The web for external mentoring

We have been experimenting with something a little bit cool this term. One of our current GCSE courses allows students to have mentors to support them in their projects, and using a couple of free online tools we’ve managed to link up with some pretty exciting people.

Using expertise from outside of the teaching staff isn’t something new for schools, but the web allows you to reach a much wider field. We have been using Posterous and Youtube to link our students to experts from all over the Country to help support them with graphic and video work.

At the start of the year we began making contact with people we thought could help in these fields. What we have ended up with is student mentors from as far afield as Manchester, working in television, film and graphic design, all at a much higher level than we can offer ourselves. Our mentor group also includes ex-students who are at college/university studying related fields, another really nice link.

At the end of December students uploaded their work in progress to either Youtube or Posterous (film or graphic design) and we passed the link to their mentor to look at. Over the holidays mentors left feedback and students are now back and working to improve their projects. In a months time they will repeat the uploading process and get some more support. The beauty of delivering this online is it is so simple. A quick comment on a Youtube video is so simple, the time commitment minimal compared to visiting the school, but the impact of the support no less.

What we have here is no more sophisticated than the usual student-teacher feedback setup but the web has allowed us to bring in a new voice to the conversation, a different level of expertise, and probably most importantly a whole new perspective on the brief as a whole. The benefits for students having a real-world mentor stretch beyond improving their projects too- this is links to industry, advice on how their work would stand up in the field, role models for them to aspire to as they complete their studies. This may be a small trial this year, but there is an exciting model to roll-out on a larger scale here. So pleased.

Our mentors have all voluntarily given up free time to support the students, in some cases after only getting a random email/tweet from someone they have never met asking for help. I’ve been blown away at the generosity of everybody involved, the comments on work are far more in-depth than I hoped and many have offered to visit the school to talk to students about what they do. Thank you to all of you, I’m very proud.

Posterous image courtesy of The Next Web