Special Educational Needs a (very) Brief History

Pre 1960’s – People with disabilities are considered defective and ineducable, labels like imbecile are official medical terms.

1967 – Plowden report recognised that disabled children should be educated alongside able bodied children.

1978 – Warnock Report recommended Inclusive education should happen wherever possible, parents of children with S.E.N should be involved with their children’s education, the broader term ‘special educational needs’ should be used.

1981 – Education Act incorporated most of the recommendations of Warnock report.

1983 – Above mentioned Education Act came into effect.

1989 – UN Convention on the rights of the child treaty was adopted by the UN general assembly.

1993 – Education Act revised previous legislation. S.E.N code of practice was published and was mandatory for schools and LEA’s.

1994 – Salamanca conference in Spain produced the Salamanca statement which made a commitment to ‘education for all’. Britain agreed to make inclusion a priority in educational policy.

2001 – ‘Special Educational Needs and Disability Act.’

2002 – Revised S.E.N code of practice came into effect.

2004 – Welsh government made UN convention on the rights of the child treaty part of all its planning and policy making.

2011 – Wales was the first place in the UK to make the UN convention on the rights of the child treaty law.

2012 – Welsh government proposals currently under review include: Increasing S.E.N support up until the age of 25, replace the term S.E.N with A.N (additional needs), bring together services provided by health, social and educational services and have an individual development plan for a child which can cover all areas.

Lev Vygotsky

·         Born June 1896 to a Jewish family in Russia.
·         He was a social constructivist – believing that to a certain degree we create our own learning but our social environment has a large part to play on cognitive development.
·         He was heavily influenced by Marxist ideas.
·         He saw children as active organisers of their own knowledge who used sign systems (language, number) in a continuous interaction with the social world.
·         Talks about the ‘natural line’ of development which comes from within the child and dominates up until about two years old. Then the ‘cultural line’ of development kicks in which involves the use of sign systems.
·         For Vygotsky human thinking would be impossible without language and other sign systems
·         The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child can do by independent problem solving and the level that might be achieved through problem solving (resolving cognitive conflict) with the support of an interested adult.
·         Vygotsky attempted to chart the developmental course of language. He did not believe these stages to be prescriptive and rigid and acknowledged that some children may move backwards and forwards between stages. Problem novelty or difficulty can cause a child to regress to an earlier stage whereas experience will progress development.
·         Primitive stage.
·         Practical intelligence.
·         External symbolic stage.
·         Internalisation of symbolic tools.

Voki

Voki is a website where you can design and add a voice to an avatar. The basic package is free but is quite limited. There is a package called Voki classroom which comes with a monthly subscription and is designed for educational use.

Voki classroom acts as a virtual learning environment. It can be used to design entire lessons and can be used interactively by students. A teacher can set up a lesson and register pupils so they can view it. The teacher can also set homework tasks which the pupils can complete using voki’s which are marked and assessed on the website. The teacher also uploads a lesson plan which details learning outcomes and a breakdown of topics to be covered. Other than this I don’t fully understand what else Voki classroom actually does. I have trawled through the website and read the getting started guide but am still not much wiser. I’m not sure what kind of teaching this is aimed at:  primary aged children? University students? or distance learning settings? I struggle to see the point of Voki classroom other than an aid for distance learning courses.

The basic package doesn’t really have any educational use as it is so limited but the Voki classroom package which is designed for teaching obviously has an educational use. However I think that Voki has overestimated it’s abilities to replace a real classroom.

Voki Website

www.icanhas.cheezburger.com

icanhas.cheezburger.com is a web2 website that contains funny pictures with captions. It began using just pictures of cats with deliberately misspelt captions which were supposed to be interpreted as being spoken by the cat in the picture The reason for the name of the website derives from the very first funny cat picture - which are known as lolcats - where a grey cat asks for a cheeseburger. It has since been assumed that cats really love cheeseburgers. Anyone can upload and caption their own picture or just caption an existing picture. This is then submitted and people vote for their favourite captions and the winners are put onto the website. The main positive feature of this website is the entertainment it provides. I like the website because I like cats and I especially like funny pictures of cats. Other than providing entertainment there aren’t really any other positive points to say about this website. The negative features of this website are that it contains a lot of advertising; the website is completely free to view and contribute to and so only makes money from adverts. In addition the website has become slightly addictive for me and I have found I have wasted a large amount of time looking at pictures of cats instead of doing something productive. Wired magazine in its October 2012 edition brought to light to what extent the internet is used for looking at pictures and videos of cats, it made for surprising reading and more importantly made me realise that I was not alone in my cat obsession.

