Schools must embrace mobile technology

The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at this year's BETT conference.

They must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking, according to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell.

Schools should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, he argued.

The gap between those schools embracing technology and those not is getting bigger, he said.

Prof Heppell was speaking to delegates at BETT, the world's biggest educational technology show.

Technology revolution

Meanwhile the UK's minister for Schools and Families Vernon Coaker reiterated the government's commitment to putting technology at the heart of the school curriculum.

"Teachers need access to innovative services. We must prepare pupils for the future workplace," said Mr Coaker.

"Cutting edge technology is the cornerstone of our reforms," he added.

The UK's Building Schools for the Future programme will see every state secondary school in England rebuilt or remodelled over the next 15 - 20 years.

But in that timeframe there could be a big divide between schools, thinks Professor Heppell.

"There is a gap between the schools that are doing pioneering stuff and those simply doing a shiny version of 19th century teaching," he said.

Cells and bells

Much of the debate in the conference centred around how technology can be seamlessly integrated into the curriculum.

For Professor Heppell, who advises governments around the world about technology policies, the answer is both radical and simple.

He thinks schools need to move away from what he terms "cells and bells".

"We have to get away from the 35 minute timetable blocks. We need to reconfigure schools for a week of immersion in numeracy and dress the school for a learning production," he said.

"We need much longer blocks of time and to allow children to be in charge of their learning," he added.

One of the ways to do this is to integrate the tools that children are using in their lives outside of the classroom.

Skyping infants

At Lampton Secondary School in Hounslow, play is a significant part of the school ethos and children were at the conference demonstrating how games consoles such as the Wii and GPS devices can be integrated into the classroom.

Meanwhile at Cleveland Junior School in Redbridge, Year 6 pupils have been busy designing their own computer games.

"We made a storyline and introduced characters and designed the backgrounds,"explained 11-year-old Rezwana.

"More schools should use the software because you can put your own personal thoughts into the game," added classmate Pawan, also aged 11.

The games the children made were sent to a nearby infant school where Year 2 pupils played them and suggested improvements via Skype.

But not all schools are so keen to embrace technology. Many still ban the use of mobile phones and social networking sites such as Facebook.

"Turned off devices equals turned off children. Sensible schools use mobile technology to their advantage, putting up a telephone number about an issue such as bullying and getting pupils to text their views," said Prof Heppell.

Teachers may be more willing to embrace technology but the resources are not there to back them up, a survey from Intel has found.

Intel, which has ploughed £1bn into educational programmes around the world over the last decade, asked 2,700 teachers from 15 countries about technology in their schools.

While 98% felt that technology was critical in preparing pupils for the workforce, three quarters also thought governments were not doing enough.

70% of teachers thought children should be provided with a personal laptop but only 3% had such access.

Home access

"The worst thing you can do is give a child a computer without access to the internet," said Lila Ibrahim, general manager of Intel's emerging markets platform group.

In the UK the government has just launched a new scheme dubbed Home Access to offer both internet connectivity and hardware to 270,000 families on low incomes by March of next year.

Eligible families need to apply for a grant and they will receive £500 to put towards kit and connectivity from a range of suppliers.

The fact that families are in charge of what kit they get should mean it is more successful than previous schemes, thinks Stephen Crowne, chief executive of Becta, a government agency that is co-ordinating the project.

Chris Green was one of the pilot familes who trialled the scheme in Suffolk.

She has seen big improvements in her son, Colin.

"He uses it for homework and I can access the school website. I wouldn't be without it," she said.

Colin is about to take his GCSEs and is thinking about further education, something he would not have contemplated a year ago.

But not everyone is convinced the Home Access scheme is the answer.

"Home access is necessary but not sufficient. You can't just parachute technology in," said Prof Heppell.

"We haven't done a great job helping mums with how to help their children read and we need to make sure that we help them with computers.

"Unless that happens it will be nice to get a laptop but it doesn't begin to solve the problem," he added.

Schools too need to adapt or they will find more pupils rejecting the current educational system, he warned.

"Put 'virtual schools' into Google and you get 387,000 references. Children in the future will have choices about where and how they learn and if schools aren't enticing, pupils won't come."

Arctic polar bears imperilled by man-made pollution

The long term survival of polar bears is being threatened by man-made pollution that is reaching the Arctic.

