Priming the Educational Pump

BEFORE anyone is going to consider using alternative technologies in learning and teaching, teacher-trainers have to ‘prime the pump’. Nothing sustainable is going to flow out from the raging torrent of internet possibilities into the classroom unless the teacher decides that it’s worth pressing the start button. There are then some considerations that I’ve begun [...]

Learn to stand alone!

MANAGEMENT is not there to change the world, but to make sure that the goals of the organisation are met – by performing some task. Its not their ‘job’ to be innovative. That is everyone’s job – within their own ability or limits. The degree to which the NSW Institute of teachers have got this [...]

The power of a BIG wiki

“WHAT comes next depends on what you, the user, makes happen There are no training wheels.” This is a great extract line in Bering Strait School District Open Content Initiative. Its a BIG wiki, with well over 10,000 collaboratively produced pages. I really liked the Lesson Plan section, which shows a great deal of intellectual [...]

An Intro to Social Media in Education

This is probably a fairly unremarkable ‘power point’ … as an introduction to social media I gave to general staff and students this week. I find it really hard to pitch social media in education as a dry – theory, so have tried to liven it up by having people leave comments during the presentation. [...]

1, 2, 3, 4 – Which Web for me?

“Web3.0? what’s that!” Is there such a thing? Isn’t web2.0 just a way of differentiating the passive, expert driven world-wide-web of Tim Berners Lee (Web1.0) from the two-way interchange publishing and of sites such as wikipedia? So what’s next? Well it might be Web2.1, 2.2 … or Web3.0 – no one knows for sure, and [...]

Yummy Ideas need flavour

Templates are the most efficient way to kill creativity in your organisation. Templates are not just the pro-formas of conformity, they are intended to provide creative boundaries in individual communication. In a world dominated by rapid change, templates offer languishing conformity. Office automation was the playground of templates. Powerpoint being the master template of all [...]

EVE of new literature

This post is something that hit the cutting room (word count) floor in the “Learning in Virtual Worlds” volume I’ve been writing with Judy O’Connell, but I think it’s worth sharing. The focus is to look at just how much you can do with a ‘free trail’ to an online game – and in fact [...]

Diigo – The power of collaborative thought

Shirky posted a very ‘oh my god’ post about the future of newspapers, weaving though it the problems faced by organisations when old ideas don’t work in new dimensions. This post becomes far more engaging for Diigo users, as there are numerous highlights though the text, with associated comments from people like Clary Burrell, who [...]

Solo Teaching verses Team Learning.

Today, our syllabus’ don’t dictate one class-one teacher, in fact our learning frameworks promote a holistic approach to learning. So why would we change the most fundamental school behaviour? Keven Jarrett showed me this photo, which got me thinking about the figure at the back of this photo. We often talk about collaborative classrooms for [...]

Etherpad – Live Text Collaboration

One of the common comments people make in workshops about Google Docs is ‘what if two people are editing’. Well in reality that doesn’t happen that often, and even so, Google Docs informs you … but in a real time classroom, it can be kind of annoying. Etherpad, is fantastic for classroom collaboration. It has [...]