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See also...
An information system
An information and communication system has emerged in association with the development of the Support Planner.
Users of the Support Planner work with their colleagues to support students and their families. In that process they are supported by
- this Planner Website to provide helpful information
- a Yahoo discussion list to enable communication between users in various schools
- a user group to share strategies and practices
- occasional workshops and seminars as suggested/requested by users
- Ivan Webb as developer of the Support Planner database
Similar arrangements have emerge within most schools in which the Planner is used. There are
- User reference materials available
- Ongoing discussions about in-school practices: what to do, how, when and why...
- Groups of users working together: support teams, year group staff, families...
- In-school workshops provide training
- Coordinator(s) that provide leadership, support and direction
Principles underpinning the above
1. People need to be able respond to their situations: to take action in response to the situations with which they are dealing and as they understand them
2. Actions require knowledge of the situation
3. Knowledge is continually constructed and reconstructed in collaboration with others and in response to experience and any readily available
information
4. This process is complex and has to be managed: knowledge
work
5. Tools such as the Support Planner can help: especially if they enable people to
- gather and organise their data and to reflect upon it
- relate their own knowledge to the knowledge and data of others
- organise their actions in response (hence the success of Outlook?)
- match the data to practices of the users
More traditional ICT has tended to focus on containing and organising data (what people needed to know). The alternative is to focus on the actions (practices) people might want to undertake on the basis of data.
The Support Planner has been developed in response to what the users wanted to be able to do (more than what they wanted to know).
The above 'principles' are not unique to the context of 'student support'. I suspect they apply to all use of ICT
