Andrew Watt is an independent consultant in the application of ICT to learning and teaching in school education.
He recently retired from his post as Senior Development Officer with the City of Edinburgh Council Children and Families Department where he led a specialised team which works with teachers throughout the City of Edinburgh to show them how E-Learning can enhance and transform the learning experience of their pupils and their own pedagogical approach.
As well as managing the team of trainers, his particular responsibilities include developing on-line learning structures, VLEs and content repositories and working with teachers to find appropriate models of blended learning for the school situation. One particular project explored the use of iPods in education (iPodagogy !) with a specific link to a VLE. He also worked on developing the use of other network applications such as websites, blogs, wikis etc within education. As an independent consultant he now does very similar things but to a much wider clientele.
After achieving an Honours degree in Maths and Computing at Edinburgh University, Andrew did postgraduate training as a High School teacher, and taught for over 30 years at all levels in a Secondary School, including senior management, before moving to Edinburgh's central ICT support unit for schools.
He has worked extensively on many national projects in Scotland devising and piloting Computing and ICT related courses and other developments in learning and teaching.
His thinking has been shaped and reinforced by the practical experience of introducing such developments in his own classroom and school over two decades. One salient point quickly became evident - even 20 years ago - that pupils, especially younger ones, embraced technology with no difficulty at all, but other colleagues and administrators were much harder to win over!
After a study visit to Washington and North Carolina in the mid nineties, he collaborated in a project on new course development with one of the main American teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and spoke at their biennial conference in Washington in 1996.
He has also spoken at three previous ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN conferences, the Handheld Learning conference in London, at BETT in London, at SETT (the former name for the Scottish Learning Festival), and at eLive in Edinburgh. He was a member of Scotland's Masterclass initiative - a project designed to spread further the use of ICT in education through innovative development and sharing good practice. At previous ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN conferences he has also hosted SIG Lunches to provide a forum and develop contacts to look at issues surrounding the development of e-learning in schools.