Wired October 2012 Article

Sir Ken Robinson 'School Kills Creativity' TED Talk - A Reflective Journal

The main theme of Ken Robinson’s TED talk is that the creativity of children is not nurtured in our education system and that the schools are primarily focused on achieving academic success. He highlights that a significant potential problem with this could be that children will grow up scared to make mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them is something that is an inevitable part of the creative process. He believes that creativity should be considered as important as literacy.

Children are being educated within a system that is examined very rigorously and where success is measured by grades and percentages and getting an answer wrong has become increasingly stigmatised. Young children aren’t afraid to make mistakes and will make attempt to answer a question; however this approach is educated out of children by the time they leave school.

Robinson discusses the idea of an educational hierarchy of subjects that exists in schools around the world. He puts maths and literacy at the top, followed by humanities such as history and geography then lastly the arts like drama and dance. The arts are considered the least important faculty and so have the least time and resources dedicated to them in school. He goes on to say that there is even a hierarchy within the arts themselves; art and music is considered more important than drama and dance.

The symptoms of this style of educating according to Ken Robinson are that it only serves to produce university professors. Academic success dominates the view of intelligence in society and so education focuses on academic achievement. Robinson predicts that in the next thirty years the amount of university graduates will cause academic hyper-inflation. Academic inflation is something that can be seen already. Twenty years ago a university degree could almost guarantee a respectable, reasonably paid job. Now there are a huge amount of university graduates that cannot find employment or who are working menial, minimum wage jobs. Also the level of university education required for certain jobs is increasing. Where previously a degree was required, now a masters is required, and where previously a masters was required a PHD is now required.

According to Ken Robinson the way we are educating our children for the future is not sustainable. There needs to be more emphasis on vocational education and building skills for work and for the future.

Ken Robinson does raise some interesting points in his TED talk, however I believe he puts far too much emphasis on creativity in education. I agree that academic inflation is already a problem but I think this is to be combated by having more vocational subjects taught in school. Children should be given the opportunity  to choose whether or not their education is academically focused or vocationally focused after a certain age, maybe fifteen or sixteen. Up until then literacy and numeracy are vital for any job sector, industry or academic career. I agree with the point Ken raises about the examination systems that are used in schools. They do not measure learning they are more often than not just a memory test and I don’t believe they give accurate results of an individuals’ intelligence or potential. I don’t believe that creative children will sustain an economy, I believe children who are literate, numerate and skilled to work will.

Guardian Teacher Network Blog

I have chosen to follow this blog because I believe the Guardian newspaper to be of a reputable standard allowing me to find its content useful and reliable. The blog contains posts from teachers, head teachers, deputy head teachers and also professional articles from Guardian writers. The content on this blog is varied containing teaching resources and useful ideas for lesson planning which come from teachers who have tried and tested them which makes this blog a good platform for sharing good practices and ideas. There are anecdotal posts from teachers including a ‘secret teacher’ an anonymous blogger who gives frank opinions on issues in the school system. This could be very to useful to people, like me, who are aiming towards a career in teaching as it gives an insight into the struggles that may be faced. The blog also includes topical stories with teaching resources for initiating classroom debate. However it is important to remember that most newspapers have some kind of political inclination meaning they aren’t always impartial. The Guardian veers towards the liberal democrat party and liberal ideas. This should not mean that its content is disregarded as left wing but other sources on information and opinion should be considered in order to gain a more balanced understanding of a topic.

Guardian Teacher Network Blog Link 

Viral Advertising

The film Prometheus used various methods to advertise the film. As you would expect for a major Hollywood blockbuster there were the usual trailers on television and posters. In addition to this adverts and websites for the fictional organisation futuristic products found in the film can be found all over the internet. In the film which is set in the year 2093 Guy Pearce’s character Peter Weyland appears as a very elderly man probably about 90 years old. This was done so that a fake TED talk could be created where Guy Pearce appears as Peter Weyland in the year 2023 when the characters organisation ‘Weyland Industries’ is supposed to have been created. There is a very realistic looking website dated 2073 for ‘Weyland industries’ which contains detailed information about the company, for example it is valued at $218 trillion and employs 619.698 million people on planet earth. Michael Fassbenders character in the film is a robot and a viral advert for this type of robot starring an unnerving Michael Fassbender as his character was created. I am impressed with this level of detail in film advertising; it is quite submersive and builds tension and excitement up to a film’s release really well. It is an example of innovation in advertising and an excellent use of a widely accessible medium.

Weyland Industries