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Not that long ago I was a writer of interesting and engaging educational programmes. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. The programmes that I wrote and shared with a team of teachers were generally well accepted and the feedback offered was always politely positive. I enjoyed writing these programmes but in recent times I have enjoyed even more stepping away from this process and in doing so empowering the team of teachers that I learn with. The programmes that this team produces far exceed the quality I could ever have hoped to produce but more importantly the students are benefiting from their experience of highly engaged and thus engaging teachers.

Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 

"Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, web literacy is both content and activity. You don't just learn "about" reading: you learn to read. You don't just learn "about" arithmetic: you learn to count and calculate. You don't just learn "about" the web: you learn to make your own website. As with these other three literacies, web literacy begins simply, with basics you can build upon. For some it can lead to a profession (i.e. becoming a computer programmer) while for most it becomes part of the conceptual DNA that helps you to understand and negotiate the world you live in."

An excellent article about the importance of web and digital literacies.

"Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process. Crickets are based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first "programmable bricks," squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO)."

what the humanities could learn from computer programmers

If you consider the day to day life of many of our students today, you see that they have very little time that is free from some form of programmed activity. Indeed, it is increasingly the norm for families to fill their children's time with the maximum number of learning, sporting and co-curricular activities. Schools naturally are happy to facilitate this and many see the breadth of programmes that they offer as a measure of success. But is there a consequence to all this activity and constant state of engagement?

Superbe lieu de programmation Ajax et javascript. Best playground for learning programming

"A programme that brings live fish into classrooms to teach the fundamentals of biology not only helps students learn, but improves their attitudes about science, a new study finds. The study of nearly 20,000 K-12 students, who raised zebrafish from embryos over the course of a week, found that kids at all grade levels showed significant learning gains. They also responded more positively to statements such as "I know what it's like to be a scientist." The results, to be published by the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that an immersive experience with a living creature can be a particularly successful strategy to engage young people in science, technology, engineering and maths."

The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England's schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary has announced. It will be replaced by an "open source" curriculum in computer science and programming designed with the help of universities and industry.

A free design course to encourage programmers/hackers into developing solid design skills, but most of the content is relevant to anyone wanting to improve their design skills (covers design in general including industrial design, web design, UX, etc). Some excellent resources are already available.

"An easy to follow design course for hackers who do amazing things. Receive a design lesson in your inbox each week, hand crafted by a design pro. Learn at your own pace, and apply it to your real life work - no fake projects here."

At the start of each year we arrive back from our break hopefully rested and energised. The new year brings many new opportunities including new students, new team members and new teaching programmes. We begin again the climb up the hill with a fresh group of learners arriving at our doors full of excitement who will rely on us to meet their learning needs in the year ahead. All of this means we are at risk of starting the year with a certain level of panic. There is so much to do, our students are not accustomed to our routines, we don't know each other well, there are parents to meet, assessments to be done and before we know it we are back to being busy. 

I am participating in European SchoolNet's SMILE programme. It is a Facebook sponsored project around digital citizenship. This is a very short introduction.

This is a wonderfully designed site to learn Mandarin Chinese. It uses a huge collection of Chinese TV programmes and movie clips with interactive and dual-language subtitles. Click on a Chinese character is see the translation and hear the pronunciation. You can set your ability level and also what sort of media you are interested in. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

In 2011 footballer Xabi Alonso gave an interview to the Guardian on his experiences as a young player moving from Spain to Liverpool.  He describes the most significant difference here. I don't think tackling is a quality," he says. "It is a recurso, something you have to resort to, not a characteristic of your game. At Liverpool I used to read the matchday programme and you'd read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They'd ask: age, heroes, strong points, etc. He'd reply: 'Shooting and tackling'. I can't get into my head that football development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play...

Learn/Troubleshoot coding. Good resource for budding programmers.

A simple and small downloadable Mindmapping programme with basic functions. Great for uncluttered mindmaps or students just learning to use them. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools

Traditional methods of teaching maths have more in common with how we programme a computer that what we might do if we wanted to engage our students in mathematical thinking. We shouldn't be overly surprised then when our students consider mathematics to be all about learning a set of rules that they need to apply in the right order so as to output the correct response. But is there a better way?

"Teachers in England are being invited to join a professional development opportunity through EarthEcho International sponsored by the Northrop Grumman Foundation. The 'EarthEcho Expeditions: What's the Catch?' programme leverages the rich Cousteau legacy of exploration and discovery to bring Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education alive for today's 21st-century learners and their educators. The free, expenses-paid opportunity is planned to allow secondary school teachers to participate as Expedition Fellows to learn first-hand from scientists and engineers the consequences of fisheries mismanagement and how this can be changed for the better with new technological approaches and discoveries."

Technology and teaching - two words that seem to fit together perfectly today for most teachers and learners. So much so that a slew of new blogs have come on board to talk about education technology - or, edTech. This list of the 50 best education technology blogs are not inclusive, as there are so many new blogs available; however, if you look at links provided by many of these blogs to other edTech blogs, you may learn about even more blog that you aren't reading yet.