Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.

ALT 2011 Learning Technologist of the Year Award

1. Entry for Team award / Individual award (delete all that do not apply) Individual 2. Full name of individual entrant and name of organisation in which the individual is based or name by which the team wishes to be known if it wins an award, and the name of the organisation (or organisations) in which the team is based. Oliver Quinlan, Robin Hood Primary School 5. Your summary as to why you or your team should win the award (200 words maximum). Write this once you have completed sections 6A to 6D. I am a highly reflective learner, and it is this reflective approach that I think is my biggest strength in my use of technology for teaching and learning. In my first two years of teaching I have been involved in a wide variety of projects developing the creative and social use of technology to support learning in an integrated way. In my own classes I have fostered an ethos of confident, creative use of technology. This has also included encouraging a reflective approach towards the use of tools by the children I teach, including the choice not to use technology when it is not appropriate. Through my network of online contacts I have shared thinking and practice, which has lead to a number of offline opportunities to influence the thinking of teachers, and in turn the experiences of learners. I am passionate about the use of technology for enabling communication and reflection, but firm in my belief that it is less about the tools, but the thinking behind their uses that has the biggest impact on learning.

6. Your evidence. Please summarise your evidence against each of the 4 areas listed below (400 words maximum per area, including any URLs a URL will count as one word, and must be preceded by http://). 6A. A clear description of the actions and roles taken to develop and support the achievement. Individual entrants should indicate any substantial involvement of others in the achievement. Team entrants should indicate who actually did what. In my role as class teacher at Robin Hood School I have been responsible for a variety of innovations in the use of technology for learning. My use of Google Docs for writing has had a significant impact of the way the children in my class approach writing. I have taken advantage of the live concurrent editing facilities of Google Docs, at first to allow me to 'live mark' children's work; adding comments and highlighting possible areas to work on in real time. This has allowed children to make significant progress in their writing, as they receive tightly focused feedback during the writing process. This has also been extended to include sessions where children 'live mark' each other's work, peer assessing their writing. Although this began in an unfocused way, my pupils have become increasingly focused in the comments they leave for other children, and in approaching assessment of their own work. More information at http://bit.ly/docsassessment . Our class blog has become a focus of the learning in our classroom. This has been used to share learning and reflect on it using comments. It has also facilitated conversations on learning across

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.
the world, with comments from schools from children from U.S. to Australia. This has resulted in children in other locations joining us in learning, for example our sentence videos at http://bit.ly/boyssentences were used by several other classes, with one producing their own video at http://bit.ly/boyssentences2 . More recently I have experimented with using Google Sites as a e-learning resource to provide structure for pupils independent learning. Our class website at http:://www.4oq.co.uk has become a central part of the experience of my pupils, providing them with links to online resources, ideas for independent learning, and forms to feedback on their learning to me. I have created 'Independent Lessons' which have allowed children to make independent choices about how to approach their learning. At first these mirrored offline lessons, but looking to leverage the benefits of this resource I have designed lessons to allow learners choices over the process of their learning. This has resulted in children taking control of their learning and deciding to produce outstanding videos to illustrate this and teach others. There is more on how this evolved on my blog at http://bit.ly/elearningindependence. These examples represent some of the most significant aspects of an approach towards integrating ICT into the learning of my classes. 6B. Clear, credible, statement of individual or team approach to the technological, and/or methodological, and/or managerial, and/or teaching and learning choices made by the applicant (individual or team), during the period covered by the application1. I approach ICT as a tool to enhance learning, and seek to embed it within a wider context of authentic learning experiences wherever appropriate. It is my belief that ICT skills should not be taught in isolation, but as a part of projects across the curriculum. I have found that integrating technology in a meaningful way is very powerful, as children can immediately see the links between ICT skills and their wider learning. What has excited me most about developments in new technologies in the past few years is the potential for sharing, communication and collaboration. I have personally benefitted hugely from this social technology in terms of my own learning, and my own blog and twitter network have allowed me to reflect with and learn from innovative educators from across the world. I openly discuss this with the children I teach, and we often make use of my twitter network to ask questions of those who have more expertise than myself in particular areas. This modeling of social learning is something I am trying to develop by encouraging connections between my classes and others across the word through the medium of our class blogs. The capacity for communication has enormous potential for providing children with authentic audiences for their work. Rather than simply completing work and leaving it in their books for only themselves and their teacher to read, I have worked to use technologies such as blogging to share children's work and invite feedback on it. This has fostered an ethos of sharing, evaluation and reflection in the classes I have worked with. The result of this is that children regularly opt to share their work, even when still in progress, with each other using such tools as the share function in Google Docs. Such choices are central to my approach to using technology for teaching and learning. My class have access to a mix of devices, including Macs, Linux notebooks, PCs and Apple iPads. We also use a variety of applications, from traditional desktop software like iMovie and Photoshop, to web 2.0 applications and mobile apps. This wide variety tools allows children to develop skills which are portably across platforms, as well as allowing them to make informed choices about the appropriate tool for the tasks they are undertaking. I encourage discussion of tools in this abstract
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Though there is no prescribed period, ALT envisages that typically applications are unlikely to rely on activity that took place more than 3 years ago.

