Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Back last month I picked up on the idea of list blogging. Rather than rabbit along in a rather in-coherent manner you produce a list of concise points on the topic. The one I particularly like is Kludge Spot’s 20 things I learned … and since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I decided [...]

A big thanks to Mark for drawing my attention to Alan November’s interview with Angela McFarlane which I listened to on my iPod when driving home yesterday evening. In it, she points to the issue of parents doing children’s coursework, and therefore cheating, but also draws on the notion of more creative coursework tasks, through [...]

I wasn’t at the launch of Smartaccess at the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Leading Edge Generation Y conference today, but if the reports are true this service leaps a generation. The designers call it a Real Learning Environment, as opposed to a virtual one, in which learners are able to truly take control of [...]

Glubble is a new free plug-in for Firefox which restricts users of a machine to a white list of websites at browser level. Intended for families with children under the age of 12, parents can control the sites their children can see. So far the idea is hardly new, even if the filtering is done [...]

Higher education is slowly but surely taking up Google Apps for Education according to a recent BBC news report. In much the same way that banks have always tried to sign up students when they are young, because most of us don’t swap, Google is signing up the next generation of graduates to its email [...]

I’ve just spend a couple of hours sorting out this year’s Naace All Members’ Conference Blog. This year’s conference yet again has some really interesting sessions, which will mean that some, including me, will not be able to see and hear all the sessions that really interest me live. However, being held at Cisco’s Headquarters [...]

I recently blogged on Fix8 and Televirtual. But once you find something on the web, there’s always a new twist around the corner. Gizmoz enables you to put your own face on a virtual avatar which will create facial gestures to any speech you record, or text to speech recorded. Again you can save it [...]

When I became an Advisory Teacher (they weren’t called consultants then) in a Local Authority back in 1990, I was pretty sure why I wanted the job. My mother, also a teacher, had said to me years before that I would never be satisfied with only making a difference to the kids in my own [...]

First it was Maths, and now as predicted all coursework from home will be scrapped from 2009. As stated in my previous post, the plan is that coursework will be conducted under supervision “by a teacher and access to books, the internet and other sources of information will be controlled”. The reason being, as [...]

If you need to explain something in plain English it usually means that it’s difficult to understand. It’s the concept that is difficult to grasp. Digital video and web 2.0 technology means that explaining something is much easier because invariably someone has already done it in a much better way that you could. So here’s [...]