Also on the web: 08/20/2010 (a.m.)

• Lane Fox launches review of Directgov • The Register

  Martha Lane Fox is conducting a review which covers not only how central Government could deliver its online services better, but also which services SHOULD be delivered by central government, and which by other agencies. Sounds good to me.There are just four questions in the survey: * Question 1: Central Government’s objectives in digital delivery * Question 2: Who should do what? * Question 3: Sharing the platform * Question 4: Trends in digital deliveryI think it's important for ICT teachers and leaders to take the survey: there's a lot of good stuff being produced by people whose work deserves a wider audience.The link above takes you to the article in The Register about it, but if you want to go straight to the survey copy and paste this URL into your browser:http://directgovreview.readandcomment.com/

  tags: Review of DirectGov

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Also on the web: 08/19/2010 (p.m.)

• Britons spend half their waking hours using technology, finds Ofcom - Telegraph

  I'm not sure where these "new figures" come from, but I recall reading something very similar last year. Basically, we Brits spend a lot of time (around half our waking lives) with technology.Is that good, bad or indifferent?Of course, that's just the technology we use directly. We "use" (ie interact with, or are affected by) a lot more without even knowing about it.

  tags: technology use

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Also on the web: 08/05/2010 (p.m.)

• Let’s Say No to Inappropriate Use of Technology

  Another timely, thought-provoking (and somewhat long) post, about the inappropriate use of technology in education. In my view, it's essential that people know when NOT to use technology. Read the post, decide for yourself.

  tags: Doug Woods inappropriate technology use ICT education technology

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The Case For Homework in ICT

Should homework be set for ICT lessons? A common argument against the idea is that it’s unfair on those students who don’t have access to computers outside school. My answer to that is: set homework which doesn’t need access to a computer.

Homework can be fun too! © cienpies.net http://fotos.cienpies.net/I suspect that much of the antipathy I’ve encountered towards setting homework is that it smacks of traditionalism. The very idea of homework is, in this sense, the antithesis of all we ed tech people like to believe we stand for: cutting edge, innovative – if not digital natives, then at least digital explorers.

I don’t see that at all. Homework can be used to ensure that the work in the classroom proceeds as quickly and as smoothly as possible. If much of your teaching style involves project work, then why not set a generic homework like: Do whatever you need to do in order to work effectively on your project next lesson? To make that work, it’s a good idea to ensure that the last five or ten minutes of the lesson is given over to identifying what has been achieved and what are the next steps. That way, students can see for themselves that they will need to, say, find out local supermarket prices in order to create an advertisement for a new product.

There is another reason for setting homework. If you work in a school in which homework is expected to be set, then by not setting it for ICT you’re declaring, in effect, ICT to be a non-subject. Non-subjects don’t get timetable time. Non-subjects don’t get first refusal when unexpected funds become available. Non-subjects don’t get much more than subsistence capitation (budget).

So for both political (with a small ‘p’) reasons and educational ones, homework in ICT is absolutely necessary. As The Commodores said in “Slippery When Wet”:

Having fun ain’t no good, leaving homework undone!

Life Without A Spellchecker

It is almost a truism that we have become too reliant on technology. You only have to step into a place where the computer system has 'gone down' to see that. Like the restaurant I wandered into a few days ago in which there was, to quote one of the staff, 'anarchy' because the computerised booking set-up had, as it were, downed tools.

But in a funny kind of way that sort of situation is copable with if you're reasonably intelligent, have a contingency plan and possess a spark of creativity. The thing is, a system which is off is, by definition, not on. Like the binary system on which it's based, the computer system's state leaves no room for doubt, no room for ambiguity. at the risk of sounding a little Monty Pythonish, it's off, not working, finished, kaput – at least for the time being.

What is far worse, in my opinion, is when something goes wrong but in such a quiet sort of way that you don't even notice at first. Thus it was that when my spell-checker stopped checking my spelling, it did so without warning, without fanfare and, crucially, without any wavy red lines. Unfortunately, the first glimmer I had of something being amiss was when I read an article I'd just posted that mentioned my being resposible.

Now there are a couple of things that come to mind about this. Firstly, it's very apparent what a shoddy job of proofreading I did. That was partly because I had implicitly assumed that the spell checker would pick up any neologism I'd 'penned'. But it was also partly because, like most people, I subconsciously substituted the correct word for the incorrect one when I was reading through my article.

That is why anyone writing for an audience on a professional basis has their work proofread by someone else. Is that done as a matter of course in schools? We harp on about writing or presenting for different audiences (in England and Wales it is stipulated in the National Curriculum). But the logical corollary of that position is having students proofread each other's work and, in special projects, splitting the task between writers and editors and proofreaders.

The second thing that strikes me, somewhat more whimsically, is that not having a spell checker is a good way of coining new words. For example, as far as I am aware the word 'resposible' does not exist (I've even looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary), yet it sounds like it ought to. Could it be, perhaps, the property of being eligible to be taken back having been disposed of?

Inventing words accidentally, and then creating meanings for them, is quite entertaining. It goes to show that life without a spell checker, whilst not ideal, is not an entirely desperate state of affairs.

This is a slightly modified version of an article first published on 20th May 2009.