Collabor8 4 Change is one of the fringe events at the forthcoming BETT show, and comprises up to around 50 round table discussions, each lasting 20 minutes. You can attend up to 5 of these over the three hours of this stupendous event. In a daily series of posts this week I hope to highlight some of the table discussions that are planned.
5 Compelling reasons to attend Collabor8 4 Change
Collabor8 4 Change is one of the fringe events at the forthcoming BETT show, and comprises up to around 50 round table discussions, each lasting 20 minutes. You can attend up to 5 of these over the three hours of this stupendous event. In a daily series of posts this week I hope to highlight some of the table discussions that are planned.
Here are the first five on my list:
Blog posts mentioned recently
Here are three blog posts I mentioned in a recent article:
Read MoreWhy you don’t have to miss the ICT in Education articles even if you’re too busy to read them
If you’re too busy to read the articles on the ICT in Education website, you can listen to them instead.
Thanks to a neat little widget from Odiogo, each article has a “Listen Now” button at the top of it. Click that, and you will be able to listen to the article read out to you. Warning: there’s a bit of delay between my posting an article and the Listen Now button working, so if you try it straight away and it doesn’t work, try again a few minutes later.
Found on the web: 12/16/2011 (a.m.)
Hmm, this is interesting. I hadn't even realised that somehow I had "favorited" Desktop Organizer. — Micro Formatica in Diigo. Admittedly I was tired when I tried it out, but still: I don't usually completely miss such requests or options.
But seeing as this link has appeared, I don't want to delete it because that would cause a bit of inconvenience for people, so I'll summarise what I think of the program and others like it:
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:
A week to remember
People visit the ICT in Education website because they have an interest in ICT in education rather than in my private life, which is why I never post anything deeply personal here. However, recent personal events have affected my working life, the most visible evidence of this being the lack of updates here for nearly two weeks. Less publicly, a number of emails have remained unanswered. Here is what has happened during this period.
Read MoreComputers in Classrooms 3D Edition!
At 10:00 GMT today, the latest issue of Computers in Classrooms, the free, e-newsletter for educational ICT professionals, will be going live. It’s a special 3D edition, with guest articles from several teachers who have been smitten by the 3D bug. Here’s the full list of articles:
Read MoreFound 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.
An experiment with randomly-generated links
I’m currently experimenting with a random link generator called Outbrain. You can see this by looking at the footer of each article and (somewhat annoyingly, I have to say), the article summaries on the front page or some of them at least. I’m interested in whether it enhances the visitor’s experience by providing suggestions for other articles on the ICT in Education website. That’s what I’m hoping, of course, but it could prove to be an irritant.
Read More2 days to go, 1 day to go
Reading with interactive books; digital leaders; hacking; games in schools; video-conferencing; future-gazing; theft-prevention.
Read MoreThe importance of not being nice
The trouble with being too nice when commenting on something is that sometimes the underlying message just doesn’t get through. This applies whether you’re looking at students’ work, observing trainee teachers or evaluating a school’s ICT provision.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating going in guns blazing, being really negative or thoroughly obnoxious. But if you don’t point out the shortcomings in whatever it is you’re looking at – or, at least, ask the sort of questions that will lead them to realise them for themselves – then really you’re not being nice, you’re being dishonest.
Ask the expert
What can a Zen outlook teach us about educational ICT?
Read MoreChoosing the right education technology conference
When I was at university I had a fool-proof method for selecting student union representatives when elections were held. I automatically discounted anyone who stood up and announced that what we needed was change. We always need change, although it’s usually quite useful to check what exactly needs changing, and whether right now is the best time to do so. Anyone who announced that we needed change, but without going any deeper into it, was an idiot as far as I was concerned. Either that, or they assumed that I was.
When technology goes wrong
Just a couple of cogitations – hopefully worthy -- about technology and our relationship with it.
Analogue or digital?
Is there any advantage in having an analogue watch face to a digital one, or vice versa?
Five Funky Flickr Tools
Keep IT clean!
Yeccchhh!!!! That was my reaction every time I saw a colleague’s keyboard. Never mind the fact that there are more germs on the average keyboard than on an average toilet seat apparently, and that other people had to use this bloke’s computer occasionally. Even worse was the fact that he was a member of my team!
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!
Two cheers for location tagging
In a recent post on his blog, Neil Adam discusses the idea of everyday items being connected to, or at least known about by, the internet. He also considers the fact that the whereabouts of things like clothing can already be tracked over the internet courtesy of technology such as RFID tags.
Report on the Mobile Learning conference
By Susan Banister 
Susan Banister @susanbanister
Learning through mobile technology is not a new concept. But as yet it has not been taken up by huge numbers of schools. Mobile technology means more than smartphones. It includes iPads, iPods, netbooks, e-readers, Nintendo DS's, GPS devices. The Curriculum ICT team at Bradford in the UK teamed up with its City Learning Centres and embraced mobile learning head on with their bMobLe project (short for Bradford mobile learning).