Many of us know about Google apps in terms of shared documents, spreadsheet, calendar, gmail and so on. But Google Apps goes much further than that in terms of what it can be used for in education. This presentation is put together by Google to show some interesting and unusual ideas
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If you had a pound for every time you were asked this question by a student or a parent you could probably retire from teaching (now there is a thought!) How many times have you wished that you had a set of snappy, ready made answers to such a question?
How about when you have to put together a presentation for Year 9 Options Evening or Sixth Form Open Evening? I know I have scratched my head in the past trying to come up with a set of persuasive statements that will imbue my passion for ICT to my students.
Thanks to a collaborative effort from a number of excellent teachers using Twitter we have been able to collate their answers and put together a set of statements that should help you when next faced with the question, ‘Why should I take ICT?’
As teachers, most of us now shy away from the Comic Sans font.
During the early part of this decade we were told that it made text easier to read for students so being good teachers and only wanting the best for our students most of us probably used it liberally in every resource and worksheet we created.
Fast forward to 2011 and most teachers, especially ICT teachers would agree that Comic Sans on a worksheet now looks a little cringworthy.
However according to new scientific research it appears that the ‘ugly’ fonts actually do help students to learn better.
No one has a definitive answer as to why this may be but Neuroscience blogger Jonah Lehrer tells the Radio 4 Today program that he believes we have to concentrate harder when reading text written in certain fonts and so we are more likely to remember what we have just read.
Listen to the podcast here (4:15 mins)
An official survey of 200 different professions in the USA revealed that the most desired job to have is as a Software Engineer.
A software engineer can mean a multitude of things but it includes the design and creation of new software ideas such as cloud computing, creating apps for mobiles, coding interactive games, creating medical and scientific software.
The survey asked people in various industries about
Then an overall ranking was worked out and software engineer came out top.
In terms of income it is fairly good but not the highest by any means – typically $87,000 (£54,000) compared say to a Historian earning $63,000 or a Biologist earning $85,000
One of things that causes stress is the feeling that you *have* to stay in a job you don’t like because there is little else you can get out there - software engineer feels quite a low level of stress because there are so many things a trained engineer can do if they fancy a change. The industry is exploding with new areas – cloud computing, mobile apps, web design, online development. Once they have the training and experience they can jump from job to job or even go freelance. This also makes them feel there are good career opportunties in front of them.
Overall, working as a software engineer offers a good working environment, hardly any physical effort, better than average income, plenty of job opportunities.
One thing to note though : You have to have a good level of education in maths, engineering, technology and science.
And yet students taking computing and ICT as a subject has dropped about 30% over the last few years. Maybe two things will help reverse the trend – raising awareness of what life as an engineer is all about along with more interesting courses.
Electronic surveillance has become pervasive in British society and civil liberties campaigners have long warned us about how the state is aquiring ever-greater powers to track people’s movements and retain personal data. The UK apparently has the most CCTV cameras per head of population in the world.
Most of us accept that CCTV cameras for the most part do have a positive effect on monitoring and reducing the amount of crime on our streets and as such we are able to ignore them in our daily lives.
We also accept that most office buildings or other places of work have security cameras that monitor who comes in and out of the building.
Attitudes however would be very different if CCTV camera were regularly used to monitor our every move whilst at work. Imagine our employers sitting in their office watching what we do throughout the day, what we say to customers, how we say it, seeing what web pages we visit and what we write in our emails.
For most of us, this would be a step too far. However, this is exactly what is starting to happen in many UK schools. CCTV cameras which were once installed to keep a check on pupil behaviour throughout the school are now being used to monitor the teacher’s performance during lessons.
This practice has caused an angry response from teachers and their unions, Chris Keates of the NASUWT said, “No other profession would tolerate this kind of surveillance. Why should teachers be expected to?”
There are concerns that often teachers aren’t aware they are being monitored and that schools have no CCTV policy in place to legitimise what they are doing.
Read the full news report here
And this kind of surveillance isn’t just restricted to teachers. There was a recent furore caused in the US where a school was accused of spying on pupils at home by remotely activating webcams on the laptops they had given them. Read the full story here
Can anyone else see the uncanny parallel with the infamous George Orwell book, 1984 where the State monitored and controlled every aspect of peoples’ lives?
This could be used as a discussion point when looking at the ethical use of technology. It would also fit well with topics such as privacy, surveillance and data protection.
The Department of Education have released their business plan (Nov 2010) that details their intentions for the next two years or so. No doubt this will have an impact on the teaching of ICT and computing in schools.
department for education business plan Nov 2010
Some of the many points coming out of the plans are :-
Just what the practical implications of all these new reforms is yet to be understood. This Guardian article puts a spin on it.
This is a bit wider than the subject of ICT but nevertheless it is interesting to consider the effect that the school environment itself may have on learning.
Some school designers are looking to new ways of encouraging students by providing spaces conducive to self learning within the modern school.
Peter Clausen, Chairman of the School Board at Ordrup in Gentofte, Denmark considers the old classic school layout as a ‘production-unit’ mentality where students are mainly treated en-mass in standardised classrooms. A more varied school environment leads to differentiated learning. The video clip shows what they have done at their school to encourage differentiated learning. Would this catch on in the UK I wonder.
The idea of harnessing the school layout itself is considered by Ewan McIntosh as he explains his idea about the seven spaces of technology. And what are these spaces? Well, they are both physical and on-line.
Many years ago, back in 2000 in fact, it was envisaged that the Internet would be used to allow school children all over the world to create collaborative projects in the form of a social network that is a bit like the Facebook we know today.
The UK government, Oracle and Professor Stephen Heppell developed a platform called Think.com. Move forward ten years and the initiative has evolved into ThinkQuest still hosted by Oracle and now claiming over 7000+ projects. It is advert free and ensures that privacy and security is paramount
There are plenty of tour demos to explain what it is all about.
Perhaps a good place to check out if you have a collaborative project in mind.
This was an observation made by artist Malcolm McLaren at a Learning Without Frontiers event about game based learning.
How about these as well
The theme running through the event was that young students are now making heavy use of technology in the form of social media, gaming, communicating – so why don’t the consumer electronics and media companies become more engaged with education?
There should be active dialogue between teachers and the entertainment industry so that the student’s experience of school is as engaging as the hours they spend gaming and chatting online. Mind you trying to explain the database third normal form in an engaging way is a challenge!
America have embraced a concept of school called a ‘charter school’ or ‘schools of choice’. This is very much like the new Academies in the UK. They are publicly funded schools but are largely free of state laws and district regulations.
Now these schools are looking to online learning in order to improve performance even further. Online learning is growing by 30% annually in the USA. There will be a move away from the traditional text book and more effort will go into personalised digital learning profiles for each student. This will be a blend of online and offline learning resources.
After all, a netbook or tablet PC is now cheaper than a set of textbooks. It is time for education both home and abroad to embrace the opportunities afforded by digital online resources and embed them in the fabric of education.