Musings on Maths, education, teaching and technology.
I’ve spent the morning travelling back in time to my childhood in 1986 via the BBC Domesday Project!
This picture has me intrigued as it’s taken near my school and must be children within about a year of me at school – how quickly the memories fade, I can’t recognise any of them!
- I should probably recognise these kids!
The Story of the Domesday Project
The silence that has descended on this blog has partly been down to another little change in direction for me as I have taken over leadership of our ICT & Business Studies department. As a Mathematician by nature this has been an interesting few weeks!
Out top priority is to try and deliver an ICT curriculum that is fit for the year 2011. Something that enthuses our pupils with the subject of ICT and offers them valuable qualifications that will stand them in good stead for their futures.
This seemed a simple task – how wrong I was!
We have traditionally put all our students through the OCR Nationals in Year 9, picking up the equivalent of 1 GCSE for each of them (well most of them). I’m no great fan of this qualification, in particular Unit 1′s trudge through Office products and folder structures. ICT is an optional subject at our school, those pupils who choose to continue it at KS4 complete the full OCR Nationals Level 2 course picking up the ‘equivalent’ of 4 GCSEs. I know there are some good units in there, but we’re increasingly finding that students are then having issues with our local colleges who do not value the OCR Nationals.
I must have read every specification out there for ICT based qualifications at Level 2 – not the most exciting of tasks I can assure you!
Other key reading this week has included two new reports:
The Next Gen report from Nesta “sets out how the UK can be transformed into the world’s leading talent hub for video games and visual effects”. Written by key players from both industries it’s a wide ranging review of the educations system from Secondary School through to University. It’s quite critical that our education system is not providing these industries with people with the required skill sets, and that this runs all the way back down to the skills we are providing pupils with at school.
Some key excerpts in relation to school based ICT:
Government view: avoiding double dip recession and encouraging growth.
Education view, needs to be a commercial relationship. Infrastructure needs to be in place. Content is key. How do we use these things and how do we blend them into the learning environment that we know. Not changing pedagogy, enhance with rich digital content. Overlay a web-based area on top of a VLE. Free content, sponsored content, museum content. PURCHASED content, allowing revenue such as textbooks now.
A can of worms. Who is responsible? Who are the stakeholders – all of us! Funding?
We need value for money, there is a STEM agenda (not well understood), deflated after cuts, relevant content to engage.
How can Sony help?
Private & Public partnership. Integrate games & interactive media into curriculum. Promote digital content creation as a career choice. Bring textbooks to life.
National Digital Curriculum needed. Broadcast great practice. Create practice based
Sony will:
Develop Second Sight PSP – great but there are cheaper free version of VR Codes out there now? Teacher packs for LBP. Eyepet PS3 AR. LBP best game creation tool? Sony will collect evidence? Vital for getting government engagement. www.interactivelx.com (iLX) – sponsored by Sony to collate evidence. Also running courses and supporting teaching ideas.
Summary: Time is right now. Can’t wait. Collaboration required. Needs high level endorsement. Needs budget.
Not sure how engaging and interesting this talk was on reflection. Was a considerable plug for Sony. But at least a call for more collaboration between the industry and the education sector and an acknowledgement that the government needs to help.
The SSAT National Conference took place last week at the ICC in Birmingham (a venue rightly compared to Escher’s Relativity!). I was fortunate to be able to attend as a punter on the Wednesday and as a presenter on the Thursday as we launched the SSAT National Digital Leaders programme!
The theme of the conference was ‘Excellence for All’, and I have to say that the SSAT delivered , each aspect of the conference itself was excellent.
Wednesday started for me with Dylan Wiliam extolling the importance of assessment being the key to good teaching. He was as inspiring a speaker as ever, as those of you who watched his recent TV program would know. In particular I was impressed with Dylan’s ability to demonstrate his techniques within a ‘classroom’ of 400 educators, and also his incredible use of research evidence to support his teachings.
Wednesday Keynotes came from David Hemery, former 400m Hurdles Gold medal winning Olympian, he was telling his story and promoting www.21stcenturylegacy.com , part of London 2012′s legacy programme for schools. He was followed by Sugata Mitra, telling his engaging tale of children teaching themselves using the Internet, from his hole-in-the-wall Mumbai slums experiment to his recent work in Gateshead. This was an engaging tale that at first seemed to question the need for teachers at all! As with all the speakers, more to follow in a future blog-post. I would add that I was fortunate enough to chat to Sugata over coffee following his talk, a charming man. [Read more...]
The latest software update for the iPad is almost upon us, bringing multi-tasking, folders, air printing, game centre, unified inbox and more to the iPad. It is currently in ‘Gold Master’ stage which is basically the final version that is released to developers a few weeks before the public.
You can download it from the links on this website – you will also need to download iTunes 10.1 Beta, again from the links on that site.
I’ve been running 4.2GM for most of the last week and it’s great – the iPad is finally more like the machine we knew it could be.
Most of the apps need to be updated by their developers to multi-task properly, but many already do and it makes content creation and manipulation much easier being able to flick from the Mail app to Safari to Twitter and on to Air Sketch for example.
Multi Task App Switching
Facebook recently updated their Groups feature. Allowing finer control over groups which you set up, who can join, who can post, who can share etc.. Their are also improvements to how you are notified about group updates and a new feature called ‘docs’ that provides a Google Docs-esque shared notepad / document. Group chat is also built in allowing you to talk to everyone in that group at once. For a demonstration head over to Mashable or watch this video:
me elsewhere