t-learning - Future Scenarios - Home-school links

Fas, aged nine, has just returned from school. His mother Pam asks him what he has been doing today. Feeling rather tired, Fas throws his coat on the nearest chair, shrugs his shoulders and just says “Oh, lots of things!”

Later that evening, once Fas is in bed, his mother goes to the TV set and just before she watches her favourite “soap”, she selects to the local services on her broadband TV service. From there she can go the video diary of Fas’s teacher - Steve Pearson.

Once a week just before Steve finishes for the day he records his weekly video diary for the parents of his class of nine year olds. He includes a few video-clips taken earlier during the week using the school’s hand-held digital video recorder. All these video-clips can be easily inserted into a standard template making them easy to assemble. The quality is not as high as someone presenting the news but it will be highly relevant for the parents of the children that he teaches. The broadband connection from the school enables Steve to easily upload the video diary onto the local learning utility network, which forms part of a larger community utility carrying healthcare, local and central government information.

The Netcom Company runs the service in the form of a public-private partnership that has successfully installed video-quality broadband links to every home and flat in the neighbourhood by various means. This enables any person in every household to access and interact with video-rich content on demand.

Steve describes how they have been making bridges out of paper and testing them as part of the Design and Technology National Curriculum. For further information for parents, Steve adds a link to another video that he prepared at the beginning of term describing in more detail the concepts, skills and tasks that have been planned for the term. This in turn has been linked to video-clips describing various learning journeys prepared by the central government education department to help parents better understand different aspects of the national curriculum.

Before Steve finishes his video diary he reminds parents to complete the form for next week’s school visit and to pay electronically through their TV sets. This saves Steve a lot of time having to collect in money and process the forms. He can devote more of his teaching time to being a learning facilitator.

Before Pam settles down to watching her favourite “soap” she checks the school events diary for full details of the school trip and pays for it through the TV set by entering her debit card number.

Future Scenario - Home-school links