Babington 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!

It’s taken a while, but I now finally get to say “we did this!” and link to the blog and video from a school project I worked on earlier this year. I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Babington 5, 4, 3, 2, 1! from ignitescience on Vimeo.

Digital documentation of creative projects in schools

As indicated in this post I’m often thwarted in my desire to share fantastic projects that I’ve worked on in schools because issues around online documentation are not clarified, discussed and agreed upon right at the start of the project, much less built into the time and financial planning.

I think we can – and should – do better.

The sorts of projects I’m talking about are typically – but not exclusively – those that come about through Creative Partnerships (CP) programmes that link artists and other creative practitioners with schools. I started working in schools about a year ago, and am about to embark on my 5th such project. There are obviously important child-protection issues that need to be taken into account when working with young people, however for this to be the only online documentation of the preceding 4 projects that I can officially and confidently link to is very frustrating for a number of reasons:

  1. Fabulous stuff has happened and I want to share it.
  2. Sharing fabulous stuff helps inspire more fabulous stuff to happen, where successive layers of fabulous stuff can build on what’s gone before it, rather than continuously having to re-invent the wheel.
  3. As a freelancer, my career development relies on my being able to evidence the projects I have worked on to potential future collaborators. Absence of public documentation leaves something of a black-hole that’s bad for me on a variety of different levels. (NB Part of the CP remit is to contribute to the professional development of the artists they work with.)
  4. Documentation and discussion of projects as they are in progress allows for valuable conversations that can shape the direction of the project in unpredictable, serendipitous ways.
  5. Whilst CP is pretty good at stipulating OK daily rates for artists, I always find that I spend more time on projects that what I am getting paid for. Utilising documentation to at least help secure the next chunk of income is a way of gaining more value from the project.
  6. When you’re pitching to a school that they should do something they wouldn’t normally do, it helps to be able to a) show them images/videos of something similar and b) some sort of evaluation of what the benefits were so that they have a reassuring frame of reference for your ideas.

There are various tactics that can be employed to ensure that images of vulnerable children are not circulated online. At a fundamental level, these often hinge upon a release signed by parents/guardians giving permission for images of their child to be used. Sometimes these are on a project-by-project basis, but increasingly I’m coming across schools that organises for blanket releases to be pursued for every child either at the start of their time at the school, or at the beginning of each academic year.

Working on CP-style projects though brings new things into the equation, so, even in schools that have acquired release permissions for all of their pupils, there is still a place for a document that outlines the implications of having different forms of online documentation and how the school wishes to address them. Not least because I am probably used to using the Internet and various online tools in a way unfamiliar to many teachers. I can’t assume that they are aware of blogging, video-streaming and discursive spaces in the same way that I am. Best to make sure everything is spelled out, right from the beginning.

There are a few things I always try and flag up in the first meetings I have with school staff, however there are often gaps or grey areas that prevent me from actively using online spaces to share projects that I’m involved in a similar way to that which I take for granted with my other work. I want to produce a document that outlines the different ways I might want to talk about the project online, what the implications of these might be and to allow the school to say “no, please don’t do that” to all or selected parts of that.

A standard, succinct, plain English guide that let’s everyone know where they stand and ensures that the documentation gathered (and there’s always lots that could potentially be used) isn’t left gathering dust afterwards.

After the response to the braindump of practicalities of using blogs in schools I’m sure this is a document that others would find invaluable too, so let’s crowdsource the process to get input from a range of viewpoints.

Creative practitioners, creative agents, agencies, schools and social media types: what do you think should be included in this document?

My initial thoughts of what could be included:

  • Making it absolutely clear that once stuff is online it can be linked to, embedded and remixed by others.
  • Reiterating that the internet has a memory, so you have to be sure before you put things online.
  • Including discussion of work in progress, as well as showcasing completed projects.
  • Gently reminding people that this all takes time and should be worked into the planning, rather than cobbled together as an afterthought.
  • Getting explicit person-by-person confirmation (or otherwise) of permission status.
  • Getting permission to write about projects on my blog, to link to this documentation from other places and to have permission to circulate links/documentation amongst my mailing lists etc

How about you? What challenges do you encounter and how can we work to lessen these? Please add your thoughts to the comments so I can begin to compile them into a useful tool for people working in this area.

