MInd your language!

Two re-occuring terms I keep encountering are ‘integrating technology’ and ‘cyber-culture’. I am never sure if they are used to be astute or divisive. Perhaps they should be retired from the discourse of educational technology entirely. ‘Integrating technology’ seems an odd term, as technology is itself empty. It presumes there are at least two components [...]

Using Rep and Achieves in the Classrooms

This post is about achievement and reputation – in games like Moshi Monsters. If you’re a player – you might find this a bit boring … so skip to the bottom and leave me a comment on “how achieves and rep matter”. For teachers – this is about formative assessment and what’s killing it. Feedback [...]

A history of pixels

The evolution of the pixel, a great documentary showing how pixels have evolved – lots of game examples.

Entering the new commons. Teachers can’t write.

“Historically, we humans have experienced an impulse to write; we have found the materials to write; we have endured the labor of composition; we have understood that writing offers new possibility and a unique agency. Historically, we composers pursued this impulse to write in spite of—in spite of cultures that devalued writing; in spite of [...]

PBL – A code for students

Project Based Learning demands students communicate with each other. Contemporary project design requires the teacher to provide a climate for students to do this – with each other – and there are numerous ways to achieve it. Many PBL classrooms use wikis, blogs, forums and my personal favourite, Edmodo or Schoology. I also encourage classrooms [...]

What Twitter does > What Twitter is

“I have no idea why you’d use Twitter” he said to me, as I tried so very hard not to openly yawn at the prospect of the conversation continuing. Okay, okay, you don’t get it. But in the grand scheme of things, it is fairly unremarkable that I’m hearing this. Many ‘on’ Twitter may have [...]

Sweet dreams are made of this

In 1983, Dave Steward bought one of these. It’s a drum machine, and he used it to create some of the greatest tracks the Eurythmics ever made. It was the same year that saw the release of Return of the Jedi, Flash Dance and Tom Cruise slid between the doorway in Risky Business – just [...]

Cheap E-Paper Displays Coming to a Store Near You

Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Cheap E-Paper Displays Coming to a Store Near You. An interesting post from Technology Review (MIT). It’s about ePaper, but smart ePaper – the ability to update ‘content’ on some ePaper using device from a centralised source. There are some videos of it in action, and the post reports this [...]

How to get staff to develop a learning plan

Another question from ISTE – “How do I get teachers to recognise what they need to do”. The stems from the issue that no one knows exactly what ‘it’ is that they are supposed to be doing with technology if they’ve never really used ‘it’ in a strategic or even tactical way. I keep saying [...]

Are you a Cyborg? – Kicking off PBL ideas

More than one person at ISTE commented how hard it was to start off a PBL project – and found that crafting the essential question and providing the ‘entry event’ challenging. Wikipedia comments “When students use technology as a tool to communicate with others, they take on an active role vs. a passive role of [...]