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I’m having a bit of a tidy up around here. And not before time!

I’d be the first to admit that I’ve been nagging on about e-safety for ages but the recent crescendo of panic is too much. Everybody’s at it. If a car hits you it might kill you but road users don’t flap around talking of little else than the risks. They deal with it. When are we going to stop squawking and learn how to control the beast?

If I think back really hard I can remember being a classroom teacher. The one thing that is easier to remember is the non stop pace but the total inability to articulate the things that made me so busy.

I have the luxury of being able to spend time playing with some exciting ICT tools but I was wondering what easy to use apps and hardware a busy teacher could quickly engage with to transform learning.

After being blown away by Leon Cych’s video of primary age children using iTouchs (http://www.l4l.co.uk/) a colleague suggested that maybe we hold children back by too much exposition and demonstration. These children seemed to be able to operate without a ‘how to’. Indeed I often ask classes, “Put your hand up if you play games on a computer or games machine. Keep them up if you read the instructions first.”  You can almost feel the rush of air as the hands come down! The point is that learners are perfectly capable of engaging with technology and internalising it without someone formalising it. Maybe the teacher needs to be less of an expert than (s)he thinks. Mind you it’s a brave teacher that has that attitude.

So back to the easy to use stuff. The National Strategies have loads of small files that learners (and teachers) can use to enhance learning. Google sites have lots of functionality and I’m beginning to think might be a step up from blogging. I also like Movie Maker and Photostory and I’m beginning to realise that the common thread for all this is that these are things learners use. Teachers can use them for teaching but they don’t need to be expert for them to be effective.

Well that’s my ‘off the top of the head’ list. I bet there are many others. The one vital thing that learners in the new century need is information literacy but that’s not an easy one… Don’t get me started…

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Today I was lucky enough to attend a workshop organised by UniServity and run by Alan November. If you haven’t heard of him (and maybe there are one or two guys still in the jungles of Borneo who don’t realise the war is over) he is a world leading authority on all things Internet/education with a reputation that makes him a sort of technological rockstar.

If you don’t know how to find the publisher of a website, what the significance of a tilda (~) is in a URL, how to customise your own version of Google, how to search only websites with a .ac.uk extension, how to search efficiently a large website and much, much more he is a man well worth listening to.

November Learning

He articulated a lots of things that I’d been aware of but in completing them for me really made clear sense of the importance of a new literacy in a world where most students’ first port of call for information is Google and the first few entries on the first page at that

This video from the USA will give you some idea of the presentation.

…and he really does provoke thought. Rather uncomfortable thought at times.

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I’ve just joined Second Life. I’m clearly a slow learner! Perhaps I could have a helper. I wonder if they’d differentiate the environment for the likes of me.

It would be a disservice to a lot of teachers to suggest that all pupil responses are limited to, “Write me a paragraph or two and draw a picture to illustrate it.” but I was set thinking about how many different ways are available for learners to demonstrate learning.

Sticking firmly to things 21^st century, so far I’ve come up with:

• Presentation (might be an idea to limit the number of slides to encourage selection)
• Blog
• Podcast
• Vodcast
• Photo Story 3
• A movie
• Animation
• Web page
• Wiki
• Mind map
  …

And what else?

Click here to download a free copy of ‘Coming of Age’ (1st edn) – a guide to the new world wide web. Edited by Terry Freedman it has contributions from a host of expert writers.