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The Village – A Great Idea – Your Help Requested

I was delighted to be contacted last week by one of our Humanities staff with the following email: I presented Project 8’s new learning platform for next year, ‘The Village’ in the Humanities teachers toolbox on Tuesday. Our idea is for us to set up an imaginary world where students can create a community, developing…

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An ICT Curriculum Fit For 2011 #ictcurric

The silence that has descended on this blog has partly been down to another little change in direction for me as I have taken over leadership of our ICT & Business Studies department.  As a Mathematician by nature this has been an interesting few weeks! Out top priority is to try and deliver an ICT curriculum that…

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Data Analysis Spreadsheet for Edexcel Higher Maths Nov 2010

Edexcel admirably give you access to detailed question by question data from their Maths exams with the use of Results+.  However I have always found that it does not come in a format that is particularly useful for teachers or individual pupils. I have created a spreadsheet that analyses the data at a class and individual…

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#LWF11 – Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia – Evolving The Dream & Final Questions

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Another presenter who is challenged by presenting ‘in the round’! Seeing a massive change in the quality and quantity of informal learning.  Talk about the dream of free knowledge for everyone.  Free access to the sum of all human knowledge. What is free access?  Free as in speech, not as in…

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#LWF11 – Lord David Puttnam of Queensgate

Lord David Puttnam, man of many hats, but perhaps pertinently Chairman of Futurelab: Joked that Stephen Heppel and he had have achieved so little in the last 20 years!  Not yet a state where what’s best for the child is also what’s best for the child. Left film industry as it had ceased to be inspirational…

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#LWF11 – David McCandless, Author & Information Designer – Infographics & Data

David is the author of http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/. Worked through some fantastic infographics from his site, go look at them now.  Better still see his TED talk: Some interesting insights from using Google InSights to track search terms.  Great tool for use in the classroom. Nice talk about needing to compare proportions rather than totals, in the concept of…

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#LWF11 – Stephen Heppell – What’s on the horizon?

Stephen started with a nice anecdote about starting his career asked a tough group of students to help him out by getting teaching tips from other teachers in return from him teaching them the content. Be Very Afraid programme.  Students taught themselves to play an instrument in a month. Evolution of tech in our lifetimes:…

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#LWF11 – Keri Facer, Prof of Education, MMU

Keri Facer. Can’t continue to argue about whether we focus on the individual or whether we use technology to bring learners together. We need to learn to live with connectivity that we’ve never imagined before.  Evolution of non-human-like intelligence. Need a curriculum for collaborative and collective intelligence.  Diminishing economy and rapidly changing aging demographic.  Need to understand the relationships between…

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#LWF11 Katharine Birbalsingh, Teacher & Author

Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Head Teacher famously sacked following her outspoken speech at the Tory Party conference. Started with the story of challenging behaviour in Secondary Schools.  How have we got to this point, a dark age of education?  How can we move schools on into the 21st Century?  Need to equip children with a bag…

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LWF11 Prof Andrew Blake – MD: Microsoft Research Cambridge – NUI

Talk about NUI – Natural User Interfaces (no touch). Obvious plug for Kinect.  Showed Anybot robot that allows you to attend a meeting without actually being there. Talked through other examples of such tech. Challenges of creating Kinect: Have to be able to capture body pose.  Come in many shapes, sizes and flexibilities! Depth camera made all this…