Having written about 7 mistakes made by ICT Co-ordinators (and if you haven’t read that, go and read it now; don’t worry, I’ll wait), I gave the topic a bit more thought and then realised I could have easily listed a few more. Well, here are a further seven to be thinking about! Have you made, or are you making, these mistakes?
ICT Posters: Credit Rating
Why do posters and notices in computer labs have to be so serious? Surely it just deters people from using the stuff?
I recall one school in which 10 seconds in the computer lab had you nervously looking around for the heavy mob: the walls were covered in posters telling you what was forbidden – forbidden! The general ambience was not improved by the bars on all the windows. Understandable, but even so….
7 Mistakes made by ICT Co-ordinators
So, you’ve landed a great new job, an important one at that, as an ICT Co-ordinator or Technology Co-ordinator. But in your eagerness to make an impact, are you making some fundamental mistakes? Here’s a quick guide about what not to do.
9 Reasons to attend BETT 2012
Well, here we are again. It will soon be Christmas, and just as we're all hoping to have started to recover from over-eating and over-imbibing (not me though: I'm being sensible!), it's the BETT show. Said to be the largest educational technology show in the world, it's gruelling but also exciting. IF you can get to it, do so -- and if you can't think of why you'd want to, you're in luck, because that's what this article is all about.
There are at least 9 good reasons to attend BETT, these being to:
Collabor8 4 Change at BETT 2012
We 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.Found on the web: 11/22/2011 (p.m.)
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Interesting approach to encouraging teachers to use technology in their teaching, specifically Web 2.0. It is similar to what some teachers told me about how they encourage their colleagues to use interactive whiteboards more effectively, whilst I was doing research for an article recently.
Why Schools Cannot Ignore Web 2.0
Here are 4 posts from about 18 months ago dealing with why schools cannot ignore Web 2.0.
Read More4 Reasons why doing IT on the cheap is an error of judgement
I’ve read about schools beating the budget blues by building their own visualisers, interactive whiteboards and computers. In my opinion these measures are a mistake, for the following reasons:
Increasing the decision-making capacity of your ICT team
If you lead an ICT team, the good news is that you don't have to do it all yourself!
Here are 10 ideas which I have found to be very helpful in creating a collaborative and co-operative team ethos.
Collaborate for Change: information and update
Collabor8 4 Change, a great new-style conference, is running again on 17th November. We've just made available 50 more tickets!
An opportunity for rich discussions: Collabor8 4 Change
Having recently written about discussions – why to contribute, and what not to do when you do contribute – I thought I’d write a quick update on a real live event taking place on 17th November 2011. This is a bit of an advert, but the event I’m writing about is free and should be good for professional development, so I hope you’ll forgive me.
Read More25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #25 Contribute to education technology discussions
Contributing to discussions is good in my book, but there are some ways of going about it which could be counter-productive. Here are some pointers about what not to do if you can help it.5 ways of using pupils to evaluate education technology resources
Here’s an idea you might like to try, if you haven’t already: use your pupils to evaluate resources. After all, they’re the ones who are going to be using them! There are five main ways of doing so, not all of which are mutually exclusive. Here they are.
Is the computer lab defunct?
Having attended a conference at the Westminster Education Forum today on the future of technology in education, I am moved to raise this issue again: have computer labs had their day?
The idea that they have was mentioned two or three times. Whilst I can see the attraction of arguments in favour of mobile technology as opposed to fixed technology, I don’t think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather than rehearse my arguments again, I’ll refer you to an article I wrote back in March 2011 called Come back, computer lab, all is forgiven. Hope you enjoy it.
Job-seeking as a metaphor for ICT assessment
When I saw several hundred people lining up for some sort of job registration recently, I immediately thought of the challenges of assessing pupils’ educational technology capability. A bit of a stretch? Not necessarily.
25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #24 Do not contribute to education technology discussions
There is little I find more annoying than being lectured to by people who have all the answers, but do not engage in (rational) discussion on the subject.
For example, a deputy headteacher once informed me that his school was going to spend thousands of pounds on instruction technology known as “integrated learning systems”, and that they were going to get the least able students to work on them all day.
I told him that some recent research said that the benefits of such systems was short-lived if all you did was use them and nothing else, and that such intensive use of them was counter-productive anyway. This had no impact at all, because
Two great quotes about education technology
I heard one very quotable thing today, and read another very quotable thing. The first was to do with copyright, the second to do with embracing technology in education. See what you think:
Read More25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #23 Be pernickety
All too often these days there is so much to be done, and so little time to do it, that we have to adopt a “good enough” attitude. That’s fine most of the time, but not always.
Read More7 things to blog about back in school
One of the possibly unwanted tasks on return to school is to get your school blog up and running again. Assuming that it’s been in hibernation over the summer break, no doubt you’ll want to start posting again as soon as possible. It may be hard to think about what to write about when you have a zillion other things to think about at the beginning of term. So here are some ideas to get the creative juices flowing again.
Why so many “Found on the web” posts lately?
You may have noticed that quite a few of the articles to appear here recently have been in the form of links headed “Found on the web”. Why?
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