Thunder

WikiMindMap produces a mindmap based on a search of Wikipedia.  This provides an interesting and visual way of researching using wikipedia.  As a test I typed in Shropshire and this is the map displayed:

By clicking on a cell with a ‘+’ it expands the branch for further siblings, clicking the green icon will re-centre the map with that branch being the central point, if you click on a branch without any icon it will open up wikipedia in a new window/tab at the relevant section.

The report highlights how important innovation is to improve education as a whole and to encourage higher learning. The report shows how the every day innovation that occurs in classrooms - from a novel way of teaching to a new approach to student involvement is rarely spread beyond the individual teacher and/or school.

NESTA identifies the need to give teachers more autonomy - supporting more developmental work led by teachers and schools to help increase innovation.  But before this can happen there needs to be more funding and support, and schools and teachers need to be given incentives to engage in it.  The report also suggests the significant impact the available budget for educational research could have on collaboration if more of it was offered to schools engaged in innovative development and research.

You can read more (or download the report) from the NESTA Website:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/informing/policy_and_research/highlights/hidden_innovation.aspx

I have recently been given approval and funding to set up a private island in Second Life, the purpose of he island will be to support the delivery of the new Diplomas in Shropshire schools.  The island will need to be accessed by students aged 14 - 19 and also their teachers. So now I am after some help and advice, any generic help would be most welcome, either in a comment or email steve[at]it4L.org .  I have a couple of key questions at the moment:

1. Should I set the island up on Teen Grid or Second Life, from reading the second life website, I think it would be best put on the Teen Grid and then getting the teachers access to the island.
2. Do all teachers have to get clearance through Ascertain, or can their LA clearance be used?

I would be keen to hear from anyone using Second Life with high school students in the UK, at present I only know of Digital Katie, who I heard speak about her use of Second Life at TeachMeet 06.

With thanks to Tim I have now completed the additional model, you can download it from here.

Andrew Brown who is an educational support officer for Argyll & Bute is in the process of putting together a series of tutorials for Captivate, details can be viewed here.

Futurelab, in partnership with Promethean, invites you to a debate

9:30-1:30, Thursday 24 May 2007
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 12 Great George Street, London

The debate will be chaired by Futurelab, and brings together expert speakers to present provocative arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’ the use of interactive whiteboards in the classroom. The audience, made up from experts and creative thinkers from the fields of education, technology and curriculum policy, will listen and respond to the arguments, and take part in wider discussions and debate.

Futurelab has compiled a review of key research findings in this area, which will be made available to attendees. Research findings will be considered and critiqued, and the pedagogical implications of the use of interactive whiteboards will be discussed in the context of current policy and educational initiatives.

There will also be an opportunity for participants to put forward their suggestions and visions of the potential future directions and technological developments that relate to interactive technologies in the classroom.

We hope you will be able to join us for what we’re sure will be a lively, informative and thought-provoking event that will offer you a great opportunity to meet informed people and thinkers from a range of different fields.

Please let us know whether you will be able to attend and forward this invite on to colleagues who may also be interested in attending. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.

Best wishes,

Dr Tim Rudd
Senior Researcher
Futurelab

RSVP: karen.thompson@futurelab.org.uk by 27 April.

Both Futurelab and Promethean are passionate about transforming the way people learn, tapping into the huge potential offered by digital technologies to develop innovative learning resources and practices. For further information, go to www.futurelab.org.uk and www.prometheanworld.com.

Last night I attended a meeting of the Shropshire branch of UKITA at Radbrook College, it was a very interesting and informative meeting.  I was invited to take part in a discussion about what skills these companies would want from our IT students, here is a list of points they made:

• common sense, not sure how we would teach this??
• have a desire to find things out, to want to know how to do things.
• want to learn for themselves not because we want them to learn.
• act as a ‘professional’.
• have a thirst for knowledge.
• a knowledge of the IT industry
• vendor qualifications are not important

The next step is to set up a sub group that I will work with to develop a mutually beneficial relationship.

Last night I read with sadness that BBC Jam is being suspended as of 20th March. This is a real shame as these innovative, high quality resources are available freely to teachers, students and parents. One of the great things about Jam is that it is aimed at the learner not the teacher, but could easily be incorporated into teacher activities. As a student you could use these resources to support the learning you were doing at school.

Update: Check out Ewan’s post

While at the Apple RTC event in Newcastle, more postings later, I have just had a brief demo of Clicker 5 and was impressed by its functionality, I was however slightly concerned by the part of the demonstration when he just dragged an image and text off another website and dropped it into Clicker, at this point breaking several copyright laws.  I suggested to him that it might be a good idea to integrate a Flickr advanced search into the application so that users could find creative commons images and use them, unfortunately he wasn’t impressed by the idea and simply said ‘No’.  I wonder why you wouldn’t want to allow this?

Margaret Wright (QCA) has just posed the question if you were creating a GCSE in ICT what would you add to functional skills to form this qualification. To me the answer is engaging and motivating uses of ICTs, I am sure there are very few if any students who want to study databases, spreadsheets and wordprocessing. We should look at a qualification that encompasses the ICTs they use outside the school environment. If students were able to submit their myspace site or their latest video from YouTube, I am sure they would engage more in our classrooms. It would probably be worth looking outside the conventional uses of ICT, look at using mobile phones, mp3 players, games consoles etc.

I think it would be great to sit down and develop a GCSE for our ‘digital natives’, it is probably something we should do in conjunction with our students, what do they think ICT is actually about.  My biggest issue with ICT qualifications to date is that they are very quickly out of date, how do we design a qualification that is future proofed?  Should we have a selection of modules that students can pick from, smaller modules that can be developed and replaced easily. I could see modules on internet safety, computer gaming, blogging, podcasting, internet research etc etc

So what do you think?