I’m really annoyed with edublogs because of the adverts that they’ve started to put on their blogs. I’ve had to move the school blog across to wordpress which has been a bit of a pain in the bum! Not very happy at all!
Archive for January, 2009This is the slideshow from my Bett Presentation on using Synchroneyes. I did try to sort out some audio to go along with it, but as the presentation was 20min the audion file was massive an kept crashing. So here it is for what its worth.
Synchroneyes in My Classroom
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.
After chatting to Tom Barrett at Bett09 I’ve decided to try and get together a resource for teachers that are just starting out in trying to get into using simple web 2.0 tools in their classrooms. The mind map below is the start of that process. Hopefully people will make suggestions and collaborate to make it a really useful resource. Any ideas / suggestions more than welcome. Today I’m on my way down to Bett 09 the biggest technology show / conference in the UK. In all the time that I’ve been involved in Ict in schools I have to my shame never actually made it to Bett before! This had been for all sorts of reasons, but mainly I think because of the cost. The conference itself is free, but there’s always the train fare, possible hotel bills etc and that horrible feeling that your colleagues back at school think that trips like this are just a jolly! This trip is different as the finance side of things has been taken care of very kindly by Stiljes, but I still have that slight nagging doubt that leaving the kids is in some way letting them down. I know that this is irrational and that I’m sure I’ll come back buzzing with ideas, but I wonder how many other professions and professionals feel the same way about leaving the office? Another exciting development of Bett will be the chance to meet what my wife terms ‘my funny friends’ off my Twitter network. To actually put names to faces will be a rather strange experience, should be great though !
It’s been quite some time since I last posted to the blog and I thought that I should get back to it. When I think back to the start of the year I hadn’t really grasped the way in which the Internet was changing – I’m not sure that anyone had. If I’m honest I thought that I’d seen the ‘big change’… Little did I know! I simply saw the web as a way of communicating and finding out information. Now I realize that the web is all about that but at a much deeper level than I previously thought. Since I started blogging and engaging in social networks ( twitter being my preferred and most fruitful) my horizons have massively expanded. I have come across people and ideas that I never would have believed. Things I would never have thought would happen: Not all of these changes are attributable to my engagement online, but what is clear to me is that rather than bring at the end of a period of change, we’re only just at the beginning of a huge cultural and technological shift. The only thing that is certain is that everything that we know and understand about learning is going to be turned on it’s head. It seems to my healthily sceptical eye that the only way to sift through the masses of ideas that are floating around is to engage with others and share ideas. There is a lot of rubbish out there and the temptation, which I admit to falling into, is to find a ‘cool’ tool and say “how can I fit this into my lesson?” This is the wrong way of going about things, but as we all know we have tom learn from our mistakes. Having said that there are tools out there that really can be used creatively to enhance learning. My top tools for learning:
The next year has to be about refining these ideas and really fleshing plans to enhance children’s learning experiences. What is clear though is that the focus of the whole process must be to use the technology to enhance learning, rather than to have a situation where using the technology becomes the learning. |
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