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.
way, as can be seen in our recent video discussing children's preferences for using computers or traditional books for their writing at http://bit.ly/writingchoices . 6C. Major and beneficial impact on practices within the entrant's or team's organisation, or community, or sphere of influence. When I began teaching in 2009 I enrolled on a Masters programme alongside many of the staff from my school. Through this I influenced a shift in practice from largely traditional desktop applications, to using web 2.0 tools across the school. This has allowed children to access their learning from school at any time on any computer, and many of them have taken this opportunity to develop their learning from school in their own time. For example, this presentation produced at home http://bit.ly/4oqgreece. Seeing the power of this, I implemented a Google Apps implementation across my school. This began as an initiative for staff to be able to collaborate on planning and access it at home, but quickly grew to the point where all children in Key Stage 2 use this as their main system for creating documents. This allows fast feedback that can quickly influence the children's learning, and some classes are also using this for peer assessment and self evaluation. I am passionate about the use of blogs for learning, and my practice with our class blog has influence the continuing development of blogs at my school. Many of our school blogs had historically just been used to share finished work and news, but I implemented the idea of creating participative activities, and posing questions for reflection for children to respond to using comments. I have also influenced the use of video on class blogs, in particular encouraging children to produce instructional videos to share what they have learnt with other classes such as in the Maths explanations at http://bit.ly/mathsexplanations. These explanations have also influenced other classes to create their own similar videos. I have a wide influence across my twitter network, and my own blog at www.oliverquinlan.com/blog. For over two years I have been sharing my thinking and practice through these channels. I have also talked at a number of TeachMeet events on a variety of uses of technology for learning. This networked approach has lead to my being invited to share my thinking with a strategy group for 21st Century Learning in Birmingham, present to school leaders at the National College, and deliver a lecture to trainee teachers at Plymouth University. My aim is always to communicate not just ideas for the uses of technology, but to encourage others to think critically and reflectively about how these tools can make the most significant impact to learning.

6D. Outstanding overall contribution in managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of learning technology. My approach to technology as an integrated tool, my philosophy of child centered learning, and the projects I have undertake using collaborative technology have come together to allow my classes to become confident, flexible and creative users of technology. The sharing of learning through their blogs, and the thinking behind this practice on my own, has in turn influenced other teachers and learners to develop their use of technology along similar lines. I feel this is most evident in the way in which the learners I work with choose to use technology in particular ways to support their learning. I regularly give the children a free choice as to how they wish to express their learning, and they do so using a range of tools. This is demonstrated well in our blog post on the mechanics of daytime and night time at http://bit.ly/4oqdaynight . This shows a range of tools being used to explain their understanding, including pen and paper in the cases in which the children felt this most appropriate.

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.
Recently, I have been using our class website to create structured resources which children can work through independently. I created such a structure for sentence writing, but left the choice of how they would express their understanding of this to them. A group of children were left to work independently and, having learnt all of the material provided, they chose to express this in the form of a video. The video they produced can be found at http://bit.ly/4oq3ed. This creative use of technology shows them not only demonstrating the sentence types they had been learning, but also some powerful thinking about their audience, and how to structure a series of web videos so that they keep coming back for more. The resources these boys created have since been used in Literacy lessons at several other schools in the UK, which shows the power of the connected environment for learning that I am working to create for children. In two years as a qualified teacher I have explored many different technological projects, associated with learning across the curriculum. However, it is this ethos of self organised and creative use of technology for learning, and the sharing of this learning with children and adults across the world that I am most proud of.

7. Date on which form was completed for sending 24th May 2011

Example entry for ALT Learning Technologist of the year award by Oliver Quinlan.