BlogDale

From Steve Beard’s blog, he’s been looking at ways of making quizzes on the iPod.

My concern is that these quizzes only work on an iPod, not on any old handheld video player. I like freedom of choice; I’m averse to vendor or platform lock-in, and therefore worried about inclusion of those who followed a different technological route for whatever reason and are therefore iPod have-nots. ‘twould be terrible to create a further subdivision even within the “Digital Divide”.

However, without innovation there’s no progress so more power to their elbow, I say. We might see an explosive growth in handheld quizzes, and as long as they add value to the educational process (I suspect the one on their site called “Beer” might not) then everything’s good.

The next thing, of course, is to get non-e teachers engaged in producing quizzes so that the medium becomes widespread enough to become worthwhile. My pragmatic side wonders what reactions might be in school if a teacher tells the class that their parents need to buy them an iPod to be able to access the funky online quiz that was vital to their success at GCSE.

Back to marking coursework…

Fellow Moodler Jens Gammelgaard (I think that’s enough letter As) brought Compendium to my attention this evening. It’s a knowledge management tool that allows individuals and groups to quickly compile existing, and grow new, knowledge. In the words of the developers:

Compendium is about sharing ideas, creating artifacts, making things together, and breaking down the boundaries between dialogue, artifact, knowledge, and data. It helps provide a faster, better way for groups and project teams to work.

Having tried it for a VERY short time, I can report that it is awesome. Rapid construction of information pathways is a snap, adding nodes with drag and drop from the web and from files in local folders onto the map to construct an information-rich source document.

I’m thinking this looks awfully like an eportfolio…

A group of us have been thinking about ways to make the KS3 curriculum more contemporary. Jude has some superb schemes of work using kitchen designers and Rollercoaster Designers - the pupils at Lacon Childe love them if the blog’s anything to judge opinion by. Similar pupil enthusiasm appears at Thomas Adams where Gill’s pupils collaborate on MissionMaker programs, and at Priory where Trina’s Gamemaker and Missionmaker pupils are blazing a trail with their authoring.

Read the rest of this entry »

How is ICT changing lives? Sure, the technology and all that it gives us is great. It makes things easier and gives accessibilty to more things, in the way that things that used to be hard are now easy. But that’s always been the case - technology’s always made things easier and that’s how we’ve advanced.

There’s a dimension, though, to ICT that I had been considering recently. It’s given us something more than just making things easier; it’s allowing us to do things we never could do before. A conference call between continents was never possible until recently; I’d never spoken to someone in another timezone but now I have a Skype contact list that includes people from all over. And this is getting to my point - that the technological growth is now not as important as the network growth, we’re now in a position where the growth is that of the organic network of people and their contacts. This is how there is now an explosion in the spread of human knowledge, and the potential for more is huge. Read the rest of this entry »