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Profiles in Success: Bryanston School

The learning system is also becoming valued as a means of spreading ideas between different departments, says Boulton. “We’ve got a scheme now where teachers from two departments observe one another, evaluate what they’re doing, talk about it, and share good practice. Teachers sometimes feel that being observed is threatening, but the portal promotes the positive idea of sharing content and teaching approaches. We’re all teaching the same pupils, and of course imaginative teaching methods that work in one subject area might very well work in another“.

“The students are well aware of the potential for developing the portal”, says Andrew Barnes. “We’ve got 700 divergent views, and of course we can’t implement them all, but it shows how the portal is locked into the educative process at the school”. The big benefit of the learning portal for Bryanston is that it can teach a common curriculum required to meet national attainment standards, and still be true to its core value of independent learning.

“In the past”, says Boulton, “it was hard to present a curriculum that allowed us to differentiate the way we taught our students in the same class, who might be at different levels of ability, maturity and understanding. But now this type of differentiated assignment work is increasingly feasible”.

“[Correction lessons] were recorded so that learning points could be used by the wider class. We provided a microphone to plug into an iPod, and put the podcasts onto the system for access at any time.”

Andrew Barnes, Head of ICT, Bryanston School

Teachers can customise the learning process according to the needs of each child. For example, they can assign a student to a particular “user group” to brush up on punctuation and grammar. Students in these groups will receive specific exercises on the system that target those skills.

The portal also enables an increasing number of students to pursue their own research creatively. “Many of our students are starting to recognise that if they are really going to mark themselves out academically, they have to take responsibility for their own learning at quite a sophisticated level”, says Barnes.

“We are talking to online academic journal archives in order to expand the research opportunities. Instead of students having to search unguided on the Internet, the portal means they have the support of the school and its teachers, and a wide array of very valuable resources”.

On the technical side, Andrew Barnes’ ICT department maintains a bank of Xserve and Xserve RAID servers, with more than 1000 client machines, supported by a three-man technical team. “I’ve worked in schools all over the world that used PCs, and I’ve never managed with just three support people. With PCs, you usually need a whole crew to continuously firefight your systems”, he says.

“We make great use of iTunes for podcast library material currently”, says Neil Boulton, “but we look at developments in podcast technology and can see that with Apple’s Podcast Producer it will be so easy to record whole lessons quite soon, and make them accessible to students and staff via the portal. Sticking a video camera in the classroom is very invasive, but if you just have to ask a teacher to press two buttons, that will change the landscape again”.