Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

I’ve been lurking on the Moodle ‘blogs and comments’ forum since my last post on this subject, Matt Crosslin, makes an interesting observation about the spread of Web 2.0 theology, as he calls it, which is worth quoting in full:
I think some of it goes to the growth of Web 2.0 “theology.” People are [...]

The school vending machine has come in for a great deal of criticism lately resulting in a ban on chocolates, crisps or fizzy drinks being sold in schools from September. A source of revenue for schools for a long time, what could be the healthy alternative?
Call a Ball has been invented by Sören Grünert, Kirsten [...]

On Thursday’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme there was a short article on the demise of the 30 second television commercial linked to a speech by Lord Saatchi (Saatchi & Saatchi) the advertising ‘guru’. In it he adopts Marc Prensky’s terms of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants to describe the divide between those that were [...]

Moodle 1.6 has been officially released and contains a whole lot of interesting new features. Many have been waiting for blogging to be integrated into this open source VLE popular with educators throughout the world. However, to blog aficionados, the Moodle blogging feature falls short. A major shortfall seems to be the fact that you [...]

The first officially sanctioned podcast can be found on the Number 10 website. Eddie Izzard follows Tony Blair and his entourage to the recent European Council meeting in Brussels.
Listen to it here as well.
Download link
Blogged with Flock

I didn’t think I’d be moving away from Firefox so quickly … But I’ve discovered Flock! Flock is a manifestation of the read/write web, a browser that starts to properly integrate write tools with your favourite Web 2.0 sites.
First there’s the news feed feature and how it integrates into your blog. Each newsfeed message is [...]

At present I’m reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. OK, I may be a bit late in actually reading this book, but it’s now out in paperback and the second edition contains more comments from the author on the implications on education.
Then I picked up on Terry’s post concerning his views on this [...]

The last three days I’ve been running a course for international school leaders on e-confidence. In many respects it tries to do what the SLICT programme has been doing in the UK. International schools are somewhat different from UK schools of course, and their structure and concerns are not those of the state sector in [...]

Apparently researchers at the London University’s Institute of Education have concluded that, “Handwriting is an essential skill for everyone, even in this age of computer technology”. The BBC News report concentrated on

the lack of training that teachers had received
that schools did not set aside time for practice.

The researcher’s point was that children taught to write [...]

Naace’s All Members’ Conference is now booking! This one day conference is a mixture of keynote and parallel sessions covering a number of relevant ICT topics. There are some heavyweight speakers such as Michael Stevenson, Director of Technology at the DfES. Stevenson is responsible for implementing the Government’s e-strategy.
Stevenson was recently interviewed by JISC, and [...]