There has been much debate of late about whether Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), particularly in their British state sponsored variations are dead. For some of the thoughts check out Lindsay Jordan, James Clay, Matt Lingard and Steve Wheeler. One week today I finally start my new job as Director of E-Learning at a high school…
So today Google announced that they will be introducing their very own Google Chrome OS. This follows in the wake of excellent the Google Chrome web browser which was released last year. Designed initially for netbooks, it appears that the OS will effectively be little more than a web browser. The beauty of this is…
Google announced a new product to the World at it’s Google I/O conference yesterday, Google Wave. There has been much written about it around the Web, by folks more intelligent than I, so if you want to catch up on the intricacies then read some of these sites: Ars Technica Tech Crunch Tech Crunch again…
Last week I began hearing some twittering about ads appearing on Edublogs blogs. A little investigation on the Edublogs forums showed a post which, to be fair, dates back some months detailing the fact that ads will be added at random to free accounts. They can quickly be removed for $40 a year as part…
Many thanks to all those who commented on my rant last month with regards to Internet filtering etc within school, I know it’s something a lot of us come up against each and every day. I thought I’d quickly update those who were interested on my progress. I put together a list of exemplars of…
As I have just ranted about on Tom Barrett’s blog post about using Google Docs for online reporting to parents, I am becoming increasingly frustrated with trying to use the Internet both myself and with pupils at school. It is to all intents and purposes blocked and Web 2.0 seems to be considered a security…
So says the title of another BBC article on the cyber-bullying YouTube problem. This worries and saddens me as I can see the quick result of this will be even more aggressive and restrictive censoring of the internet by school network managers. There is so much excellent material available on YouTube and other similar sites…
Following on from my previous post about GapMinder, Hans Rosling has made another inspiring talk at a TED conference. His use of data continues to inspire me and pushes my thoughts on using this software in the classroom. With the abolition of data handling coursework next year more time will be freed up to look…
At the end of an ordinary Year 9 lesson on scatter graphs I had a flash of inspiration and remembered the fantastic Gapminder World tool courtesy of Google and Gapminder. For the uninitiated this is a dynamic graphing package populated with a range of data about countries covering the last 30 years. You choose two…