The core project team – Lucy Atkins, Josie Fraser and Richard Hall -are all delighted theDigiLit Leicester project has been selected as one of the five winners of the Reclaim Open Learning innovation contest, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, the Digital Media and Learning Hub, and the MIT Media Lab.
Being selected alongside other projects of such high caliber is a real honour:
- Digital Storytelling 106 (DS106) (US)
- FemTechNet (US)
- Jaaga Study (India)
- Phonar-Ed (UK)
It’s a great win, not just for the project, but for the city. Our project is a partnership between Leicester City Council, De Montfort University and the 23 Leicester Building Schools for the Future (BSF) mainstream and SEN secondary schools. It’s an important project in terms of the city, since it’s how the ICT strand of the BSF Programme is structuring, designing and delivering on staff development, to make sure learners in the city get the most benefit from the investment being made in technology.
The project is explicit about the important role open education plays within digital literacy – particularly in terms of the ability to find, evaluate, create, build on and use open educational resources, and in connecting to, participating in and creating open learning networks. The framework and survey content is available under open licence for others to make use of, build on, or adjust for their own settings.
The project aims to improve learner outcomes and opportunities in Leicester by identifying the ways in which school staff are able to use technology to enhance their teaching practice and communities, and support development where gaps are identified. We’ve done this by developing a framework of digital literacy, in partnership with schools, situated in secondary school practice. We’ve developed a survey, again in partnership, mapped to the framework, from which we’ve collected information at the level of individual staff members, schools, and city wide. This month we have been busy meeting with schools to feed back their survey results, decide priorities and plan next steps. We’ll be releasing an external report on the initial findings at the beginning of October 2013. In the second year of the project, we’ll be working with schools on a range of initiatives to further increase staff digital literacy skills and confidence across the city.
You can read my interview for Reclaim Open Learning here.
Cross-posted from LCC’s SchoolTech blog.