Join us at BETT & The Academies Event

It’s only a few days into the new year, and already our event calendar is filling up fast.

At the end of January we’ll be heading to London’s ExCeL centre for the BETT exhibition, bringing together the best of educational technology under one roof from the 25th to the 28th of January.

On Wednesday the 25th at BETT, our co-founder Seb Francis will be representing Titus Learning as part of a panel discussion on Exporting Innovative Management Information & Learning Systems, which will take place at the DIT International Trade & Export Theatre.

Chaired by Ian Hunter, Chief Commercial Officer at WCBS, the discussion will cover:

  • The demand and differences in innovative management information and learning systems abroad
  • How to pave a route to market: challenges and opportunities?
  • The importance and methods of establishing relationships with the most relevant local partner, agent or distributor
  • What are the best ways to create a strategic marketing plan in order to thrive overseas?

For more information on the session, please view Seb’s profile page on the BETT website.

On February 28th, we’ll be travelling to Salford, where we’ll be exhibiting at the Academies Event 2017 at Adelphi House. The event will centre around what the future holds for existing academies and schools considering converting to academy status, as well as discussing recent developments in the education sector.

The line up of speakers is equally interesting, featuring DfE National Schools Commissioner, Sir David Carter and the Chief Executive of the National Governors’ Association, Emma Knights, among others.

If you’re heading to either of these events and would like to arrange a time to speak to one of our team, please get in touch.

Increasing LMS usage and engagement at the International School of Bremen

Titus Learning were introduced to the International School of Bremen via the International Schools’ Council. The school had been using Moodle for some time, but were looking to find out more about how best to use the platform.

With only one member of staff managing training and support for the platform, usage and engagement among the schools’ 400 students was relatively low.

While keen to continue with Moodle, International School of Bremen were seeking to work with a provider who could ensure that the platform would be well used by staff and students alike, and who would provide a hands-on service including guidance on implementation, rollout and best practice.

Having reviewed the school’s requirements in detail, Titus Learning proposed a Moodle-based LMS which would incorporate a responsive, easy to navigate theme to improve usability as well as integration with the school’s MIS software, CMIS. This would streamline the process of user registration and management, avoiding duplication of work and saving time for International School of Bremen’s administrative staff.

“We first approached Titus Learning following a recommendation from another company with whom we’d worked. The process was well managed, thorough and supportive from end to end” – Malcolm Davis, School Director, International School of Bremen

Data protection laws in Germany meant that the new learning platform would have to be hosted at the school, which was a potential challenge in terms of maintaining the server. Titus Learning were able to circumvent this by implementing a remote management service, which allows the server and all sensitive data to be hosted onsite, while monitoring, updates, security patches and maintenance are handled remotely.

A key requirement was that management and maintenance of the new platform could be shared among the staff, rather than becoming the responsibility of a single member as before. To address this Titus Learning put forward an implementation plan which included in-depth staff training to ensure that the whole team was comfortable and confident in their use of the platform prior to launch day.

This was supported by a proactive support agreement which went beyond the classic model of fulfilling inbound requests and addressing technical issues. As well as providing a telephone and email support service, Titus Learning would provide ongoing advice and guidance into how best to use the platform, new features which could be utilised to further extend functionality and creative ideas to maintain and improve engagement within the school community.

“Titus Learning are a good, professional company and the support they offer is continuous and reliable. We’ll be continuing to work with them in future to support our virtual learning platform.” – Malcolm Davis, School Director, International School of Bremen

To find out more about how Titus Learning can help you engage and motivate learners, or for any other queries regarding e-learning, contact our team here.

Digital Intelligence: If we forget to look out of the window…

As we start the New Year, we’re delighted to feature a guest post on Digital Intelligence by John Mikton, who blogs at Beyond Digital. With 20 years’ experience working in Education Technology and 10 years as a Senior Leadership Team member in International Schools, John is perfectly placed to comment on all things EdTech. John is currently the Director of eLearning at the Inter Community School Zurich and was previously the Director of ICT at the International School of Prague. John is an Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Education Trainer, Common Sense Digital Citizenship: Certified Educator and trainer at the Principal Training Center and AppsEvents.

