Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

George Beckley, a teacher at Backwell School in North Somerset overheard some students talking about a video that showed how to make a perfect ‘joint’. It was available on Tocmag, a service that lets users create ‘mini-magazines’, which consist of six pages of text, photos, audio and video. These can then be accessed from, and [...]

I’ve just read (on paper) the latest issue of VISION, the bi-annual magazine of Futurelab and was drawn to the article entitled, The new basics: changing curriculum for 21st century skills by John Morgan, Senior Researcher at Futurelab. It appeals to me because it makes a historical comparison between the change promised in the [...]

82 97 MPs have to date signed John Pugh’s Early Day Motion on Software in Schools which reads as follows:
“That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; [...]

The Telegraph ran an article yesterday on the ‘fact’ that by 2026 a device the size of a sugar cube could store high resolution video of every second of a human life. As Professor Nigel Shadbolt, president of the British Computer Society and professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton, said at the [...]

Gartner’s the analyst and consultant firm has made 10 predictions for 2007, although some of them stretch beyond that. Among them is the prediction that blogging will peak in 2007. According to the BBC News site:
” … during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million. The [...]

On December 5th, Seymour Papert, one of true pioneers of computers in education was struck by a motorbike while crossing a busy street outside his hotel in Hanoi. He was attending a conferences on teaching mathematics with digital technology. He underwent brain surgery, but remains in a medically-induced coma.
As you can tell from other entries [...]

I have known Paul Heinrich for many years. He is presently ICT Adviser in Portsmouth and on the Executive Committee on Naace (of which I am Vice Chair), the professional association for educational professionals wishing to advance education through ICT. Paul has always written for a number of educational ICT publications as long as I [...]

At a recent international training session, I was interested to hear from one teacher in Bavaria that mobiles had to be switched off in the federal state’s schools by law. Previously mobile phones had been banned from use in lessons. This ban was now extended to breaks. The ban has been brought in following concerns [...]

Chris is a hard working teacher at CrossRoads Middle School in Columbia, South Carolina teaching Spanish and Latin. By the look of his blog, he’s a typical hard-working and enthusiastic teacher using the technology to enhance his students’ learning. Not that he’s got much, twelve mid to late 1990s Dell computers running Windows 98 Second [...]

A workshop event we held recently for teachers had a pre-requisite that everyone had to bring with them a wireless-enabled laptop computer. Indeed, we’ve virtually made this compulsory for events we now organise, since so many teachers have their own, or access to, a laptop, and we’ve made a conscious decision that we try to [...]