Adams has shown that there are no boundaries to what women can achieve and has greatly helped the profile of women in the sporting world. She has strived to make women’s participation in sport an encouraging environment where we support each other and strive to achieve whatever goals we set out to.

written by Robin – gymnastics rep