Dick Sblog

I’ve just been to the iEARN UK national conference – fantastic. Seldom has so much been achieved with so little resource! Why on earth this organisation doesn’t receive core funding from the DfES and the Dept for International Development, I just don’t know.
One of the other delegates was from Radiowaves – a company providing an [...]

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Check out the Vermont MIDI project – a 12 year old programme that encourages and supports students in composing and arranging music. A community of professional composers, teachers, pre-service educators, and students engage in mentoring and online discussion of student work. (With thanks to BBC radio 4’s digital planet podcast)

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david puttnam, writing in educationguardian on May 8th, has issued a challenge: he wants to start a serious public debate about how and whether we can bridge the gap between childrens’ experiences [of ICT] inside and outside school. This is welcome and is the same point highlighted by John Naughton in the Observer, back in [...]

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In Stephen Heppell’s piece in The Guardian of Jan 9th he makes an eloquent appeal, “Having already spoken to some of the children I know that many innovations in tomorrow’s learning will come directly from them and from their extraordinary, ingenious young teachers. But please, please, please will someone allow them the freedom and space [...]

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Think about this, a quote from e-Skills uk, the Sector Skills Council, “9 out of 10 new jobs demand ICT skills and employers need their staff to have increasingly high levels of IT user skills. Yet 40% of today’s ICT users have received no IT training at all. This is at a time with organisations [...]

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check out stephen hepple’s eloquent advocacy of the ‘c’ in ict in his recent contribution to the guardian’s education suppliment. Hear Hear!
but my observation is that the way in which people get to grips with new internet based technologies is through a process of play not under the pressure of work. people learn to [...]

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Collaboration takes many forms. Take a look at WebPlay. This is a great project providing kids with the chance to understand the whole production process for a play, including writing and performing one themselves. OK, lots of school projects cover the same ground, that’s true. However, WebPlay gets the participating classes to work online with [...]

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I’ve always been impressed by the degree of motivation produced by giving kids the opportunity to produce their own ’stuff’ and share it with a wider audience. The radiowaves project gives kids the chance to start their own internet radio station and the opportunity to broadcast to an international audience. Just how cool is that?

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A team at Sheffield Hallam Uni have just produced an interesting report on e-learning in FE. They categorise e-learning use into 3 types

as a medium (eg internet, email)
as a presentation tool (eg powerpoint)
as a learning/problem solving tool

Now, it occurs to me that a properly structured virtual teams project will press all of these buttons – [...]

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Back in the late ’90s I worked on a fabulous project called ‘Web for Schools’. We trained 700 teachers from across Europe to create web resources (the hard, html way) and they trained their students; then they linked up to collaborate. For many of them, the results were astonishing – the kid’s knowledge and skills [...]

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