Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

In my travels around schools in the last few weeks, it’s been interesting to ponder on how the metaphors we’ve used for ICT in education have penetrated into the conversation of headteachers. One that is cropping up time and time again is that “ICT is just a tool”. Originally used to persuade educators that ICT [...]

Inside the latest version of the Mac operating system there’s a great feature called “Back to My Mac”. Using your .Mac account, it enables you to log on to it from another Mac on the internet. Designed as a sort of simple VPN, to pick up files you might have left on a machine in [...]

When times get tougher, lots of people ask me about being an educational ICT consultant and more critically what sort of things they need to know. Seth Godin is an excellent source of advice, and charges a lot for his marketing consultancy. He’s recently re-published his list of what every good marketer knows, so I [...]

I’ve often said that there are three types of teacher: creators, adapters and users. Creators develop new ideas for students in their classroom, they are the ones that write (and maybe still do) the textbooks that you find in classrooms, and some even make money out of it. The next group are the adapters, [...]

Pete Yeomans makes an interesting comment in a recent listserv post about what we expect of teachers when they learn how to use technology:
Using the internet to learn, be it in conversation, the collaborative web or a VLE is alien to many many teachers. Therefore they perceive the risks in a disproportionate manner. We [...]

That’s the premise of Dr Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution, interviewed in the Sunday Times last week by John Cornwell. The article itself is full of journalistic hyperbole, and the story of her life, is truly another story. Greenfield is a specialist in brain degeneration and her hypothesis is that that children’s [...]