Nayland College
Nayland College principal Charles Newton is anticipating the future and harnessing the power of digital data.
Twenty-first century vision
I have always been conscious that ICT was going to be an expensive exercise. It would take a long time. It was going to be a huge commitment, and at the end of the day, there is always that tough question, 'How is this going to improve things for students?'
If schools don't keep up with the world their students live in, were born in, and operate very skilfully in then we are going to get out of touch. The challenge is how to reverse this growing incongruence. How do we start creating a truly twenty-first century learning environment?
Nine years ago, Geoff Scrimgeour, the ICT leader and I started talking with other Nayland College teachers about what we needed to do. We developed a very strong vision for building the infrastructure of the school network, but more importantly the intranet that you lay over the top of that network, and how that could service learning.
So the outcomes of our discussions about the intranet was a model that looks rather like a huge transparent jellyfish that lays right over the top of the school, and you can look into it and see the data, resources, and software flowing round it continuously. It's always there. It can be accessed at any time, in any place in the school, by whoever needs it. But how do you actually enable that instantaneous access?
Digital dashboard
NayNet, the Nayland College network, has been developing tools that sit on top of the standard industry model infrastructure. Everyone at the school has their own digital dashboard, a personal space on our intranet which links to everything else, like the datamine which is our way of gathering all sorts of information very quickly in one place. It has become the gateway to all the resources and facilities that operate across the network.
You can customise your dashboard if you want to. Across the top it gives you quick access to email, to the Internet, to help and to key resources like that. And down the sides it's got a whole series of toolbars, which you can click on to find a myriad of links. And it's all customised so each menu comes up differently depending on what sort of user you are. The ones that the teachers see are slightly different to the ones that the students see. So it's a personalised, individualised 'Welcome to NayNet'.
We are also establishing a digital portfolio where students can store a record of their work. We've even got a 'digital locker' – a student's workbook, which is becoming a bit like their schoolbag. We are developing these very specific, educationally focused, modules to enable users to quickly grab the customised resources and services they require.
Learning centre
When we had roll growth, we took the opportunity to redesign our library. We completely gutted it, put a lot of glass and sliding doors into it, and extended it so it became much more of an open-flow space with breakout areas around it. You can easily move out into the reading area, which is a lovely space, and students love going there; or into an area where you can check your email and Internet; or into the ICT suite, which is the heart of our network. Those who are working to support the network, the webmaster, the ICT manager and the helpdesk people, work from that space. It means that teachers and students are continually interacting and accessing the technical support and the people who – in effect – are designing and running the network. At the same time they are interacting with our skilled librarians and teachers.
We have another area, which we call the media centre or 'The Cave', which is actually a converted set of Nelson Block toilets that are now being put to a much better use. Again, we have split the technical team so that they can look after the two areas, but the same concept exists: that you have your users having access to the people who are driving the network. More importantly, our students have access to a fantastic resource, because people like Murray Neil, the network webmaster, can help students with aspects such as web design and multimedia. This has been a significant success.
Digital future
Over the last two years, a significant quandary has emerged. It is becoming apparent that in the next wave of ICT learning resources (the first truly valuable wave), digital resources are going to be hungry for bandwidth and network capacity. They will be fantastic, very exciting, and they are going to inspire kids and teachers. But they will be true multimedia, and be very demanding. They will need to be able to be accessed quickly and effectively, and broadcast across networks. We have realised that schools aren't going to continue to build networks that are capable of handling multimedia, streaming video etcetera on their own. We don't have the resources, and we don't have the technical capacity to do that.
We are really lucky in Nelson. About three years ago, Network Tasman Ltd, one of the local power authorities, decided they were going to build a big fibre optic network around the region and the CEO, Wayne Mackey, saw a real opportunity for something exciting. They decided to gift a strand of that dark fibre to the schools and education institutions in Nelson to build a super-fast fibre-optic broadband network.
We've grabbed this opportunity – and have begun building 'the Loop'. Instead of schools trying to build things on their own, we are going to be able to pool our resources, expertise, and buying power, and work together. So instead of each school trying to work out how it's going to tackle things like streaming video and multimedia, we are now going to do it together, and I think that's a very powerful model. In fact it's the only model at the moment that is taking us forward. We simply can't go on trying to operate on our own. We will now have a big co-operative network that is going to connect every school in the Nelson region, to the farthest flung, to the smallest, to the largest, all on a huge network with the ability to move learning objects, and other resources, around quickly.
We will be able to access resources from anywhere in New Zealand or internationally. We can start looking at linking to places like Te Papa, and the Correspondence School. And then we will also have the ability to access the video bridge, which then gives us video conferencing all over the country, even internationally. The fact that we will be able to have individual videoconferences, that principals will be able to talk to each other and look each other in the eye when we are discussing matters will be a significant change in the way we interface.
The potential for learning and learners is fantastic. Just think about some of the scenarios. How about live co-operative TV programmes or an inter-school radio station? Let's build on the great things that are already happening in individual schools, but let's start making it collaborative, let's start linking them up, because we can do it. It will be just like opening the door and talking to the person in the next room.
Tracking trends
Our ability to gather and capture data digitally has had huge spin-offs, ones we didn't foresee initially, but which now are absolutely key to everything we are doing at Nayland College. We are tracking a number of student behaviour and performance trends, and starting to build up a very complex, but understandable, reading of what is happening in the school.
Schools are absolutely full of data everywhere. There is data about student performance, about attendance, about their achievements, all sorts of information about them and their families. But it's also in the teaching planning books, it's in the dean's diary, it's in the student office, in people's heads and all over the place. At last we can gather it all together effectively.
At Nayland, we are making sure that all that data is digitised and in secure databases where it can be accessed. It sounds simple, but in fact it is a mammoth task, and it certainly has taken a lot of hard work. However, as we are learning how to do it and as the student management systems improve, schools have an absolutely fantastic opportunity to know so much more about what is going on with their students than they ever did before. So we are doing a whole project around making sure that we are gathering data, analysing it, and looking at the trends that are coming out of it.
We are watching our attendance, and what we call our pastoral stats (statistics), which is the information that senior management and the dean put in around the interaction of students. We are certainly looking at the intake data for our school, and we are looking at the NCEA data, and the progress through the year. We are looking at Māori students, Māori at risk, looking at Pacific Islands students. We can track identified groups, cohort performance, and students with identified learning needs.
Paradigm shift
This data gathering is also very powerful when you are dealing with individual situations and individual students. Thanks to our datamine I now have a screen generated by NayNet, where I can call up a student's name. This is great for me when I don't necessarily know all the students. The screen immediately gives me their photo and their contact details. Around that screen is a series of little icons, and those icons are all the critical things that you would want to talk to a parent about if they ring you; their attendance, their achievements, their past reports, their activities around school, if they have paid their school fees, anything you want that you've got in the system you can have at your fingertips. And that's incredibly powerful – especially if the student is sitting next to you!
If we take that a step further and think about the impact of the Loop network as well as NayNet, now we have the ability to contact the community as well. So now those conversations are going to be three-way, the student, the teacher and the parent, and what could be more powerful than those three all looking at the same data during the conversation? Again, that's paradigm-shifting stuff. We haven't been in that position before but we are on the threshold of it, and I think that will substantially change the way that schools interact with their community and their parents.
