Setting homework via Twitter

So, apologies for the two-month absence. Rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated etc... I've just moved to the Persian Gulf is all.

Predictably, a new job is a fount of chaos, and so it has proved as ever - you don't know any of the new place's systems, procedures, where to find resources, whom to ask for what etc - but actually it's a positive pressure: you want to do well, to make a good impression, and to succeed for your new students. I have a great love for the place I left but my day-to-day focus here now is pleasure and gratitude at the exciting opportunities the new role offers me. And new beginnings are as good a time as any to start something radical and see how it goes: when could experimentation possibly be safer than at first in a role, when you have the excuse of finding your feet if you cock up? Don't be cautious: gamble. Explore. And so my first post in a new school is to tell you all this: I'm setting homework only by Twitter now. And wow, but really - wow. I will never, ever set homework conventionally again.

This all began about four months ago when I (much belatedly) took advantage of an unlooked-for lapse in workload to finally get round to learning about Twitter. To someone deeply unimpressed by the Facebook phenomenon (I refuse to even have a page. I looked. I hated it. It would drive me mental) Twitter surprisingly caught instant light. Facebook is navel-gazing (even though you look at friends' sites) - Twitter is discursive by nature. Facebook is about self, and Twitter about views. Facebook is asking people to like me. Twitter is looking for whom I like and being pleasantly surprised by people following me - I take it that maybe I've something interesting to say if they do choose to follow. Obviously these distinctions are a touch false, but you take my point: Twitter is just fundamentally more businesslike and meaningful. I confess to being quite a lightweight user - I just use it to engage in educational and political dialogue on topics of interest, not for anything personal. I suppose others use it more roundedly - but I swiftly recognised its potential as a reliable medium of short factual communication - and what else is homework? I resolved to try it in my new school.

I should step back a while and give some context. I've always been an IT enthusiast without being a true tecchie. I was on email before others, used to teach media with videos while the conventional line was still to analyse newspaper headlines, and got all excited about forum collaboration and conferencing before NCSL made it the centre of every course they do (mildly irritated about how much less the TDA funded me compared to NCSL, but there we go...) I've been using the net since school systems could deliver the bandwidth to make it viable, and in the last three years everything I've produced has been resourced to websites where both colleagues and students could find it. I already refuse to allow students to pretend they didn't get a photocopy, couldn't remember the task, didn't know what proforma to use or how to plan the essay: it's all there online at course-specific websites I've created. They're not exciting (they're mostly Office Live templates with some thoughtful effort in layout going into them) but they're in depth and they work. I've used Wordpress (forgive me, BlogLord, don't strike me down or filter this page!) for dedicated subject blogs for specific schools. Twitter was the next natural step. And so successful was it after week one that several other staff have followed suit as well and we're trialling it together.

Think if you will for a moment of all the problems you face with homework:

• the student lost what they'd written down
• the student didn't write it down properly
• the student couldn't remember it
• the student couldn't read their own writing
• the student abbreviated it stupidly so it makes no sense and they effectively do a different task to what you set
• the student didn't know when it was due
• the parent didn't know there was any
• ... and is probably upset enough when they finally find out how much has been skipped, and blames you for not letting them know
• the parent can't face the argument with the child when they ask to see the planner
• the student / parent / both doesn't know what resource the task relates to
• the tutor / TA / catch-up teacher can't find out what it is to help the student with
• the teacher - god forbid - forget to set it before the bell and instead shouts "sorry - I forgot homework - none this week"
• (the teacher forgot to write it down in haste and makes a fool of themselves next lesson not remembering?)
• (the line manager can't check if the teacher is setting homework?)

