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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News update: BETT, Collabor8 4 Change and Computers in Classrooms Newsletter

I’m currently working on the next edition of Computers in Classrooms. With any luck I’ll get that out some time today. It will contain, amongst other things:

  • More details of the Collabor8 4 Change event. There are now 114 people attending, 62 round table discussions to choose from, and only 36 tickets left. Ticket availability is open only until Saturday 5pm GMT.
  • Access to an extensive unofficial guide to BETT, which will be useful for other conferences as well.
  • Access to a review of the trends seen at last year’s BETT, and the reflections of a number of well-respected people in the educational ICT community in the UK.

All this, and it’s free to subscribe! Wow!

e-Safety and cyberbullying news

bullying-739607What’s happening in the world of e-safety, especially in the UK? Here are some interesting items from the November 2010 issue of Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for those with a professional interest in educational ICT. The items include:

  • Research into types of bullying;
  • Research into technology and behaviour;
  • The Beat Bullying website; and
  • Safer Internet Day and a competition from Childnet.
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Collabor8 4 Change at BETT 2012

whitekeys03We had a fantastic three hours at Collabor8 4 Change at Havering on the 17th November. Variety is the spice of life, so with 56 topics to choose from in total, everyone was catered for. To give you a flavour of the event, below is a selection of the talks and discussions featured. Now, if you are feeling really devastated that you were not able to be there, we have two bits of good news.
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Computers in Classrooms Now Published!

The latest issue of Computers in Classrooms has just been published. Here’s what it includes:

  • Round-ups from several conferences, including a report of the recent BMobLe conference by Susan Banister
  • Useful news, including information about a group purchasing scheme called The Hive, by bee-it
  • Latest research from BESA
  • News, views, a review and plenty of other stuff to think about
  • two mega-brilliant prize draws

Subscribe now for free!

New edition of Computers in Classrooms almost ready!

I’m in the final stages of proofreading the next issue of Computers in Classrooms, the free  e-newsletter for people with a professional interest in education technology. Articles include conference reports, including a guest article by Susan Banister, websites to check out, news, stuff to think about and a book review. Oh yes, and two prize draws: for PIMS and for Xobni Pro.

If you don’t want to miss out, sign up now, and join thousands of others!

Unsubscribing blues

I’ve recently decided to finally take the bull by the horns and unsubscribe myself from any newsletter or other mailing that I don’t at least skim on its arrival. It’s part of a drive to de-junk my life, starting with our home, and moving on to my inbox. You’d think that unsubscribing would be easy. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
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Didactic teaching or discovery learning?

According to a study reported on by The Economist, 4 and 5 year-olds not told what could be done with an unfamiliar object explored it for longer and came up with more ideas than control groups who were shown, to varying degrees. The Economist states:

The researchers’ conclusion was that, in the context of strange toys of unknown function, prior explanation does, indeed, inhibit exploration and discovery. Generalising from that would be ambitious. But it suggests that further research might be quite a good idea.

Does this imply that the advocates of discovery learning (and their associated preference for “guide on the side” to “sage on the stage”) are right?

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A conference, summer CPD and a UNESCO report

Here are three options for you to consider in order to give a boost to your professional development:

  • The forthcoming ISTE conference in Philadelphia.
  • A cornucopia of ideas for professional development over the summer break, in case all that relaxing gets you down.
  • A report from UNESCO on Learning, Innovation and ICT.

All this was published last week in Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for educational ICT professionals. Subscribe now (literally: right now) and you’ll stand a chance of winning a premium version of Xobni, a pretty good email management tool. I’m running the draw for that at 10 pm UK time today.

Read on for the details of those three resources.

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Prize draw: 4 Xobni licenses to be won

Tomorrow, Wednesday 30th March, at 9 pm British Summer Time, I’ll be running a prize draw for subscribers to Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for educational technology professionals. I will be picking 4 names out of the virtual hat, and those people will receive (if they want it), a free licence for the premium version of Xobni, which is an email manager which works with your email client, which in my case is Outlook.

I wrote about the application in an article called, appropriately enough, Xobni. The company has very kindly made these licences available for this prize draw. All you have to do to be eligible is subscribe to the newsletter!

Computers in Classrooms

I’m just putting the finishing touches to the latest issue of Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for anyone with an interest in educational ICT. Inn this edition you will find:

  • A code that will get you £100 off the delegate price of the Building Schools Conference taking place tomorrow and Thursday.
  • A code for free access to Scholastic’s Child Education Plus and Nursery Education Plus.
  • First impressions of Aerotropolis, to b published on 1st March.
  • Quick review of Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age by Neil Selwyn.
  • Resources for geography and history teachers.
  • Information about a European report about ICT.
  • And more!

You can sign up for this esteemed publication by clicking Computers in Classrooms link and filling out the form. We use a double opt-in system, meaning that you’ll be sent an email asking you to confirm that you would like to subscribe. Join thousands of other like-minded people now!

Switched-On ICT Revisited

As I said in a previous article about it, Switched-On ICT is the name of the primary (elementary) scheme of work I've been involved with, as Series Editor. That role has entailed advising on assessing pupils' ICT capability, and helping to make sure that the instructions and assessment opportunities and statements are both consistent and accurate.

The text is engaging, with topics such as We Are Explorers, and makes full use of Web 2.0 and other free applications as well as schools' Learning Platforms. Here is a list of what I see as its strengths:

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Safer Internet Day

Just a quick reminder: this annual event us nearly upon us – tomorrow, 8th February 2011. See the Safer Internet Day website, and the Safer Internet Day Fair. What will your school be doing for the event? Check out the Think u Know website too. You might also find this post interesting: Digital Safety for Children and Youth. It has some interesting links.

First published in Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for edcational ICT professionals.