The bullet points or the short video have to come at the end of the learning process, not the beginning. Bullet points at the beginning are a substitute for understanding rather than an expression of it.
Read MoreAsk the expert
What can a Zen outlook teach us about educational ICT?
Read MoreRules rules rules
In case you missed them, here are a few posts I’ve written listing rules. They’re a little light-hearted – but they are serious too!
Enjoy!
4 Reasons why doing IT on the cheap is an error of judgement
I’ve read about schools beating the budget blues by building their own visualisers, interactive whiteboards and computers. In my opinion these measures are a mistake, for the following reasons:
The value of email in a recession
Here’s a cartoon you may find amusing in these rather austere times!
Read MoreFound on the web: 10/25/2011 (a.m.)
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Take Creative Writing Outdoors! | Scottish Book Trust
Nice idea to get kids writing, and a pretty obvious one once you've heard it!
Would going to a nice natural environment work for adults too? Of course! And if you have a smartphone and an Evernote account, you can take notes and incorporate photos in a special "story ideas" notebook.
8 Observations on flipping the classroom
One of the more unfortunate buzzwords to appear in online education circles and the press is “flipping the classroom”. This means that instead of lecturing students in lessons in school, the teacher records the lecture as a video and uploads it to YouTube – or recommends other people’s videos to the students. The students watch the videos for homework, freeing up the lesson for interactivity, project work and so on.
I not impressed with this brilliant “new” idea. Why not?
What young people can do, and why it's relevant to ICT
In case you missed it...
Nearly two years ago now I wrote an article here called What young people can do, and 7 implications of that.
I think its central points are still relevant, and I hope you agree and find the article useful and interesting.
4 Ways to come up with innovative ideas for teaching education technology
To borrow from Dr Johnson, I find that most innovative ideas in ICT I read about are both new and exciting. Unfortunately, the ones that are new are not exciting, and the ones that are exciting are not new. It’s all very well “pushing the boundaries”, but all that does is give you more of the same.
In my opinion there are four main ways of generating ideas that are both genuinely new and genuinely exciting. Here they are.
Choosing the right education technology conference
When I was at university I had a fool-proof method for selecting student union representatives when elections were held. I automatically discounted anyone who stood up and announced that what we needed was change. We always need change, although it’s usually quite useful to check what exactly needs changing, and whether right now is the best time to do so. Anyone who announced that we needed change, but without going any deeper into it, was an idiot as far as I was concerned. Either that, or they assumed that I was.
When technology goes wrong
Just a couple of cogitations – hopefully worthy -- about technology and our relationship with it.
Analogue or digital?
Is there any advantage in having an analogue watch face to a digital one, or vice versa?
Increasing the decision-making capacity of your ICT team
If you lead an ICT team, the good news is that you don't have to do it all yourself!
Here are 10 ideas which I have found to be very helpful in creating a collaborative and co-operative team ethos.
Five Funky Flickr Tools
Keep IT clean!
Yeccchhh!!!! That was my reaction every time I saw a colleague’s keyboard. Never mind the fact that there are more germs on the average keyboard than on an average toilet seat apparently, and that other people had to use this bloke’s computer occasionally. Even worse was the fact that he was a member of my team!
Collaborate for Change: information and update
Collabor8 4 Change, a great new-style conference, is running again on 17th November. We've just made available 50 more tickets!
Two cheers for location tagging
In a recent post on his blog, Neil Adam discusses the idea of everyday items being connected to, or at least known about by, the internet. He also considers the fact that the whereabouts of things like clothing can already be tracked over the internet courtesy of technology such as RFID tags.
Review of Impact of New Technologies in English Maintained Schools
Published by the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), this is a report on research undertaken to find out how schools use, and anticipate using, new technology. It covers funding, hardware used by teachers, hardware used by pupils, software used by teachers, communicating with parents through social networking and other means, and home access.
Read MoreReport on the Mobile Learning conference
By Susan Banister 
Susan Banister @susanbanister
Learning through mobile technology is not a new concept. But as yet it has not been taken up by huge numbers of schools. Mobile technology means more than smartphones. It includes iPads, iPods, netbooks, e-readers, Nintendo DS's, GPS devices. The Curriculum ICT team at Bradford in the UK teamed up with its City Learning Centres and embraced mobile learning head on with their bMobLe project (short for Bradford mobile learning).
The 100 worst blogs
I keep coming across blogs with titles like “Top 50 Blogs in [genre or category]. Perhaps it would be much more of a service for someone to produce a list of the worst blogs in a particular category.
Computers in Classrooms Now Published!
The latest issue of Computers in Classrooms has just been published. Here’s what it includes:
- Round-ups from several conferences, including a report of the recent BMobLe conference by Susan Banister
- Useful news, including information about a group purchasing scheme called The Hive, by bee-it
- Latest research from BESA
- News, views, a review and plenty of other stuff to think about
- two mega-brilliant prize draws
Subscribe now for free!
Update on 2011-09-23 11:38 by Terry Freedman, Educational ICT Consultant
Ooops! Neil Adam has kindly just pointed out to me that in the link in the sentence Information and Communication Technology in UK State Schools Volume 1, published by BESA doesn't work because it has a comma in it. Grrrr!!! Sorry about that. The link should, of course, be www.besa.org.uk. Thanks, Neil.