5 Ways to create spectacular classrooms

I am a firm believer that asking teachers to do more with technology is the wrong approach to renewal, unless you are removing old habits, old methods and genuinely improving outcomes. In sessions I run for teachers, I believe that it’s more effective to change the culture and narrow the participation gap between autonomous and [...]

Policy and Risk in 1:1 Laptops

As we see laptops being issued to students directly, here in Australia and around the world- it’s interesting to look at the policies being issued to students and teachers – which then shape their use and the learning possible. Given the language. Are we ready for laptops? When it comes to visualising policy, a word [...]

Twilight – Covert-Operations and banned ideas

DISCOVERING who is doing what, sneeking about, looking for covert technologies, is a twilight though bloodless activity I engage in. How did the Twilight novel end up the banned list in the locker library …  Maybe some of the attraction is to rebel against the filtration and prejudice that stops what we perceive to be [...]

This is now

OMG, this kind of thing is available for computer owners. It will never catch on.

23 years ore 23 seconds – to rebuild a house of learning?

THE Daily Mail, reports a story in which a little old lady in the UK, spent 23 years dismantling every brick and beam in her house and moving it 100 miles. She wanted to preserve it, and saw the need for this long before local council policy forced it upon her. If a little old [...]

Russian invasion!

INCREASINGLY it seems, newcomers are taking their classes online in blogs, wikis and online communities. There is a wealth of published materials that encourage and celebrate the adoption of technology in the classroom. Schools need to  provide adequate orientation and safety assurances; taking the newcomer through practical guidance be an effective, safe, online course facilitator. [...]

Word Sift

WORD Sift, is a site that allows you to paste in a passage of text create a visualisation of the word frequency, removing some 2000 most common English words. Word Sift allows the user to click the word to feed a visual thesaurus. The tool has been linked to a list of academic word list, [...]

23 Things about Classroom Laptops

LAPTOPS in the classroom will be for many teachers a rude awakening or a liberating departure – depending on your ideology. There is no disputing the fact that students will have a printing press on their desk. Schools are not ready for this; but teachers have to be – so I’d like to put forward [...]

FaceBook – the ICT Student Support Line

I met with an ex-student, now at a University recently. We talked about how informal networks influence his study patterns. I had to re-assure him about why I was interested. “Why are you looking to ban them at your place?” he said jokingly … but went on to explain how he uses about ten FaceBook [...]

Permission Publishing with Students

PRIVACY and duty of care are  a right of students. As the number of teachers and students continues to grow from the grassroots,  do we need better policy, as we do more online? At worst, students online should have their identity protected – and there should be an acceptable use policy in place to even [...]