So Google have released Youtube For Schools? http://www.youtube.com/schools. This gives access to all the videos on Youtube Edu, and also others curated by your teachers, specific to your school Google Apps account. Well that’s lovely. But really. Isn’t it time your school just used the other Youtube For Schools over at http://youtube.com? We’ve been using it freely…
Inspired by Sugata Mitra at the SSAT National Conference I decided to try and ape his ‘minimally invasive education‘ within my own Maths classroom. In a really tough December week this two hours shone out as a great teaching and learning experience. Before going any further, please head over to my previous post to read about the inspiration…
Bio Sugata Mitra is currently Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. He has spent many years in a huge number of research posts. With regards to education he is most famous for his Hole In The Wall Experiment whereby he put an Internet enabled PC in…
A post I’ve been meaning to write for many months… Battles: I have had my battles with Internet filtering in the past, but I’m now the man in charge. Every school I have worked in so far in my opinion has had an old fashioned ‘head in the sand’ view to filtering and acceptable use…
Facebook recently updated their Groups feature. Allowing finer control over groups which you set up, who can join, who can post, who can share etc.. Their are also improvements to how you are notified about group updates and a new feature called ‘docs’ that provides a Google Docs-esque shared notepad / document. Group chat is…
I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break. The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector. Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated. The aims of the day were: The way the digital media industry influences…
Inspired by Simon Job, this is a post about how I surf the torrential tidal wave of information that is out there on the Internet, how I filter it down into a manageable stream to consume and how I save the best bits for later. I have been using Google Reader for the last 3 years or so…
I have complained bitterly all year about the speed of our Internet connection at school, it hampers learning day after day and shows no sign of improvement. I thought it was just me being difficult until a Capita support technician’s comment on the phone last week as an update failed and crippled our SIMS FMS…
I had an observation lesson today and decided to pull out all the technology tricks! We happened to be at a point in the scheme of work looking at data handling and collecting data in particular. I decided I’d develop the Questionnaires lesson which I used at interview last year. 60 minutes should be enough…
Gordon Brown finally announced the Home Access programme last week. Organised by Becta this scheme will provide 270,000 households with a voucher that is redeemable for a computer along with 1 year’s Internet access, a suite of software and also support. Families will be eligible if they have a child in Years 3-7, they have not…