You will have gathered where I am going with this: all of these problems disappear in their entirety when you simply tweet every homework. Take one lesson to make all students create an account (actually, two-thirds had them already) and require them to follow you, and you're off. You control the wording, the timing, the weblinks to resources, the due date. Parents or colleagues can access it at will without awkward conversations. Students can have it appear on their mobile, their facebook page - wherever. Display it when you set it for those who want to write it by hand anyway - but all excuses vanish instantly. Most delightful is the end of the ranting from those few parents who never checked their child's work but are furious with you that he (it's always he...) is not doing it. Now you get to delicately point out that they could have checked effortlessly, without conflict, any time they liked. Oh, blissful day - not that I've had that here anyway. Less exciting but more practical is my quiet admission that my own disorganisation has usually been the reason I've faltered away on homework as terms have gone on. Not any more. Twitter is my personal homework-monitoring Jeeves and when classes enter I'm armed with clarity and newfound high expectations.

Retrospectively, I realise this is so immense and fantastic that millions more people must be doing it already. If they are, they're keeping schtum. Having got to typing "using twitter for ho-" in Google, the venerable G-mind suggested completing it with "home automation." Behind the curve I may be, but surely more people have an interest in homework than home automation? Can no-one have searched for this before? Or written about this before? Maybe, beyond the lazy first-ten-answers I searched, they have, but all I found were a few general tangents: a Twitter account called ClassHomework - which stopped being used in early 2009; better, an idea of posting homework on Facebook is buried in the depths of this really thoughtful and inspiring page - but rather low-down in a manner that buries it amidst interesting but less practical and powerful applications (plus Twitter is a bare infostream, much more suited to setting homework than Facebook); the delightfully-named Graham Trick's use of Twitter to be homework help for students - but this entails sitting at Twitter for 2 hours every night waiting for help requests - "really? won't email do that just fine?"; and at last this IT / education consultancy one which sounds something like the use I make - minimal effort for me, high papertrail quality, documents referenced for homework. Why isn't everyone doing it? It's made my life infinitely easier.

Alright, so there needs to be some information about how to use it - but use a blog and post PDF guides for students and parents there available for download. And one for staff, too - you need to standardise the practice a little, to not confuse: we don't use our real Twitter identities (work / life separation warning bell - another reason to use Twitter, not Facebook) but a common form: XYZ_ABC where XYZ is the school's name in 3 letters and ABC the recognised staff initials on timetables. Students can use the formula to search staff. Tweets have a standard form too: year group - subject code - info - due date. A2 Sociology, for example: "13SOC: first draft of Murdoch ownership essay (Tue)" - how clear is that? Optional homeworks have "**" instead of a date, and items / links of interest just start "nb_" and the subject code. Combine these written explanations with a video tutorial on the glorious Screencast-o-matic (upload to / embed in blog if you like, or put it on the main school website) showing people how to go to and use Twitter and you're laughing. How could it be easier?

The luddites who adore keeping it in-house are grumbling, I can hear. Was Twitter the obvious step? Can't all this be done on the VLE, all this providing files and notifying of homeworks? Please notice my snort of derision. I have been waiting for VLEs to be not-sh*t (or indeed, even in existence) for a decade in multiple schools now. I invite you all to consider the following list of problems: step forward to win a prize if your school VLE

• exists (and not just on the server or in the head of the IT guy)
• functions effectively and does not need constant IT support
• is actually used by enough staff for students to know and care about it
• does not require a "working group" (?!) to talk about it
• gives you enough access and functionality not to be irritating to use "because we can't give you full access, that might cause other problems"
• doesn't have a set of emerging policies surrounding how you have to lay things out and what length / design they must all have
• allows you to text homework tweets from your mobile mid-class
• ... let alone then have 24 phones in the class ping as the homework is near-instantly delivered
• doesn't, despite your being a secondary school, look like some cretinous over-bright chalkboard with infant-school icons designed by a six-year-old on a sugar high
• ... i.e. like a late-1990s AOL proprietary interface ("the whole universe is me... look nowhere else...")

Anyone whose VLE manages to clear all these hurdles - pop over, Willy Wonka and I have your Golden Ticket waiting.

