Educating Yorkshire has been a huge hit, with viewing
figures in excess of 3 million, making it one of the highest watched programmes
this year for channel 4. This got me thinking about how there is a genuine
interest in finding out what kids are getting up to in schools. Of course there
are positives and negatives to putting cameras in schools for all to see, an
invasion on students privacy for one, as I am sure most don’t want their
parents seeing what they get up to at school. Also are there repercussions in
the future for these students when they try and get a job?
These are all important questions and 1984 always pops to
mind when you talk about adding more cameras to an already over invasive society.
But I think in this case getting an insight to the everyday lives of students as
well as teachers, gives the everyday person much greater respect for a
sometimes under appreciated job. One thing I am interested in exploring is how schools
can implement this on a smaller scale and that doesn't take up to much a
teacher’s already busy schedule.
First of all what are the possible advantages of
implementing something like this? One of the big advantages is cutting down on
low level disruption. If students know they could be being watched by their
parents they are much less likely to act up as they know they could get a
telling off at home. This is similar to the Hawthorne effect where an
experiment was carried out on workers in two workplaces to find out what effect
light had on productivity. What Hawthorne found was that productivity would
increase during the experiment and then slump again when it was concluded. He
concluded that the workers were more productive if they knew someone was taking
an interest in their work. Whether or not having students knowing their parents
could be watching would improve class behaviour or even results remains to be
seen but it could be a possibility.
Another positive is getting more parent involvement in the
school. Too often the only contact parents have with schools is a parents
evening once a year. Being able to see their children in class and to see how
they actually act in class could give parents a much better insight into how
their children are actually doing at school. They can then push them on if they
are acting up in class and get them to knuckle down and likewise if they are
doing well they can reward them and encourage them to keep going.
There are of course negatives to an experiment like this.
The first is teacher’s time, with an already busy schedule do teachers need
another gimmick that will distract from the actual teaching of the class, and
will students just act up if they know they are being filmed. I think this is
an important question and if the project were to be time consuming than no this
wouldn't be worth it but as I will point out later in the article there are
quick and easy ways in which you can set this up.
Another important area to bring up is whether more cameras
in life are a good idea. The average person is already caught on camera 300
times a day, do students and teachers need another aspect of their lives
monitored? I think this will be the biggest reason a project like this won’t
get off the ground as it is already such a sensitive topic and it may cause
issues with some parents.
The time and cost of implementing a project like this I
believe could be very little in terms of time and completely free financially.
Having worked in a small company you often have to find solutions to problems
quickly and cheaply. I had to find a way to deliver a talk to teachers all over
the world all at once and for it to be cheap or free but also look
professional. At first I thought this was an impossible task, but after a bit
of research I quickly discovered there were a number of free services out there
that could deliver exactly what I needed. The one downside side of using a free
service is there might be the odd advert but these have a minimal impact most
of the time.
The main streaming software I used was Ustream, this is free
to use and viewers watching don’t have to sign up, which helps keeps things
simple. One of the really good features of this is that you can link it to your
Facebook page, making it really easy for parents to find and access. Ustream will
also record and store the live stream for you and save it on your account and
on your Facebook page as well. So parents that are at work or are busy can
watch it later when they have some free time, making it more accessible to
everyone. All you need to set this up is to have a webcam linked to a computer
with a view of the class, and then you just click ‘Live Broadcast’. This will
then go straight out to your live stream account and Facebook page for parents
to watch.
As teachers it is important to find innovative and
interesting ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, but I think the
key thing is to make technology work for you. By using a free streaming service
and a webcam, it is a cheap and simple solution that won’t take up much time but
delivers something exciting for parents, teachers and students. This could even
be used as a marketing tool for schools allowing them to show prospective
students and parent’s fun and rewarding lessons with the schools best teachers.
This could be much more effective and then the traditional prospective and
power point presentation and show off the best qualities of your school in real
time.
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