Learning from the past

As I said recently, I’m currently clearing out tons of paperwork, books, reports, CDs -- anything, in fact, that I have had no need to bother with for the past several years. It is a process that has been as slow as I’d feared rather than as fast as I’d hoped, mainly because ordinary life always seems to intrude on even the best laid plans.
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Normal service will be resumed

I'm taking advantage of the Easter vacation to clear out old files and paperwork. It's something I've been meaning to do for some time, and with so many bank holidays this month, this seemed as good a time as any!

There are quite a few articles on this site to read, and lots on the original ICT in Education website too.

I'll resume posting articles here as soon as possible, but please bear with me for a week or so! Thanks.

 

Preparing for the new term

black bag-sWhat I’d really like to do right now is relax in the garden with a good book, or go swimming, or to enjoy the best of both worlds by taking myself to an outdoor pool somewhere. I could do a couple of lengths to convince myself I’ve had a work-out, and then reward myself by soaking up the sun. Instead, I’m surrounded by boxes of files, bags of files, and files. Yes, it’s the annual spring-clean, and this year I’m throwing out all the documents that last year I thought I should keep, and which I haven’t looked at since. I will also put all the new documents I think I should keep into a special box, to make it easier to throw them out this time next year.

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Budgeting for educational technology

When the Principal chewed me out for having put in a purchase order for toner cartridges, I guessed that was probably not the best time to present to him my refurbishment plan which involved buying interactive whiteboards. The school was generous in its funding of ICT, but I had been given only a consumables budget, not a capital one. This made planning ahead almost impossible.
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Conventional non-wisdom

Should you have an ICT leaflet or prospectus to give to potential students or their parents? Conventional wisdom dictates that you should. Conventional wisdom is wrong.

If you think about it, the only reason for doing anything, either in education or in business, is to solve a problem. What is the problem, then, that the ICT prospectus is intended to solve? It is this:

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5 Reasons to contribute to consultations

The number of responses to consultations tends to be low. For example, the Royal Society in England has received 125 responses to its consultation on computing in schools. Admittedly this is a niche area, but it still seems pretty low to me, given the fact that there are over 17,000 primary schools in England and, especially, over 3,000 secondary schools which, one would assume, have a vested interest. I believe that the number of responses to Government consultations is higher, but still relatively small.

I think people are mistaken not to have their say in this type of situation, even though I can understand why they might not wish to do so.

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The end of Becta et al? Or, Should the Centre for Policy Studies be abolished?

"It seems to me that one of the key issues is not whether organisations provide value for money according to some narrow criteria, but whether they do so when the wider social costs and benefits are taken into account."

This article was originally published on 1st September 2009. I thought it might be interesting to re-read it in the current UK context.

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ICT Briefing Evenings

When the Headteacher told me that he would like me to run an ICT briefing evening for parents, I thought it was a great idea, although I didn’t agree with his suggested approach. He thought the parents should be given a talk for about 20 minutes, and then be allowed to wander around. I thought, let’s cut the talk part: the kids can do that, on a one-to-one basis. Who wants to sit and listen where ICT is concerned?
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Is there an ICT way of thinking?

Is there a way of thinking that has a quality of “ICT-ness”, in the same way as, say, there is an economics way of thinking? To put this another way, are there particular concepts whose understanding are fundamental to what we might call “digital literacy”? In the field of economics, for example, you have to understand the concepts of opportunity cost, scarcity an marginality – all of which words are technical terms in economics, regardless of how they are used in everyday speech.
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What does the Government really think about ICT?

I am by no means an apologist for the Government, but it seems to me that colleagues who have seized on the absence of ICT in the recent White Paper on the future of teaching as indicative of the Government's lack of interest in, or commitment to, ICT may have been premature. As an ex-Ofsted inspector I would say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The White Paper failed to mention electricity as well, but I'm sure the Government would be surprised if anyone took that mean the Government thought schools should be run on gas!
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Two-tier email system

Teachers looking for material with which to furnish their lessons on how technology affects society need look no further than email. This form of communication has affected in at least three ways what might be called “disposable time” – the time one has left after the essentials like eating and sleeping have been taken care of.

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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!

What does a broken clock signify?

This sounds like an odd kind of question to pose on an educational technology website, but bear with me. A couple of days ago I went to my local swimming pool and the clock on the wall was tilted at an angle, and stuck at ten to six (it was three in the afternoon).

So that got me thinking: does a broken clock indicate that the management really doesn't care that much about such details because they are regarded as unimportant in comparison to customer service issues?

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