Blogging in schools: some practicalities

I recently completed a project in a school as part of the Ignition programme. Although I’ve suggested to other schools that I’ve worked with that blogs may be a useful tool, this is the first time we’ve had permission to go ahead with one so I wanted to share something of the process. I’m always a bit reticent to blog much about school projects on this site because of various issues with working with schools and young people, but there’s important learning to be done here from all directions, so here are some notes brain-dumping the main points.

Why blog?

  • In general terms they’re great for documenting the trials and tribulations of a project, as the project evolves, allowing you to potentially share the process and get feedback from classmates, other teachers, parents and other creative practitioners.
  • Not this project so much, but I’m getting asked to do ‘wow!’ projects that completely take over the timetable for one or more year-groups for a week – it would help everyone involved in these if we could see examples of work like this that has happened before so we can a) reassure those that need to be reassured and b) build on the work of others.
  • If the pupils are writing content for the blog, it’s a great way to check on their perceptions of what’s working well and what isn’t. Also to get a feel for what motivates them.
  • Someone once described it to me as “writing your evaluation report as you go along”.
  • Celebration! I’ve only been working in education settings for the last couple of years, but it’s my feeling that the documentation for what might be genuinely fantastic projects is pretty much comprehensively rubbish. We can do better. Documentation should not be an afterthought.

Permissions:

  • Questions I always ask at the first meeting: “What’s the situation with permissions for photos etc?” and “I usually blog my practice, how do you feel about me blogging this project?”
  • Check at every opportunity that permissions are in place. Ask, ask and ask again.
  • In this case consent had already been given for all the pupils to have their photos used via a generic permission request.
  • Ask again, just to make sure.
  • (Some artists have described how, if there are one or two pupils in a class who cannot have their photo published, they get them to wear an armband. If the armband shows up in any photo, don’t use that photo.)
  • I think there’s scope for being even more black and white about permissions: I’m contemplating producing a document that outlines how I might want to blog about a project (both here and/or on a project-dedicated blog) and the implications of this in terms of images/videos potentially being linked to and embedded elsewhere etc. Also including space for a signature saying: “yes you have permission to do this”. Any thoughts?
  • Surnames were removed from posts before publishing.

Platform:

  • Schools often have their own websites, but these are usually shockingly bad and nowhere near the point of being able to incorporate blog posts.
  • Some schools have options for using the intranet – check in advance if these have the PHP/MySQL resources you’d need for a self-hosted install. Also ask about what ftp access you could get.
  • This school has a platform (Frog) we could have used, but our delivery days were Thursday and Fridays and response times from the IT department during initial communications indicated we wouldn’t be able to get material online within realistic time-frames.
  • I’ve lots of experience with WordPress, so we went for a free WordPress.com account. You’re not being paid to figure out a new system – stick with what you know so it can get done fast and not detract from contact time with the pupils.

This particular context:

  • A secondary school in what’s probably best described as a ‘socially disadvantaged’ part area of a large city.
  • Working with 20 Year 8 girls identified as being non-enthused with school in general and likely not to raise their attainment above the Level 4 they start with.
  • Our original brief: to spark a bit of enthusiasm for learning, particularly with respect to Science.
  • A lot of our efforts turned out to be focused towards building self-confidence in the girls and managing behavioural issues.
  • Project duration: about 8 contact days spread over a month or two. (Two creative practitioners for 75% of the time, the remainder being one creative practitioner with a Science teacher present.
  • Feedback from the initial sessions was overwhelmingly “we don’t like writing reports!”.
  • The blog allowed pupils to document their work in a variety of different media: we used video, text, photo and audio.

Access:

  • WordPress.com allows for a variety different privacy settings: we negotiated a trial period where the blog was accessible only to people with an authorised log-on, and then once we could demonstrate the content was OK, we were allowed to make it freely accessible.
  • We’ve yet to hear back from the school about how they feel about us actively publicising the blog, so that’s a) why I’m not linking to it here and b) another thing I’d want to include in the permission document so it’s clear right from the start.

Account management:

  • The pupils we were working with were moderately disruptive and rarely bought anything like pen or paper to class with them. It was not feasible to give each pupil their own log-on details.
  • We used two log-ons: the admin level one for myself and a contributor role for the pupils to use.
  • The contributor role allowed pupils to write their own posts, but not to publish them. Admin could moderate posts, edit if necessary, and then publish.
  • After publishing, the author of the post was switched to belonging to the admin account so pupils could no longer edit the post. (Either ones they had written, or ones other pupils had written).
  • Pupils did their best to get the admin password – don’t write it down and consider changing the password every so often!

