Guided Access is a great new accessibility feature on the iPad that allows you to lock an iPad (or other iOS device) into one application and even restrict which parts of the screen can be interacted with. Some of our staff have been concerned about handing their iPads over to learners, conscious that their confidential…
Yesterday hundreds of thousands of 16 year olds opened an envelope to find out the fruits of the first 11 years of hard work at school. College courses, apprenticeships, jobs and more rested on the grades they had been given in their GCSE exams. The night before they were already panicking that something might be…
There has been much said about the subject of ICT in secondary schools since Michael Gove spoke at BETT. I wrote with some excitement the day after, actually praising Mr Gove for once in my life! Excited with the potential freedom and with an idea to leave National Curriculum levels behind and look towards a…
Oliver Quinlan’s got me thinking out loud… …What if we spent all the money / time / efforts that our Teaching Assistants cost / provide on conducting detailed analysis of progress and then feeding this back to the teacher and learner? John Hattie’s work is hard to ignore. But Oliver’s right. We continue to be…
Yesterday I posted an article looking at the teaching and learning features and requirements that IT provision supports in schools. I concluded that if funding can be made to work (and with creative budgeting it’s not as hard as you’d think) that 1:1 is the ideal model. So that begs the question: What device? We’ve looked…
There’s been much talk and excitement of late about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as the cure to all IT provision ills in schools. Whilst it certainly has a place and should be encouraged it’s not a replacement for other models at the present time. This post owes a lot to Ryan Bretag’s recent writing,…
This was originally written as a think piece for the DfE for the http://schoolstech.org.uk/ site, think pieces weren’t used in the end so here it is! Our young learners inhabit a world where communication and access to knowledge is being transformed by mobile devices. A world in which we as adults would be lost and frustrated…
Sometimes a couple of ideas come together to form a little flash of inspiration. I’ve had a Pinterest account for a while but not really used it personally or thought of using it in education. A blog post from Mark Warner got me thinking though. Pinterest is a social site that encourages users to create…
I was most impressed with the Desmos Graphing Calculator last year. It’s a powerful and user friendly graphical calculator. It’s just been re-written from the ground up in HTLM5 which means it will work perfectly on an iPad or other tablet. It’s genuinely impressive and exciting to see what magic coders are starting to weave…
And just like that, world order is restored. I felt a little uncomfortable praising Mr Gove for his radical move to remove the ICT Programme of Study. But all is back in balance now. As MSN reports: “The Education Secretary has called for longer school days and suggested that teachers should also be happy with…