Creative ICT News

The chill winds of economic reality

One of the best/worst aspects of the internet in recent years has been being able to use all kinds of really fantastic tools for nothing. The credit crunch seems to have really started to bite and some of these tools have started to drop by the wayside Others have started to put ads into their product as a means of paying the rent.

This "something for nothing" business model really affects me as I sell a Wordpress MU based blog platform into schools. This costs a very reasonable (I think) £350 per annum and takes away all the headache of having to run a web server yourself and doing installations, upgrades, support etc. I'm not going to get rich doing this, but it's enjoyable and I've got about 20 schools running on my server with space for lots more. Persuading a school to part with the cash when they can get single user Wordpress accounts or Edublogs accounts for nothing is the tricky part, but once persuaded they seem to really appreciate having their own domain and oversight of all blogs from an admin login.

I'm hoping, that as more and more companies are putting advertising into their free products, folk might see the benefit of investing in their own domain for their school blog site. Twitter seems to be full of people bemoaning the fact that their lovely Edublogs page or Pageflakes site is now displaying advertising. Frankly, I don't see the point in getting hacked off with a free service when they start putting ads in it - they're businesses not educational charities, and it may be that they have no alternative - lots of free Web 2.0 services have already shutdown, and it seems that the brilliant Tutpup might be the latest.

If you want to find out more, check out: http://creativeblogs.net

One last point, if you are an edublogger and you want to just run a single-user account for your personal blog, I'l be happy to accommodate you on Creative Blogs (no ads guaranteed ;-). Just get in touch.

     Update: In fact it has emerged that Tutpup was in fact acquired by Mind Candy, owners of Moshi Monsters. read their blog post here: http://mindcandy.com/2009/02/tutpup-now-part-of-mind-candy/

Post Teachmeet reaction

This is a quick voxpop reaction immediately after Teachmeet at Bett.The video was shot by Eyebeams

EatMeet on TeachMeet from Learn4Life on Vimeo.

I'm hoping to get along to Teachmeet Midlands at the NCSL on the evening of May 15th. I'll have space in my car (travelling from Stockport) so get in touch if you want to come along.

Under the radar

Some of the best bits from the BETT show are always conversations you have with visitors. This year was no different and I'm going to highlight two resources I came across in my journey around the stands.

Pepod

What a simple and effective idea! Lots of video podcasts of children demonstrating PE skills. Great for PE lessons. Give each group a video ipod, or project on to a big screen in the hall and children can compare their own skills with the exemplar model. I think they have a website on the way, but in the meantime, here's a link to the podcasts:

http://video.aol.com/video-search/query/pepod

Anithings

Anithings is a new animation tool from Stripey Steve. 

anithings teaser video from Stripey Design on Vimeo.

Straight away I like the "fuzzy felt" style of the finished animation, although that's just one of several available styles. However, its main point of difference is the way the animation is made. If I want to move the ball, I select it, then slide a timeline to show how long I want the ball to move for, click the end point, and the ball will move from a to b smoothly without having to create lots of intermediate frames. I can even get the ball to bounce by using my mouse. I suspect this will prove to be a lot more intuitive than traditional stop-frame animation and I will await its release with interest. Should be out in the spring. More info http://stripeydesign.com

BETT reflections

Having spent three days talking on stands to folk at the BETT show, it's a somewhat jaded and tired me sitting on the Pendolino back north.

The sheer size and buzz of the event can leave you a little overwhelmed and it pays to take a quiet moment to take stock. I have just read Gareth Davies' post on the show (link later) and I think he is rightly beginning to question whether a commercial event like BETT really is cutting edge anymore. In my two days on Lightbox's stand I spent most of my time showcasing classroom practice rather than talking features and benefits of products. And this is the essence of the fringe event, Teachmeet. No product demos or sales pitches allowed, only classroom practice. This was where the real buzz at BETT was: 250 highly engaged teachers and educators, and this is where smart companies will try and engage by product placement through using teachers to talk about what they are doing in their classroom. They have to be fairly sophisticated about this as one guy found out to his cost when his obvious corporate sales pitch fell flat: his company now has a terrible PR image among some of the most widely read edubloggers in the country (boo to Learnosity - no link deliberately).

