Educational Technology - ICT in Education

Interesting selection of stuff discovered thru Twitter, eg video games link. It includes one of my posts too, but that's not the reason I'm posting this!

Excellent post which basically asks the question: is it wise to chuck out all the rules we know to be sensible when it comes to elearning and consultants?

The latest edition of IFIP, the ICT newsletter based in India, includes a range of interesting-looking articles, including social entrepreneurship and ICT in Nigeria. Also, the work Miles Berry and I did to find out how youngsters use technology when not at school. Available free of charge.

A lot of good stuff comes out of Denmark as far as education is concerned, and I think this raises the stakes a bit. In a nutshell, this exam allows students to use the internet to help them answer the questions. The questions are not about finding facts, but validation of search engine results and such like.

As Stephen Heppell says, students use computers in their education, and then as soon as they walk through the examination room door they have to leave all that behind and write their answers. I'd go further: research has shown that setting tests which involve a different mode of answering from the mode of learning leads to poorer performance. In other words, if students have covered a course mainly through using technology, they should be required to use the technology for the examination. Similarly with paper-based learning.

I wonder if (a) this is also true of the UK and (b) if so, what would Baroness Greenfield make of it? The summary suggests that the increase in the use of the internet and mobile phones does NOT lead to social isolation, but instead: "is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people's full personal network - their strong and weak ties - internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks."

Looks like a great competition for youngsters to get involved in.
"Write a news story or a script between 250 and 400 words or make a video or audio recording (between 90 seconds and 120 seconds) that tells us how you think "technology is changing the way we learn"."

A good article by Sheyne Lucock on the drawbacks of using IWBs from a pedagogical point of view. I have known Sheyne for many years, and his views are not unknown to me. It's good to see them in print, however, and it will be interesting to see other people's reactions to them.

Not the most hilarious comic strip I've read, but I really like Kevin's comment about it!

Balanced article: mother and daughter each giving their views on whether or not Facebook is safe. As my wife said, that's like asking if cars are safe to drive.

You don't necessarily have to be a "techie" in order to be able to manage a technical support team effectively. These guidelines explain how.

I quite like the questions suggested in this post about being critically literate by Lisa Durff. I agree with her when she says that critical literacy should be extended to all media, not just books. Like her, I have always encouraged my students to question everything (which took a humorous -- and welcome -- turn when they started to question ME!).\n\nRead and bookmark and share this post.

Notre Dame High School in Sheffield, UK, is planning to allow students to bring their phones and other mobile devices into the classroom. I was pleased to see in this article that Mick Brooks, of the NAHT, is taking a non-Luddite stance on this. Unsuprising: he was one of the panel at the recent launch of the Cambridge Review of the Primary Curriculum, which I wrote about recently (http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2009/10/22/what-young-people-can-do-and-7-implications-of-that.html).\nPaul Haigh, the Deputy Head mentioned in the article, and I exchanged messages just after the Handheld Learning Conference, and it's good to see his work being picked up by a national newspaper.

An interesting-looking blog, which I came across courtesy of Julie Lindsay's blog at htp://123elearning.blogspot.com. It's about the use of computer games, but specifically in the contexty of English as a Foreign/Second Language. Looks potentially useful, and I will be xploring it for possible inclusion the Games issue of the Computers in Classrooms newsletter.

Interesting embeddable widget I discovered on Wesley Fryer's blog, http://www.speedofcreativity.org/. It shows how many blog posts etc there have been since you loaded the widget, in real time.

I'm not actually sure how valuable or even valid such information is. There is no doubt, however, that using it in a presentation, as Fryer intended to do, would be a good way of grabbing people's attention right from the start.

Perhaps it would work well in a classroom setting too, as a starting point for a discussion about what such statistics mean, in a 'real' sense.

At first glane, this wiki-based video repository seems quite comprehensive. Given that it can be edited by anyone, I'm slightly concerned that 'rogue' videos may find their place on to the site. Also, will stuff be moved about making it hard to find again? Still, there is a search facility. I will be exploring this and reporting on it in due course.
Thanks to coolcatteacher.blogspot.com for blogging about it, which is how I heard about it.

Useful starting point for discussion with students

"the Three Laws of Robotics"