No - I'd rather have and maintain my own websites and blogs through commercial programs, free and with excellent functionality, and without line-management interference. And Twitter is the perfect complement. Set Wordpress (or whatever you use) to embed the Twitter feed too and BOOM! - There it all is right there for them. Not an excuse in the world. No losing track or lack of papertrail. No fake parental dissatisfaction. Fibbers - students or parents - have nowhere to hide - and nothing's going to keep me more honest, either: because if I'm not setting it right, I've invited the world to watch. I'm happy with that - we're all bound in to success together. Try it. And while you're at it - if you see any of the folks from Twitter's marketing department - tweet them that they owe me a MINT for this posting.

Enquiry and inquisition

Teachers everywhere will know and bemoan the existence of school filter systems. More draconian than the inquisition, more inflexible than plastercast, more arbitrary than a roulette wheel, they have a suppressive and stifling effect on classroom practice. A day barely goes by without an education blogger or twitterer having a (generally justified) rant about some latest inanity or perversity of their system: wtiness, for example, Malcolm Bellamy's brief and well-written complaint. You can't check your own email in school, even on free lessons; YouTube is blocked; all blogs are blocked at a county level; almost any search term referring to anything remotely controversial is inaccessible - and so forth. Never usually one to whinge about lack of teacher autonomy and willfully stupid school processes, for once I want to do the opposite, and suggest - both that there is a way round this - and that this medieval censorship is actually an accidentally systemic feature, not the result of anything intentional.

First, eliminate the obvious idiocies, which are rare. Heads who ban any use of emails in lesson times, schools that refuse to allow *any* teacher a filter bypass, bans on teachers using YouTube - these are foolish and not that common. Most Heads, behind the curve on technology for reasons both of age and time pressure, prefer to ignore what teachers are doing and IT-competent educators can do what they need in this regard. Also ignore the fact that school filters block vast swathes on general keywords in searches - my own, for example, blocks anything containing "teen", "network", "violence", "protest", "revolution" etc - even from major national newspapers. You will imagine how difficult this has made the last few months of news coverage for Citizenship lessons... what I want to explain is how this happens in practice.

To understand how we got to the point where nearly everything useful appears to be blocked, you have to know the structure of the blocking systems. At least (I am informed) this is how it works in the South-West - and I suspect most others are the same. Imagine a tree system: many teachers to one school, many schools to one LEA, many LEAs to one region - and the whole region uses one filter company, one filter. Probably with the best intentions (to protect children - and probably even to save teachers' time) someone somewhere, without thinking it through, set the whole thing up so that when one teacher in one school asks for a given site to be banned, the whole region filter picks up the block. So everything that any teacher or IT technician in any school anywhere in the network blocks - it's blocked for everyone. It's literally a Puritan's Charter. One dyed-in-the-wool Daily Mail-reader can screw up all interesting exploratory IT-based work for everyone across several counties - and there are no shortage of people who would. It is a system which (I contend, accidentally) empowers the traditionalist over the progressive, the IT-incompetent over the pathfinder, bookwork over IT, tedious bland topics over interesting controversial ones - and all by accident. Imagine if you ran a classroom or school (primary or secondary - it doesn't matter) this way - where anything that anyone objected to as a learning activity had to be banned. Reading and maths would be out pretty quickly at the say-so of the least engaged; singing would get blocked (probably by boys) and physical activity (possibly by girls?); assemblies would go, and science for those who don't like equations and... and... and so on. Every worst prejudice and conventionality would be enforced. Now imagine everything your class had blocked also being blocked at every other school, and vice versa - there'd be nothing left. Providing a systemic "universal right to block" is fundamentally foolish, and multiplied exponentially once you have networks as large as whole UK regions. No-one wants a system where so much is inaccessible, and once you realise we got here inadvertently, it'll make you a lot less angry - and a lot more practical and rational about how not to let this limit your teaching. So despair not! From the following list of response actions you can take there will be a few, no matter what your regional system and how similar / dissimilar it is to mine, which you can use:

