West Midlands Broadband Consortium
West Midlands Broadband Consortium
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- West Midlands Broadband Consortium
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The West Midlands Broadband Consortium (WMnet) is one of England's ten Regional Broadband Consortia. It was established under the UK's National Grid for Learning, a strategy for improving ICT in education established in 1998. WMnet aims to enhance the quality of learning for all, through the development of a distributed, regional learning network built on a broadband backbone, giving all 2,500 schools in the region affordable and reliable broadband connectivity. It links together pupils, teachers, schools, universities libraries, museums, LEAs and other learning centres in the region to the secure National Education Network to provide online content and services without the need to access the wider internet.
Challenge
WMnet is tasked with promoting the use of broadband for best learning practice within schools across a wide area and oversees the project management of broadband initiatives within LEAs in the region. It needed a cost-effective e-learning system that could be tailored for the specific needs and uses of each school and which makes full use of broadband’s capabilities.
WMnet faced a number of challenges in selecting a suitable software system. Firstly, they needed to reach a large number of organisations, including LEAs, County Councils, schools and colleges across a widely geographically dispersed area, many of which were in rural areas. It also had to consider how best to teach a number of disaffected students in the area who no longer have places within mainstream schools due to behavioural and personal problems.
Solution
WMnet looked at a variety of different learning tools and systems on the market and chose Macromedia Breeze 5 to deliver a number of innovative e-learning and collaboration projects within schools across the West Midlands.
Worcestershire LEA is using Breeze Presenter and Breeze Meeting for staff development around creativity. It is a rural authority, with long distances between schools. They needed a way to ensure maximum attendance at training courses run by the Creative Thinking Partnership, a strategy to promote creative thinking amongst teachers. Using Macromedia Breeze they offer remote training and live tutorials via videoconference so teachers from each of its twelve schools can take part. Courses are also recorded and so are available at all times, allowing teachers to share and collaborate without having to travel, thus freeing teachers’ time and reducing travel costs. This approach also engages teachers in new technology, and raises their awareness of emerging technologies.
Birmingham’s Virtual College, a small college mainly for disaffected students, conducts its lessons almost entirely online using Breeze to supplement the one to one tuition pupils receive, and the feedback from students has been very positive. It began using Breeze Meeting, Training and Presenter in July 2005 with a group of year 11 students (15 and 16 year olds) to deliver online group-learning sessions and to establish a virtual community for its students. Tutors are able to create learning content much quicker and more easily than before, and can spend less time travelling and more time teaching.
- Solihull County Council use Breeze to improve literacy amongst male Key Stage 2 students (10 and 11 year olds). The council has also used Breeze to conduct surveys and collect data around students’ impressions of school, including an anti-bullying survey.
- Shropshire County Council used Breeze to disseminate information from the Darwin Symposium, an event to celebrate Darwin’s centenary, to a wide audience and create a forum for discussing evolution, philosophy and the work of Charles Darwin. Schools in the area were able to give presentations remotely using Breeze Presenter and participants could ask questions via the Breeze instant messaging capabilities. The council is also running a pilot scheme to offer master classes in software development to gifted and talented GCSE pupils using Breeze.
“Breeze allows collaboration and co-operation between schools and agencies on a level we’ve never seen before,” says Jean Maund, e-learning projects manager, WMnet. “Using familiar tools like PowerPoint, staff find it very easy to quickly author, publish, and manage on-demand training and presentations. The great user interface really engages students and with hardly any training required to view a presentation or attend a meeting, both teachers and students find it simple to use. Across the region we have over 400 registered users of Breeze with access to over 600 presentations. For such a large region, Breeze is a really cost-effective solution allowing us to reach a large number of students and enhance their quality of learning. It reduces travel time and costs for those staff who need to travel either for teaching or to attend meetings, particularly in more rural areas and in the case of Birmingham Virtual College, enabling them to dedicate more of their time to teaching.”
WMnet has also been using Breeze with its own staff for internal communications. At present, WMnet uses Breeze within the West Midlands area, but has plans to extend its use across other regions in conjunction with the other Regional Broadband Consortia.
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