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Oh dear. Did I miss something? Have I fallen asleep at the wheel again? What’s this Web 2.0 that seems to all the buzz, and why wasn’t I aware of Web 1.0? What can have changed so radically that we need a new designation? (It doesn’t look any different). What’s the fuss about?

It seems that there is a crescendo of murmuring about the way the web is used. Just like many I was happy to use the web just to find information, and to buy train tickets, books and the like; transactions were generally of a monetary nature. Using the web was a solitary one-way experience. But the times, they are a-changing…the web has got two-way. You and I can share thoughts, review each others’ work, add to each others’ efforts – we can work together! And learning will be made more effective through the collaborative spaces that we create. (You and I are learners on a journey, yes? So the same is true for those learners in our classrooms…) Read the rest of this entry »

testcast

This isn’t a podcast yet, for some reason the rss enclosures aren’t working. I’m working on it.

DJ

Nesta Futurelabs are at it again, this time they are setting up a three-year research and development project investigating how children can shape their own learning, by changing the emphasis from what they learn to how they learn.

If you fancy getting involved, more details can be found here.

A new letter giving more details about our conference on the 5th April can be found here, you will need to have a Shropshire digitalbrain account to view it.

Talking photograph albums are an interesting way to present information. They allow children to store anything such as photographs, pictures, postcards, text etc on each of its 24 pages, and to record 10 seconds of speech to go with each piece. This would be a fantastic resource for children who need help with their writing e.g. young children or children with special needs; as a speaking and listening project or simply as an alternative way to store and present information

At the recent Primary Strategy ICT subject leaders meeting, we were reminded that the Primary Strategy still very much sees ICT as a separate subject as well as a tool to be used to support learning across the curriculum. The ‘ICT progression’ documents are currently in progress and will provide a framework for teaching and assessing ICT capability from the foundation stage to Year 7 and beyond. It is hoped that it will be published in Autumn 2006. A draft version should be available for comment in the summer term.
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Taken from the Edexcel DiDA microsite:

Helping You Implement DiDA in 2006: Free Regional Events designed to help you succeed.
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I am pleased to announce that we are holding a conference on learning in the 21st Century. We are fortunate that Marc Prensky will be the keynote speaker, you can view Marcs keynote from SETT 2005 here (moving the player scroll bar to about half way through (57 minutes to be precise) when the Prensky component begins).
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I have just read this article about teaching by only using questions. This is known as the Socratic Method, I came across this via the Scottish Education Blog – an interesting read.

So having read the article, I wonder how many lessons we could teach like this. It is great that students are continually engaged in the lesson and I am sure that it would enhance their learning, but could we do it?

Answers via comments

Have you ever considered how to make assessment data more usable in an everyday and practical way. A popular method is to colour code data for example in pupil assessments using the “traffic light” approach – so how do we do it? Essentially the likely environment to do this sort of work will be within a spreadsheet either Excel or the Open Office spreadsheet. The methods etc are very similar and you can download examples for either on the links below:

Excel example

Open Office Spreadsheet example

Of course what ICT can’t do is make sensible best use of the data – that’s where we hit the real teaching and learning agenda!