In case you missed them, here are a few posts I’ve written listing rules. They’re a little light-hearted – but they are serious too!
Enjoy!
4 Reasons why doing IT on the cheap is an error of judgement
I’ve read about schools beating the budget blues by building their own visualisers, interactive whiteboards and computers. In my opinion these measures are a mistake, for the following reasons:
The value of email in a recession
Here’s a cartoon you may find amusing in these rather austere times!
Read MoreFound on the web: 10/25/2011 (a.m.)
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Take Creative Writing Outdoors! | Scottish Book Trust
Nice idea to get kids writing, and a pretty obvious one once you've heard it!
Would going to a nice natural environment work for adults too? Of course! And if you have a smartphone and an Evernote account, you can take notes and incorporate photos in a special "story ideas" notebook.
8 Observations on flipping the classroom
One of the more unfortunate buzzwords to appear in online education circles and the press is “flipping the classroom”. This means that instead of lecturing students in lessons in school, the teacher records the lecture as a video and uploads it to YouTube – or recommends other people’s videos to the students. The students watch the videos for homework, freeing up the lesson for interactivity, project work and so on.
I not impressed with this brilliant “new” idea. Why not?
What young people can do, and why it's relevant to ICT
In case you missed it...
Nearly two years ago now I wrote an article here called What young people can do, and 7 implications of that.
I think its central points are still relevant, and I hope you agree and find the article useful and interesting.
4 Ways to come up with innovative ideas for teaching education technology
To borrow from Dr Johnson, I find that most innovative ideas in ICT I read about are both new and exciting. Unfortunately, the ones that are new are not exciting, and the ones that are exciting are not new. It’s all very well “pushing the boundaries”, but all that does is give you more of the same.
In my opinion there are four main ways of generating ideas that are both genuinely new and genuinely exciting. Here they are.
Choosing the right education technology conference
When I was at university I had a fool-proof method for selecting student union representatives when elections were held. I automatically discounted anyone who stood up and announced that what we needed was change. We always need change, although it’s usually quite useful to check what exactly needs changing, and whether right now is the best time to do so. Anyone who announced that we needed change, but without going any deeper into it, was an idiot as far as I was concerned. Either that, or they assumed that I was.
When technology goes wrong
Just a couple of cogitations – hopefully worthy -- about technology and our relationship with it.
Analogue or digital?
Is there any advantage in having an analogue watch face to a digital one, or vice versa?
Increasing the decision-making capacity of your ICT team
If you lead an ICT team, the good news is that you don't have to do it all yourself!
Here are 10 ideas which I have found to be very helpful in creating a collaborative and co-operative team ethos.
Five Funky Flickr Tools
Keep IT clean!
Yeccchhh!!!! That was my reaction every time I saw a colleague’s keyboard. Never mind the fact that there are more germs on the average keyboard than on an average toilet seat apparently, and that other people had to use this bloke’s computer occasionally. Even worse was the fact that he was a member of my team!
