Google Love Stories

SSAT National Conference 2010 #NC10 – Initial Thoughts

November 28, 2010 By MrStucke 2 Comments

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...]

Filed Under: Digital Leaders, Leadership, News Tagged With: Digital Leaders, EdTech, education, ELearning, government, nc10, News, SSAT, teaching, VLE

A Progressive Approach To The Internet In School

October 8, 2010 By MrStucke 13 Comments

A post I’ve been meaning to write for many months…

Battles:

I have had my battles with Internet filtering in the past, but I’m now the man in charge. Every school I have worked in so far in my opinion has had an old fashioned ‘head in the sand’ view to filtering and acceptable use of the Internet within school. I’ve ranted about this in the past.

Reversing a Head In The Sand mentality. CC licensed image from David Barrie at Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/addictive_picasso/

Battleground:

I would estimate that 95% of our pupils now own a mobile phone, and that 80% of these have unrestricted access to the Internet on these devices. This doesn’t factor in devices such as netbooks, iPod Touches and PSPs that are also brought into school. What this leads to is unrestricted, unfiltered access to the Internet within our school, and at a pace and quality that is ever increasing. I also regularly receive requests from teachers to block this that and the other as a classroom management tool.

Battle plan:

I strongly believe that in response to this situation we need a new approach to Internet access within schools, something that still protects our children but also that prepares them for the World in which they live.

This comes in 3 parts:

An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that is relevant, understood by all parties and linked closely to general school behaviour policies.
Relatively unfiltered Internet access.
Quality monitoring solutions.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: EdTech, ELearning, Top Posts Tagged With: Classroom, EdTech, education, ELearning, Filtering, Internet, online, Web2.0, YouTube

Facebook Groups in School?

October 8, 2010 By MrStucke 8 Comments

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:

So, the million dollar question… Could this be used in education? Could it be part of a VLEesque home-school link? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Classroom, ELearning, News, Tools Tagged With: ELearning, Facebook, Internet, PLN, Social network, teaching, VLE, Web2.0

Frog Learning Platforms Conference 2010 – Digital Leaders – The Story So Far

June 14, 2010 By MrStucke 1 Comment

Embedded below is the presentation that I will attempt in the Pecha-Kucha style on Tuesday 15th June at the Frog Learning Platforms Conference 2010.

For further information on Digital Leaders check out the following links or get in touch with me on Twitter or via the comments below.

http://www.mrstucke.com/tag/digital-leaders/

http://kristianstill.co.uk/wordpress/category/curriculum/digital-leaders/

http://digitalleaders.co.uk

http://vital.ac.uk/

Filed Under: Digital Leaders, ELearning Tagged With: CPD, Digital Leaders, EdTech, education, ELearning, frog10, learning platform, Toshiba, training, VLE

Influencing Policy Part 2: Becta-X: Old Conversations, New Connections, Bright Future?

April 18, 2010 By MrStucke Leave a Comment

I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break. The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector. Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated.

The aims of the day were:

The way the digital media industry influences young people is both a threat and a real opportunity to education. As part of its “Fit for the Future” programme Becta has asked Just-b. Productions to independently bring together thinkers and doers from both these two worlds

We hope this participatory and distributed forum will break down walls between these two sectors, between big and small, between speaker and delegate, between real and remote participants and create fresh thinking on all sides.

I’ll not describe the entire order of events, if you want the details or indeed just the perspectives of others then please have a skim through some of these posts from other educators who were in attendance:

Fred Garnett / Tom Barrett / Doug Belshaw / Dai Barnes / Kristian Still / Nicola McNee / Ewan McIntosh

As you will see from those posts there was some discussion and reflection afterwards as to how much of a success the event was. My 2-cents worth: [Read more...]

Filed Under: ELearning Tagged With: AUP, BECTA, becta-x, BectaX, Delicious, EdTech, education, ELearning, Filtering, Internet, PLN, Twitter, Web2.0