Islay High, a school of ambition

Congratulations to Islay High School on winning the Scottish Education Award for Ambition.  Also, thanks to Ian Stuart and colleagues for allowing me to come to their open day on Friday.  What I saw was truly excellent.  

Each child has a Samsung Q1 UMPC. This usually retails at £700, but it's now possible for educational establishments to purchase them on an "Education Licence" for just £350. These are significantly more advanced than the Asus Minibook. Key features include 2 batteries, a 6 hour battery life and a touchscreen which recognises handwriting.

They are a small school with only 29 staff. This has greatly aided staff training and quality assurance for the project. I questioned a few pupils and it seems that the laptops are used all the time (they don't sit at the bottom of bags unused).  

The key focus of their project has been "personalised learning" facilitated by the laptops. Notes are taken on the laptops and tags added to "useful bits for the exam". This builds up a personalised set of study notes for each pupil. (they predict this will have a high impact on attainment).

Evidence collecting has been greatly enhanced by buying 100 webcams at £2 each. The children use these with the laptops to video what they are doing e.g. video of a chemistry experiment. The SQA are increasingly willing to accept this sort of evidence over paper evidence.

They have used their polling system on parents evenings to gain feedback from parents about policy ideas and what they're doing

The technology is perhaps the thing that strikes you most immediately about the school, put it is really there to facilitate the other changes: a relaxation on age and stage, more choice in the curriculum (an excellent selection of vocational qualifications), personalised learning.  

Next step is to implement a VLE (Studywiz).  

I had a great day and learned lots from the experience.  It was good to catch up with John @ Sandaig (trademark it before somebody else does John) and also speak to Ewan MacIntosh and others.  

Thanks to Ewan for the above photo. I think the elevated view and the sun perfectly demonstrates how thinning I now am. You can see the rest of Ewan's photos from the trip on his Flickr here.

I now plan to write about Islay and what they are doing for my MEd project next year.  The difficulty will be narrowing down what to include (the Masters dissertation is supposed to be quite specific) when there is so much inspiring stuff going on at the school.