This conclusion comes from a major review of research into how industrial chemicals such as mercury and organochlorines affect the bears.

The review suggests that such chemicals have a range of subclinical effects.

When added together, these can have a dramatic and potentially fatal impact on the bears' bones, organs and reproductive and immune systems.

The review, an analysis of more than a decade's research into the effect of pollution on bears, is published in the journal Environment International.

A range of man-made pollutants reach the polar Arctic region, carried there in the air and water.

These include toxic metals such as mercury, organohalogen contaminants (OHCs) including organochlorines, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perflourinated compounds (PFCs), which are used industrially in insulating fluids, as coolants, in foams and electronics and as pest control agents.

Such chemicals are often fat-soluble and accumulate in the fat of many animals, which are then eaten by top predators such as polar bears.

These top predators are then exposed to increasingly concentrated levels of toxins.

But the impact of these toxins on polar bears has been difficult to measure, with the only previous studies done by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme in 1998 and 2004.

That is party because it is logistically difficult to take many and repeated samples of blood or tissue from live polar bears.

Also, only free-ranging healthy animals that are not clinically sick tend to be sampled, making the overall population appear to be healthier than it already is.

ILL EFFECTS Shrinking sexual ability: studies have found correlations between levels of OHCs and smaller and deformed sexual organs in male and female bears Overactive organs: organochlorines increase the activity of liver enzymes, while mercury boosts stress hormones in the blood Mercury damages the bears' nervous systems PCB exposure may lead to decreases in bone mass density

So veterinary scientist and polar bear expert Dr Christian Sonne, of the Department of Arctic Environment at Aarhus University in Denmark, conducted the first review of all pertinent research on the health effects of such contaminants on polar bears.

Previously, Dr Sonne was part of a team of researchers which found that "stress" linked to pollutants and shrinking sea ice appeared to be shrinking polar bears.

His new analysis includes the results of more than 200 organ and skull tissue samples taken from 80 bears in East Greenland between 1999 and 2009, as well as repeated measurements and observations of bears living in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway.

These studies reveal a number of ill-effects associated with industrial pollutants.

However, such studies can only show that contaminant levels are correlated with ill-effects, not that they cause them.

Bears and dogs

So Dr Sonne investigated the direct impacts of Arctic pollutants on two other top predators living in the region, Norwegian Arctic foxes and Greenland sledge dogs.

In 2003, researchers started a two-year study in which they fed Arctic foxes clean or contaminated whale blubber. One fox of a pair of brothers was fed clean food as a control, while the other brother ate contaminated food.

Having eliminated all other influences, such as gender and age, the researchers showed that foxes exposed to environmental levels of pollutants do suffer harmful effects.

For example, PCBs trigger decreases in bone density and damage the liver, mercury and organochlorines cause renal lesions, while OHCs alter the amount of vitamins circulating in the blood.

Similar effects were found in comparable studies on Greenland sledgedogs.

The maximum sea ice extent is declining by about 2.7% per decade

"Polar bear studies are correlative, but that is not conclusive as being 'cause and effect'," explains Dr Sonne.

"So including dogs and foxes as model species is important [because] you use species that are much like polar bears, and the species were exposed to similar food items as polar bears."

The impact on the bears is likely to be greater even than those effects which show up in studies.

"It is really important to understand that all organ systems are tied together," says Dr Sonne.

So individual pollutants may only have subtle, non-clinical effects on particular parts of a bear's body.

But in concert, the overall impact can be devastating, reducing an individual bear's ability to hunt, reproduce and resist disease.

"After being very sceptical, I now feel that the impact on bears may be true," says Dr Sonne.

Climatic impact

He also concludes that climate change will exacerbate the impact of pollutants on the bears.

As the level of sea ice declines with warming temperatures, polar bears are fasting for longer.

That may mean they eat fewer seals and therefore less pollutants overall.

But they will have to burn fat to compensate.

That will release greater concentrations of toxins from their fat stores into their blood, says Dr Sonne.

This will cause further illness, weakening bears that will already be in poorer condition and may be exposed to new and more virulent pathogens capable of surviving in a warmer Arctic.

Dr Sonne's research is published a week after another separate study published in the journal Arctic showed that polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean are occurring more frequently on land and open water, and less on the ice.