Yes, I did see new some exciting kit at BETT (more about this in a later post), and yes, it was great to chat to many familiar faces and friends, but next year, when you plan your visit, make sure you take in Teachmeet.

Teachmeet Havering on 31st March (No link for this event yet)

Teachmeet Nottingham May 15th at the NCSL

Image credit: Ian Usher (image manipulated using Tiltshiftmaker)

Teachmeet @ BETT 09

I blogged this live on my mobile during the event as I figured everybody else would be twittering. So it's a bit rough around the edges.

No Powerpoint, no Keynote, let the fun begin. Ian Usher is introducing the rules of unconference. John Davitt is getting rowdy - this will be an interesting experience.

Great idea, rewriting Shakespeare in txtspk and doing it in Comic Life. Check out Comic Brush - free comic creator tool.

Ollie Bray has also mentioned one of my favourite sites for emergency ICT lessons: http://www.bighugelabs.com

John Cuthell on embedding ICT in the curriculum via project learning. Hmmm

Lisa Stevens next urging everyone to share their practice via Teachmeet or a blog. http://lisibo.blogspot.com

Watching a video of a really disturbed teenage kid who related to the diary of Anne Frank, because she had n-one to talk to as well and she uses Anne's example as the inspiration for her blog. Powerful stuff!

Now a presentation from Ian Stuart, live from Islay! Every pupil in the school has an ultra mobile pc and are using Microsoft OneNote to capture everything. Promoting his unconference on Islay (venue: Bowmore distillery) - weblink later. The school of 2020 is the theme. Sounds like an essential piece of CPD.

http://blog.richardmillwood.net

http://newtools.org Look at the Learning Event Generator- you'll never be short of ideas again! (John Davitt was the guy who inspired me to go independent in the first place. I attended one of his courses a few years ago and thought, "I'd like to do that". Only with less wit and panache.)

http://www.nate.org.uk Case studies of literacy stuff that's hard to teach.

Tom Barrett on Twitter and Google Earth in the classroom. Always interesting, his blog is a must read.

Drew Buddie waxing lyrical "Twitter is my Google". How true, the man is obsessed! Follow Drew on twitter: Digitalmaverick.

http://mathtrain.com

My friends Anthony and Nic from Redbridge up next.

Zoomit a fantastic free tool from Microsoft - allows you to zoom your desktop to highlight URLs etc

Teachmeet in Havering on 31st March 09

Fantastic site for music teachers: http://www.teachingmusic.org.uk

This post is degenerating into a list of resources. Missed completely the brilliant "photoshop tennis" idea which I will link to later. (Greg Hodgson on Twitter)

Just won 2 prizes in the raffle!

http://johnnybunko.com Great examples of manga style comic strips for anyone interested in teaching through comics.

An irish guy just got shouted off for trying to sell- just did his company a massive disservice.

Cheered up by looking at Alton Convent School's rather marvellous Drupal powered website.

That's all folks!

The "Redbridge Massive" at Teachmeet ;-)

BETT show day 2

For the last two days I have been working on the Lightbox stand. I have had great fun sharing what the children at Chorlton Park have been doing with it. Always so much more powerful to see real work produced by real kids.

Towards the end of the afternoon I got some time to look around, and a couple of things caught my eye.

First off were Valiant Technology, home of the roamer. I imagine that they have lost marketshare to Beebot in recent years, but their new robot is definitely worth a look as it takes robot technology into a whole new space where you can program it to do whole lot more than follow a sequence of instructions. In fact, you can design an environment for the robot to "live" in, and interact with. They are also developing a very good user community to help teachers with lesson plans and resources. So if your old roamer is sitting unloved in the bottom of a cupboard, it's time to have another look. More info at http://www.valiant-technology.com

I also liked Smart's frame for a plasma TV. By mounting the TV in the frame it becomes an interactive whiteboard - with no projector. It's not cheap, but might be just the ticket for small groups working in restricted space.

