Creative ICT News

Annual ICT Register Showcase

I am pleased to be running a short seminar at the ICT Register Showcase in Loughborough tomorrow. My session is on podcasting and I'm representing Chorlton Park Primary School where I'm currently working on a podcasting project with year 5 children.

For my session I've uploaded a PowerPoint to Slideshare and created some notes to help inform teachers' planning. Both of these resources can be viewed at http://creativeblogs.net

The Chorlton Park podcasting project is showcased at http://radio.chorltonparkblogs.net

And the wiki I set up to manage it is at http://creativeict.wiki.zoho.com

One of the key elements of the project was to write scripts for radio programmes in small groups, and if I could have had access (blocked) I'd have used Google Docs for the collaborative writing element. As it is they used good old MS Word and uploaded some of their scripts to the wiki.

I'm looking forward to this conference, as there seems to be a host of interesting and innovative practitioners presenting - it's going to be more of a question of deciding what I amd going to miss.

Conference details here.

Facebook is Dead, Long Live Twitter

Actually, Facebook is obviously not dead. It has upwards of 60 million users and is worth maybe $7billion. "Facebook is Dull" might be a more appropriate title. I've got a Facebook account and find it completely useless for my work. Do I really need to know that my sister-in-law has been challenged to a movie quiz by someone I've never heard of? Am I bothered that I've only got six Facebook friends? I signed up to see what the fuss was about and to see if there was any worthwhile educational app for it. Couldn't think of one, even though Teachmeet has a Facebook group: I got all the info I needed about it by following the wiki.

I'd written Facebook off as a worthwhile use of my time, and then this came along, spotted by Dougmuses. A beautifully crafted rant about Facebook - with some surprising revelations about the owners. Now I feel doubly vindicated.

Twitter, on the other hand, rocks. I've already blogged about how useful I find it in my working life: it's a constant stream of useful ideas, weblinks and resources. And now people are starting to use it in all kinds of innovative ways. Paul Harrington describes how he picked up on a live streamed discussion with teachers in Bangkok through Twitter. MrMayo has set up a wiki to manage his Manyvoices project using Twitter for collaborative writing; and I am convinced we will see many more such projects develop in 2008.

Follow me on Twitterhttp://twitter.com/hgjohn

Panorama

Predictably, the Panorama programme last night had no statistics to allow viewers to make a balanced risk-assessment about allowing children to access the internet, compared to, say, crossing the road. However it did provide some excellent advice to parents to minimise risks:

1. Don't allow children to have internet access in their bedrooms;
2. Make sure that their user profiles contains no means of identification (age, sex, location: ASL);
3. Engage with children in discussions about who it's appropriate to chat to online i.e. don't add friends of friends to your network: only people they actually know. One parent regularly asked his daughter to physically describe each person in her network in order to get her to delete contacts that she'd not actually met.

I'm not sure how realistic this parent was being - consider the example of Emily Sanderson. Robert Hart, in the latest issue of Ictopus' Sharing Good Practice demonstrates convincingly how engagement in a safe online community adds a significant dimension to her learning

More worrying to me was the discussion I had after the programme with someone who, after the e-safety conference mentioned below, had discussions with various Stockport headteachers. They were shocked to find out that few knew what went on in their classrooms concerning e-safety.

Much more enjoyable than the Panorama programme was the programme entitled Road Rage: the Battle for Britain's Roads. As someone who cycles a lot for exercise, I was shamed by the number of cyclists in London casually running red lights; but equally immensely amused by the twerp that drove around the gridlocked roads of Hampstead in his Jeep during the school run and didn't see himself as part of the problem!

Nothing like a bit of hysteria

My thanks to Jayne at Chorlton Park for alerting me to tonight's Panorama "One Click From Danger". No prizes awarded for guessing the subject matter. As usual Ewan McIntosh has already commented on this on his blog and I would have little to add except to say that I find the whole internet hysteria thing depressing. Back in November I blogged about an e-safety conference in Stockport. It seems that we really are not interested in giving children the tools and skills necessary to use the internet positively and safely (let's face it, it's not rocket science) instead we just wring our hands and let people who are not educationalists filter our schools' web access with predictably ridiculously inconsistent results turning teachers off the power of the internet to educate and inspire. OK rant over, off to a quiet room for a lie down.

Not sure if I can bear to watch Panorama later on...

What's new for 2008? (and the best bits from 2007)

Without a doubt, the year just finished saw an explosion in awareness of social networking and a fevered discussion on how school's might make use of this phenomenon. On a personal level this was reflected in a big jump in interest from school wanting me to set up multi-user blogsites via Creative Blogs and this has definitely helped keep the wolf from the door in the uncertain world of the self-employed educational consultant. Let's hope the trend continues in 2008! Here are just a few schools who have picked up blogging and run with it:

Green Park Primary School, Maghull

Bridge Hall Primary School, Stockport

Sudley Junior School, Liverpool

In total, I have 18 schools blogging, with several new ones about to go live this term - thanks for all the support guys!

The other big thing for me in 2007 wasn't Facebook (yawn), it was Twitter. I didn't see the point at first, but by adding a few people that I knew through the blogosphere I soon tuned in to some very interesting conversations and found new people whose blogs I am learning from and are doing exciting things in the world of education - on a global scale. One such person is Tom Barrett who wrote an excellent post on using Twitter as part of your personal learning network. Some of you may have noticed my Twitter posts appearing in the the left hand sidebar of this blog. I can update Twitter from my Pageflakes page using their Twitter flake. I can also update from my mobile phone. It's an addictive form of microblogging and I thoroughly recommend that you try it out. If you want to follow me, I'm HGJohn.

What's going to be making the news in 2008?

Bett is just around the corner so this will probably change once I've been!

1. Twitter will become huge (in the way that Facebook did in '07);
2. Voicethread will be the most common "have you seen this?" education resource (if it's not, it should be);
3. Blogging in schools will go from strength to strength (fervent hope);
4. There will be lots of conferences on games technology crossing over to education;
5. Ultra Mobile PCs will be the mobile device of choice for most mobile learning projects (see my Asus PC review below);
6. LAs and Regional Broadband consortia will at last get some kind of consistent approach to filtering social networks and web 2.0 applications*

*I don't actually believe this and actually think the opposite might occur, especially given recent developments in Australia.

Finally a few blogs I've enjoyed this year:

http://www.dougdickinson.co.uk/blog/

http://redbridgeprimaryit.blogspot.com

http://ddraig-goch.blogspot.com