Every year has its moments, and 2016 was no exception. Various significant shifts occurred, including changes in the political landscape in the United States, United Kingdom, and Turkey. And the horrors of war, civil strife, terrorism and an underlying global tension have been constantly fed into our digital lives from the comfort of our screens.

As we consume the aggregated algorithmic social network feeds, each customized to ensure we get what we want to digest, we are choreographed into a more divisive world.

Information is power. This year, the pollsters, news agencies, and pundits got caught out with two big votes, and so many predictions seemed off.

Our landscape of information has entered a level of Orwellian curation, and what is news, fact, or reality seems dictated by emotion and perspectives constructed from our own curated news feeds. They are rarely factual. “Post Truth” – Oxford English Dictionary Names ‘Post-Truth’ Word of the Year by Jon Blistein is the word that defines these moments and a shift to a new narrative.

For many of us, this Orwellian curation has us struggling to distinguish fact from fiction. The level of sophistication of not only the algorithms but how these are manipulated to shift thinking is the new power. In schools, we are being told by various studies that our students capacity for media and information literacy is weak. (Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds by Camila Domonoske ). When you consider we as adults struggle with this landscape, it is no surprise that our students struggle too.

In a world of algorithms where the sophisticated digital curation of social media, news, blogs, and video feeds can be manipulated to match an individual’s perspective, the challenges we face as educators are immense. This manipulation, shared in this sobering article “ Google, democracy and the truth about internet search by Carole Cadwalladr“, highlights the complexity of being truly media literate.  The prevalence of third party curation in social media feeds during elections highlighted in this article “Macedonia’s fake news industry sets sights on Europe by: Andrew Byrne” emphasis the challenges we all face in understanding what is “real” news.

To be complacent is short-sighted in a school setting.  There is a tendency with school professional development to not explicitly address the digital reality that engulfs our lives as an essential part of our professional learning. Information and Media literacy are what frame our own democratic values: choice, perspective, empathy, resilience, and critical thinking. If we as educators are going to assign students critical thinking tasks and ask them to engage with media and information while juggling screen time in a complex digital landscape, we cannot be passive bystanders.

As school leaders, we need to re-frame our engagement with the role of digital life in professional development. Together, we need to understand the complexity and impact of algorithmic information flows on our devices.

We also need dedicated spaces for this professional learning. We must learn how to mentor information flows, authenticate media, source perspectives, and understand the pedagogic impact of a curated news. We must approach this with patience and empathy, and allow everyone to build an understanding of the digital flows we live by, tapping into the talent of our librarians and digital coaches as guides. We must take advantage of the frameworks available to us (e.g: #1 or #2) and use them as a point of reference for a pedagogic consensus on how to mentor our school community.

The paradigm shift asks us to look at Digital Intelligence as a core intelligence. As defined by http://www.projectdq.org: “- the sum of social, emotional, and cognitive abilities essential to digital life.” and shared out in the World Economic Forum  article: “8 digital life skills all children need – and a plan for teaching them”.

Digital Intelligence needs to be woven into the curriculum. We do this on a daily basis with all other aspects of the curriculum. Let us do it with Digital Intelligence. Re-structure the focus and content to explicitly encompass screen-time management, privacy management, cyber security management, digital footprints, and digital identity; use these to make authentic connections based on our experiences. Then, reflect on our digital habits, likes, tensions, questions and understandings to create activities to share. In this process, we should hope to find comfort in being honest with our own vulnerabilities.  We can then use this life-learning to support our students’ understanding of digital intelligence.

Being explicit about implementing Digital Intelligence in faculty professional learning ensures this is an essential part of our educators professional growth.  Working together, as adults learners, we need to harness the complexity of the choreographed digital world. By ensuring this is in our professional learning landscape, we are then empowered to share our digital intelligence to students. It is the only way to counter an Orwellian curation of information in a “post truth” world.