Editorial decisions:

  • The standard of writing amongst the pupils we worked with was generally very poor. We had neither the resources nor the desire to spend our time correcting grammar and spelling and it was important to the project that we put as few barriers in the way of the pupils communicating as possible. The school were understandably reluctant to have writing of this quality published, but we reached a compromise whereby we would correct the basics such as use of capital letters and full stops before publishing each post.
  • It was originally our intention to have only the pupils writing for the blog, but as the project progressed and gaps started to appear, it became necessary to provide some sort of commentary from the point of view of the creative practitioners to bind it together.
  • Post were written in non-chronological order, so it became necessary to tweak the publishing dates to relate to the events the posts described.
  • All the above were outlined in a statement about editorial policy on the blog. I feel this was an important thing to do.

Tags, categories and comments:

  • Since we couldn’t use individual accounts to keep track of who was writing what, we tried using tags to store this information. Pupils were asked to add a tage of AuthorXX where XX were their initials. This mostly worked.
  • We also asked them to add initial tags for other pupils involved in the activity they were posting about, however this turned out to not be very practical.
  • Two different categories were used: one to hold post written by the pupils and another for commentary from the creative practitioners.
  • The creative practitioners made an effort to give positive and constructive comments on each post. It would have been nice for the teachers to have done likewise and it would also have been good to have had the time and resources to encourage the pupils to leave comments too so as to build in some peer review. (This would have had to have been very carefully managed though, because there were some serious clashes going on between several of the pupils.)
  • All comments are moderated before being published.

Random thoughts and observations:

  • We initially made a variety of recording devices (digital cameras, video camera, voice recorder) freely available to the students so they could document things from their point of view. This began to be used by some of the pupils as an excuse not to get involved (by hiding behind the camera), so we reduced it down to just one camera that could do photos and video and controlled the access to it.
  • Lots of documentation is great, but it all takes time to process and there’s only a limited amount you can use on the blog.
  • Check what formats school-owned devices record in. The video camera we were using turned out to be quite old and recorded in a format we couldn’t edit. When it was uploaded to Vimeo the aspect ratio was a bit squished.
  • Build in a system for recharging batteries and taking data off the devices at the end of each day – cameras get used whilst you’re not there and you can’t guarantee your files won’t get deleted.
  • The classrooms were were working in had one computer (at the front, attached to a video projector). We would direct selected students to write about a particular activity and give them a time limit of about 10 minutes to ensure that other people got a chance to write too.
  • Sometimes it’s great to display the blogging process on the projector. Other times it’s very distracting to the other pupils.
  • It’s difficult to manage use of other media – photos need uploading and video needs editing and uploading before they can be used. This makes it difficult for ‘real time’ blogging so some of the authorship decisions about what media is used to accompany text got taken away from the pupils. Not ideal, but part of the practicalities of the situation.
  • Instigating the contributor role and distributing this log-on to the pupils allowed them to write posts between sessions. We initially did this in response to requests from many of the pupils. A couple of the pupils did write several posts away from our sessions, which was great!
  • Sometimes the girls would use their posts to manipulate us into letting them change groups and work with different people. Although we had no control over the groupings, we did have to make some tricky editorial decisions about what to edit out.
  • Occasionally, writing for the blog was used as a tactic for pupils to not engage with the activities in class. Conversely, we could also use it as a tactic for dealing with unruly pupils, or to re-engage pupils who had lost focus.
  • The pupils were very internet-savvy, but do not underestimate the computer illiteracy of other members of staff. You will probably have to walk them through processes of setting up accounts and the differences between control panel admin screens and the actual front-facing website itself.
  • The pupils were very internet-savvy, but their Internet was a different one to the one I use. Different networks, different search engines…
  • Seeing images of themselves in various slouching and sulking poses going online helped to raise the levels of professionalism we were seeing from the girls, although we also had to be careful with those with fragile self-esteem.

Sounds like a huge behavioural management and logistical nightmare, would you ever consider doing it again?

  • Yes,
  • Absolutely.
  • No doubt about it.
  • Running a blog alongside a project needs to be planned as an integral part of activities. It takes a lot of time and needs very careful planning in advance, but the rewards in terms of documenting the project, giving the pupils a space to air their responses and having something to show to people and say “look what we did!” are well worth the effort.
  • It actually turns out that our girls loved to write!


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