What can we learn from a band about the characteristics of the expert ICT teacher?
What does the Government really think about ICT?
Two-tier email system
Teachers looking for material with which to furnish their lessons on how technology affects society need look no further than email. This form of communication has affected in at least three ways what might be called “disposable time” – the time one has left after the essentials like eating and sleeping have been taken care of.
Prize draw: 4 Xobni licenses to be won
Tomorrow, Wednesday 30th March, at 9 pm British Summer Time, I’ll be running a prize draw for subscribers to Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for educational technology professionals. I will be picking 4 names out of the virtual hat, and those people will receive (if they want it), a free licence for the premium version of Xobni, which is an email manager which works with your email client, which in my case is Outlook.
I wrote about the application in an article called, appropriately enough, Xobni. The company has very kindly made these licences available for this prize draw. All you have to do to be eligible is subscribe to the newsletter!
On being a certified Google Apps trainer
What does a broken clock signify?
This sounds like an odd kind of question to pose on an educational technology website, but bear with me. A couple of days ago I went to my local swimming pool and the clock on the wall was tilted at an angle, and stuck at ten to six (it was three in the afternoon).
So that got me thinking: does a broken clock indicate that the management really doesn't care that much about such details because they are regarded as unimportant in comparison to customer service issues?
25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #18 Don’t ask questions
You’d think that giving people in your team the freedom to teach ICT how they like would be met, by them a least, with unbridled enthusiasm. You’d think that the best way to get on with your boss would be to offer no resistance to his latest idea, even if you secretly believe it is completely nuts. You’d think that not challenging your students when they proudly show you the results of their programming or desktop publishing efforts would be much better than the opposite, lest their (supposedly) fragile self-esteem be damaged.
You’d be wrong.
Is More Too Much?
Digital Invisible Ink
I love the Livescribe Pulse Pen, which allows me to take notes in the traditional way but still have them digitized, and therefore easily searchable. However, it has two “features” which really do need to be addressed...
Review of the Kodak Zx1 Pocket Camcorder
My bookshelf
Here are thumbnail sketches of a few books which I've come by recently. Taken as a whole they cover:
- The future of cities: should we build cities around airports instead of away from them?
- Schooling in the digital age: is it as much to do with politics as technology?
- Useful educational resources for the iPad.
- Learning and innovation in ICT: a European perspective.
Hope you find these useful.
25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #17 Be a pragmatist
“But what do you actually have to do?”
“You have to implement this solution.”
“Yes, but what do I do?”
“You have to implement this solution.”
“How? Who do I have to speak to? What should I say?”
An Open Source Schools conference
Come back, computer lab, all is forgiven
Why is it that all innovators seem to have an “either-or” mentality, an all-or-nothing approach? “Out with the old, in with the new!” seems to be their call to action, yet sometimes – I would say often – the new is not as good as the old. At least, not so much better that the old should be dispensed with altogether.
In ICT, the past is not what it was
The Transparency Initiative
In case you missed it... Rules
We do take things too seriously sometimes. Occasionally it can be good to relax a bit, especially in these austere times.
There's a rule for everything in life, and technology has spawned quite a few "laws" in its own right. Here are some to start reflecting on, in 21 rules for computer users.
Enjoy!
Integrity, journalism and PR
Finding stuff on the ICT in Education website
One of the main criticisms levelled at the original ICT in Education website was that it was hard to find things. Come to think of it, that was the only criticism for a long time, before the site became more and more unwieldy through my attempts to make articles easier to locate. I’m trying to not repeat the mistakes on this website, so every so often I take another long, hard look at it and ask: how might searching/finding be made even easier? And so it was that over the weekend I did some revamping and moving things about, and this article describes the results.