A short reflection on co-learning inspired by Howard Rheingold and European Schoolnets Future Classroom Scenarios Course...

I was fascinated at how a picture by Hugh MacLeod on "information and knowledge" was retweeted by so many educators and so wrote a short post about it.

These are my reasons about how and why I continue to blog almost four years on. Key points: Blogging keeps me current Blogging encourages me to read Blogging makes me think, justify and engage in debate Blogging makes me develop a discipline and a time to write Blogging encourages me to make practice explicit Blogging is for me a form of curation, of gathering sources that matter Increasingly I see blogging as a form of professional self-development.

Some of my thoughts on why connectivity is essential to human nature and why open wifi in schools matters. Most of the time its already there - in pockets!

My thoughts on normalising the use of social media in schools in the context of Safer Internet Day 2014 "This reality has yet to sink-in, in most schools where dealing with the safer-internet means presenting an anti-cyber bullying campaign rather than a positive pro-social media approach. Many children have a smart-device near at hand - the immediacy if this must be normalised within the process of teaching, learning and play as a tool for research, creation and communication rather than a device that necessarily leads to meanness."

Digital Media Literacy is the title of a Short Course being developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) in the Republic of Ireland. These are some of my thoughts! I draw particularly on the ideas of Howard Rheingold.

"Collaborative problem solving is not a traditional domain, in that it is not explicitly taught as a school subject, rather embedded as a practice in the classroom" (PISA 2015 Draft Collaborative Problem Solving Framework p.27) - some thoughts from the context of education in Ireland

A short contribution to the debate on immigrant and native, skeptic and enthusiast....

How many of us have that heart-sinking experience when a presenter talks at us older people as immigrants and the younger as natives, when in fact, we are all in this together.

Implementing ICT and Social Media Policy - right down to the classroom!

Some thoughts on the 2013 NMC Horizon Report

..a continuation of my thoughts on One Device per Group!

Perhaps there is too much emphasis on the possibility of Bringing Your Own Device (BYOD) and not enough on One Device Per Group.

There must be lots of fun and interesting ways to incorporate face-to-face communications with strangers (whether teachers or students) in language learning and beyond. Some thoughts after observing others engage with "Skype, Face-time and Google video "

I think that in the context of teaching and learning, how we introduce the handling of online-devices in schools needs further thought. Rather than the device being omnipresent, teacher and student must see it as an aid to pedagogy rather than replacing the learning interaction between people.

This is a blog I wrote after I read an academic article 'Power on': Googlecracy, privatisation and the standardisation of sources (Souto-Otero and Beneito-Montagut 2013). I have related the article to teachers in the Second Level (high-school) system of education.

Some thoughts on eBooks after an interview with Audrey Niffeneger developed into a discussion of same!

SMILE - Social Media in Learning & Education - A short update on my involvement in this project from European Schoolnet supported by a Digital Citizenship Research Grant from Facebook.

Schools must regard 100Mbps Broadband not as an opportunity to do existing things faster, but to do new things altogether. These are things that some of our students are doing at home (and occasionally in school) - creating music, animations, sound, music, programming, curating, remixing - that should be given a voice and a place in our schools. this type of work will help support at least four of Hargreaves gateways: Learning to Learn, Assessment for Learning, New Technologies (ICT) and Student Voice.

My reflections on the Google I/O and Education. this post has got a lot of interest especially in Australia. I make the point..."This is the real work of education - helping people take control of their lives and realising that in these still early days of the online world, we are being pushed and pushed into vistas that may be limited."