There's been a lot of noise about the Microsoft Surface (a multi-touch table - see photo) and it is a lovely piece of kit to play with - feels like a giant iPhone, and it's distinctly odd to "throw" objects across such a large screen. There will be masses of educational apps using this technology - I'm thinking of some great sorting and counting tools, for example, however, with a price tag of 8500 pounds and engineers based in Germany, don't expect to see one in your classroom anytime soon. It is definitely a technology to watch, though, as Microsoft a already talking to educational developers and will be announcing ed prices soon. I suspect that software developers are going to have to radically rethink software design as the children will be grouped around all four sides of the device.

Tomorrow I will be on the Incerts stand upstairs in the software zone, do take the time to drop by and say, "Hello."

If it's January, it must be BETT

I'm sitting on the 9:42 Virgin Pendolino from Stockport to Euston undertaking my annual pilgrimage to the BETT show at Olympia. I say annual, but I missed it last year due to the arrival of Luke who celebrated his first birthday last Friday.

This year I'm pleased to be working on the Softease stand on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday where I hope to be showcasing some of the work I have been doing at school with Honeycomb.

On Friday I will be working on the Incerts stand which, if you haven't seen before, I strongly recommend you drop by for a look. It will transform your approach to pupil tracking, assessment and reporting. And save you a bundle of time, too.

The thing that most excites me, however, is the opportunity to meet some of the colleagues that I have been exchanging tweets with for over a year now. To say that Twitter has transformed my network of professional contacts is no exaggeration. I am now connected to a worldwide network of teachers and educators who support each other on a daily basis (I'm HGjohn on Twitter). So, @skinnyboyevans, @tombarrett, @twowhizzy, @dajbelshaw, @mrkp and @theokk, to name but five, "See you later."

What am I hoping to see this year? Top of my list is to find a VLE that genuinely seems to be designed with primary schools in mind. All the VLEs I have seen have just taken their secondary and higher ed offerings and made the font bigger.

I'm also looking forward to Teachmeet, the Friday night unconference for ICT teachers which promises to be a fantastic learning opportunity.

I'm going to try and do some live blogging while I am at the show to try and bring you highlights as I find them. Keep tuned...

Two lessons

One of the disadvantages for me as a self-employed consultant is that I am occasionally prone to bouts of introspection and self-doubt: "No-one reads my blog; it would be much easier to go back to teaching," etc. One such attack was brought on last week when I was working quietly in the corner of an ICT suite. The children in the class were all writing New Year's resolutions and what I saw profoundly depressed me. They were using Microsoft Word, and when one child asked if he could put a picture on he was told that he could use Word Art for the title and clip art for the picture. The children didn't print their work out for display and I doubted very much if they would ever look at them again. It was a classic "filler" for the first week back and probably epitomises what Ofsted would term "dull teaching". 

I don't hold myself up to be some kind of inspirational teacher, but I don't think you need to be to make such a lesson interesting and worthwhile. I decided to repeat the exercise with my Year 5s at Chorlton Park, only this time, they would blog their thoughts. When I pulled up the Year 5 blog on the whiteboard, the first thing I drew their attention to was the Clustr Map. Who was reading their blog? They could identify visitors from India, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, USA among many others. Straight away they were impressed, they had no idea that so many people were reading their stuff. Next they logged in and wrote about their New Year resolutions before using Compfight to find a striking image (with a license that they were allowed to use) for their posts. Those that finished quickly began to comment supportively on each other's resolutions and they made sure that they tagged their posts with a unique catgory so that they could pull up their resolutions and review progress later in the year.

I don't consider this lesson to be, in any way, remarkable; it required very little thought or planning. Any teacher could have delivered it, but it does so much more than the first. The children were aware that people from all over the planet could read their work, and that imediately impacted upon the quality of their writing; they started to review each other's work (without any prompting from me) and supported each other via positive comments; they knew that by clicking on the New Year Resoultion category that they could go back to their work and read comments and review progress (If you have a moment, please visit and add a couple more comments - will be much appreciated). They remained engaged from start to finish and many stayed on into break to make sure that theirs was published.

It is this ability of blogging to be able to demonstrate to children that people read their efforts that makes it such a powerful tool for learning. It also reaffirmed to me that we need to keep making teachers aware of tools such as blogging that have the capability of making a seemingly mundane task into something exciting, interactive, worthwhile and fun.