Education Technology and ICT article round-up

Here are a few good reads you may have missed in the last week or so, including an invitation to enter an article for a blog carnival, the deadline for which is this Sunday!

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David Mitchell talks about Quadblogging and February 29

I had the pleasure of finally meeting up with David Mitchell, aka @deputymitchell. David is the brains behind Quadblogging, in which schools form groups of four in order to – well, I’ll let David explain it in his own words. In this video he talks about how the project originated, and how to get involved if you’d like to join in.

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3D at Oakington Manor Primary School

By Ophelia Vanderpuye

In 2006 following a visit to China by the school’s headteacher and ICT Advanced Skills Teacher, discussions took place about the possibility of building a new ICT suite as the then suite had become too small for the growing children. In the years that followed plans and visits to new build schools to give inspiration for the design of the new building In 2009, we took a bold leap into the unknown as our discussion with our architect and ICT suppliers started to show a design that was totally different to anything we had seen in the schools we visited.

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iPad Apps and Bloom’s Taxonomy

Here’s a lovely idea from Kelly Tenkely: a whole load of iPad apps classified according to Bloom’s taxonomy. I’ve had a quick look, and my conclusions are as follows:

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Educating in the Third Dimension

By Graham Quince

Firstly a bit of a confession, I’m not a fan of 3D. I honestly don’t think it adds anything to the movie experience. Plot makes a movie worth watching, not 50ft robots smashing debris into the audience. I’m not in the minority either, ticket sales keep proving most people aren’t interested in sitting for 2 hours to watch a theme park attraction. I first saw modern 3D in the Terminator 2 show at Universal Studios. It blew me away. It was amazing. It was 10 minutes long and things kept jumping out from the screen. And that’s my point, 3D is a gimmick. It’s very cool, but like a rollercoaster, it works best in short doses.

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Technology & Learning Editor Kevin Hogan Interviewed

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Kevin Hogan again at BETT this year. Kevin is the Editor of Technology and Learning, which is a good magazine, a great website, and a brilliant blog and a new international blog. In this short video he talks about BETT, and the differences between educational technology in the USA and the UK, as well as his plans for the magazine.

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4 Reasons that the ICT Programme of Study “had” to go

The fate of the ICT Programme of Study could have been predicted accurately long before Judge Gove donned his black cap and passed the death sentence. After several years of what might be justly described as a “war of attrition”, the weight of the “evidence”, such as it is, made such an outcome unavoidable.

This article is not, to continue the analogy, meant to be the beginning of an appeal process

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The 3D Landscape

Recent changes in the 3D technology landscape are transforming the way we visualise and interact with 3D data and the real world. 3D applications and technologies have reached a level of maturity that are starting to add a real value to the education sector.  Inition brings over 10 years experience of integrating 3D technologies alongside expert consulting and training services.  We asked them to outline a few of their examples, from 3D displays through to scanning, 3D printing, motion capture and haptic interfaces.

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Lights, Camera, Inaction: A Personal View of Kodak Technology

Look, I don’t wish to overstate the case, but yesterday I really understood, on a deep level, where Albert King was coming from when he wrote that great blues line, “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” Because yesterday was the day that my beloved Kodak Zi8 pocket camcorder suddenly died. Admittedly, that was the only bad thing that has happened for a while, not everything like the lyric I just quoted suggests, but even so….

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BETT Survey

Did you attend BETT this year?

If so, please contribute to a review I’d like to compile about what was good, trends, etc. This will be made available free of charge once it’s done. Please complete a very short online survey.

Thanks!

Digital literacy and Computer Science

Computer studies and its main component, programming, could be an exciting new addition to the curriculum. However, we must not repeat the mistakes of the 1980s, when the subject was, at least in my experience and in my opinion, insular, highly technical, and rightly perceived by some (especially girls) as “geeky”.

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Education Technology and ICT at BETT: Big changes for 2013

Er, excuse me. Um, I just wondered…, er could I just squeeze past…, oops, sorry…

How many times have you found yourself stuck behind a couple of people walking at such a snail-like pace that one suspects they started out the day before? That’s just one of the problems experienced at BETT at Olympia: so much squeezed into a space which has long been too small, resulting in aisles that are far too narrow for the volume of traffic and a stand numbering systems which seems to owe more to random number generation than logic. Well, hopefully this is all now a thing of the past, a soon-to-be distant memory of a venue we can reminisce about but not miss.

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