My current school is in the midst of a digital revolution thanks to the 1:1 iPad rollout and Google Apps for Education installation. There are so many options open to staff and students with regards to sharing the digital resources they have curated or created and while this is great for choice and accessibility it can also become a mess of misconceptions, policy conflicts and training needs.
During the pilot with our S3 students I’ve been deliberately hands-off and encouraged experimentation within departments. In January I launched a more formal option (not policy) where teachers were given a structure to work with in Google Drive where they could receive or view work created by students in their class. I’ve received very few comments at all about it but know that more and more subject areas are using Google Drive for sharing resources and receiving student work back. Other options are still being used (and I think it is important to allow this to continue) but I want to provide staff, students and parents with a baseline – a method that can be easily implemented in classrooms but that can also be built upon or adapted with the consensus of individual classes (and by that I mean both students and teachers).
Digital is an abstract medium for many and asking staff or students to suddenly begin to utilise this way of working over and above all others can cause confusion, hit confidence and increase resistance towards future workflow changes. Experimentation followed by discussion on the pros and cons of different systems can help build a more robust workflow that is more immediately useful to a larger number of individuals within the school. I am confident that the discussion to come in the next few weeks will become strong foundations for policy that has been created from the bottom up and is based upon experience rather than sales pitch. However I have a concern that one way of sharing digital resources is not best for all and, very like the variety of subject areas and specialisms in the education system, the standard policy will need to be forked (to use GitHub terminology) to suit other areas.
Perhaps using GitHub is a way forward for school or educational authority policies? The system offers clarity, accountability, accessibility and flexibility. I’d be interested to hear if other schools are allowing departments to remix standard policies (with permission of course) to best suit the educational needs of the student and – like Christopher Ritter – use a service like GitHub to record and approve the changes.
