Scale up, not down

First of all, a big congratulations to the Digital Leaders @ Hamble College who impressed Vital’s Helen Caldwell. On Wednesday, Helen inform us that we had been issued a grant to help bring teachers from various SE school together to help define the Digital Leader project. To then expand the project and to help like minded schools start similar DL projects at their schools within the SE area. Currently we have 4 schools/colleagues interested, some staff I know, some I look forward to meeting but its still open. We have room/funding for probably 6 schools in total. Its all rather exciting, and certainly the DLs that met and enthusiastically presented their experiences to Helen last week, are “chuffed to bits.”

Meanwhile, I continued my personal conversations with like minded teacher and ICT innovator Daniel Stucke, Director of E-Learning at Stretford High School, Manchester. Clearly out of area, but keen to get the wheels in motion at his school. Our conversation led him to a chance encounter with ICT consultant Bob Harrison who incidently bumped into the DLs at ‘work’ at the Open Source Schools Conference last year. Now, Bob just happens to be one of the ICT consultants contributing to the Vitals Strategy and governor at the school with which Daniel Stucke’s school is potentially merging…. the dots just seemed to be connecting all by themselves…

So with Bob’s expert knowledge and encouragement, Daniel approached the NW Vital project and has been successful in his own rights, funding pending for his own Digital Leader project, so hopefully we will have 2 areas in the frame.

Excited by the imminent collaboration on Digital Leaders with @kristianstill, Toshiba via @bobharrisonset and also Vital. Daniel Stucke

To finish this almost unbelievable tale, I get a call from Bob on Friday AM. Bob outlined his tempered views more traditional CPD – you know the type – tick the box and collect the certificate type CPD, and his thoughts as to what a Digital Leader programme could potential offer a school and not just my school, or the schools in our region, but all schools. I had to pause for thought, come up for air.

Bob has encouraged me to think BIGGER (which made me reflect on a conversation I had with Tom Barrett a few weeks ago and the advice he received from Google – scale up, not down). Without question I am very passionate about the DLs, I have seen first hand the positive impact they have had/made at our school; on the CPD expereince of staff, on the confidence of the students as DLs, on improving the DLs relationships with their teaching staff – including myself, on pulling ‘teachnology’ into the classroom and on showcasing the school, but it was only 2 weeks ago that I was discussing the possibility of a regional programme with Vital.

So, I am cautiously moving forward, reassured by Bob’s confidence. I intend to dedicate time over half-term to the scaling up document for Digital Leaders (Wiki or Docs?). I am going to be asking Tom for his thoughts as he is 6 months thinking ahead of me and because I trust and value his opinion. Feel free to contribute – and if you want to know more about the Digital Leader programme, just search the Digital Leader category.