This is a round-up of articles I've written recently. They cover a variety of topics in the ed tech sphere, not all of them on this website. Hopefully you'll find something of interest.

Innovation

I half-jokingly (but only half jokingly) said to Lord Jim Knight at the EdTechX Europe conference last June that there was far too much innovation in education these days. What I was really getting at was the constant drive to 'improve' things even when they're working perfectly well.

But when you decide that innovation would be a good and healthy thing to do, then you might find this article useful:

Education technology: 7 crucial questions

Published on the Technology and Learning blog. Incidentally, if you would like to read an incredibly brief review of that conference, I published one in the Digital Education newsletter:

The EdTechX Europe Conference: a very brief review

Parental engagement

Are parents' evenings anachronistic? That's the question I asked recently in an article. Considering the fact that you can send a text message to parents telling them how their son or daughter is doing, why spend hours in a hall after school when you could be at home watching tv?

Given the extremely unlikely idea that schools will get rid of parents' evenings any time soon, I suggested ways in which they could at least be even more useful and engaging.

Here's the article:

Are parents' evenings anachronistic?

Published on the Groupcall blog. The article also contains links to another article on parental engagement, and a free e-book on the subject. You may also find this article, written by Kieran Layer, useful too:

Alienated Parents and How to Improve Relationships

Finally, if you're going to email parents, it would be nice to think they will actually open them. This article contains a few ideas about how to encourage that to happen:

Getting Your Emails Opened

Teaching programming

I think that there are three main ways of teaching kids how to program. In an article I wrote for a magazine, I explored these, drawing on my own experience and also research into teaching mathematics.

3 Ways To Teach Coding And Nurture Confident Programmers

Published in Teach Secondary magazine.

Teachers using education technology -- or not

Is it really acceptable, in this day and age, for some educators who are technologically challenged to almost boast about the fact? "Me? I can't work a digital camera. I just get my 5 year old son to transfer the photos." Really? Do you get your son to read to you as well, or to count the change when you go shopping?

Grab a coffee and sit down for a rant. Mind you, it's a well-considered rant I think, so perhaps not even a rant at all, just a plea for a different approach to digital illiteracy:

7 suggestions for how to treat willful digital illiteracy in education

Published on the ICT & Computing in Education website. On a related subject (sort of), I also wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about how to put colleagues off using any education technology in your school:

11 ways to deter colleagues from using education technology

I hope you found these articles interesting. Very soon my newsletter, Digital Education, will be back after the Easter break, with news, views and reviews as usual. Don't miss it! You can use the form below to sign up. Don't worry, it's free, and I won't spam you.

Is The computing Curriculum Too Masculine? Revisited 16 years later!

One of the apparently insoluble problems of the age is how do you encourage more girls to take up Computing? I think a lot can be done, and have done so myself, but I wonder how far a lot of the effort fails to get to the heart of the issue, which could be the curriculum itself, the way it is taught, or a combination of the two?