• Search by article, preferably on broadsheets: get students to search by article instead of pictures, and then take the pictures from the written newspaper online articles - often restrictions are more stringent on image searches (I don't know how this is done, but I've seen it.)
• Walk kids round the system by the back door: have your own site (blog or otherwise) on the WWW not on your VLE (immune to the filter when accessed externally), and extract "safe" article sections for students, with links to the full articles - students will go home and click to the link to read more fully once they're outside of the school filter. The very act of filters banning / blocking slyly makes them more likely to go away and look from home: independent learning!
• Have ready use of a full filter bypass: go to your IT technician and require them to tell you / install for you the filter bypass - don't believe them if they say there isn't one, there is, and thousands of teachers use it. I have it on my Faves bar at the top and it allows me to teach from anything normally blocked under the filter - of course I take no risks when browsing live with a class. And NO, your IT technician does NOT need to "check it with the Head"; by all means they can inform the Head (and drop an email yourself too) but if it empowers and improves learning in your class, and especially if it is critical to it, then you need to use it. Put the case strongly to SLT if needed.
• "UNblocking exists too": for most school filter systems, your IT technician can unblock whole domains at a school-level even if they are on the county / regional ban list (YES, they CAN - don't believe self-important "gatekeeper" IT techies who decide it is their choice whether they do so and who claim it is them "who will get in trouble if kids access something wrong" - NO, you WON'T, I'm INSTRUCTING you to unblock it, the risk is MINE. This can be done with YouTube or Twitter or whatever you need.
• Argue for teacher responsibility and use good, classroom-discretionary software to support it. Banning a given thing at county or regional distance is pointless, inflexible and ineffective. If your school uses a separate software system like Impero, you can take control of any one, or all computers in a room at once; you can block specific types of site or specific sites on a switch on / off basis. And by the way, what controls whether a child accesses a given site in my classroom is not the job of the IT technician to decide, but mine - I'm the teacher, and I supervise my classes carefully, and what I say goes. I do not require a minimum wage techie at a desk eighty miles away to enforce, let alone make, that decision for me.
• Make your Head read this article. If they're the panicky sort who fears the risks of the net and therefore adopts a default burrowing position on all matters IT, presuming that "if it's filtered there must be a good reason why", make them read this article to understand how this vastly disproportionate system of censorhip has arisen and managed to, without anyone's explicit intent, consume in its path so much good and worthwhile learning.
• If all else fails, do it on the sly. You will need to exercise judgement over whether to accept this advice! But before my school's (excellent, open-minded and collaborative) IT technician figured out the bypass and unblocking functions, I bought a 3 dongle and turned off my laptop's Wifi and instead used the dongle whenever I wanted to bypass the system. I billed the department for the costs and, ironically, it was this that nudged people into realising this was stupid and expensive and there must be a way to bypass and unblock - and there was, just nobody had told us. Proceed cautiously here.

Of course we want children protected from the filth the net is full of. Of course we want to avoid classroom time wasted on inanity. Doubtless we also want to stop saying "please, please stop looking at that stupid site" (even though we know we should be taking responsibility and asserting, rather than asking.) But don't get angry and rant. Don't presume there's an anti-teacher disempowering conspiracy (it's a drift, not a conspiracy!) Realise it's an accident of an ill-thought-out system and remind yourself of what you know: technology enhances learning; the real world, in all its controversy, should be the stuff of education even for the youngest; systems and technicians work for teachers, not the other way round; you need and should feel unabashed about using a bypass filter; you are entitled to decide when a specific site should be unblocked for your class / year / department / school's group(s) of children, using your excellent and appropriate professional judgement - and now, go make these things happen. Bring the world into your classroom as you see fit and don't let anyone say no.