Archive for the ‘education’ Category

  • The "Open" arguement and how it changes learning

    Date: 2009.07.07 | Category: education, free, ict, resources, sharing | Response: 0

    Why do I publish everything I do?

    I don’t, I publish about 90% of what I do. I don’t publish all of the School Email source. I do publish nearly all of my music work and most of my educational source code especially the php work I do. I also create free to use resource sites that enable learners and educators to quickly and easily access the content they want to access.

    Why be open?

    I’m a computer geek, we have an entire community dedicated to sharing code, ideas, thoughts and knowledge. It’s great. In fact its probably the best part of working in IT. For example, Primary School Teaching has 900 man DAYS of code yet 890 of those days were provided for free, by a community of contributors.

    How does this translate to educators?

    Education created IT, yet IT seems to of outdone education when it comes to sharing resources/ideas/plans and knowledge. How bizarre is that?

    I have spent the last few days trying to encourage educators to spend 30 seconds a day uploading their lesson plans to Primary School Teaching and the #1 argument I face is why should I share my hard work with someone who will just steal it? For me this just doesn’t compute. I don’t see how it does in teaching, I don’t understand why teachers won’t share as much as I’m used to.

    It should be free to learn.

    Shouldn’t it?

    When to have closed systems

    Only when security is an issue (ie child details) should a system be “closed”. Certain niche systems that require lots of revenue to fund them and have large start up capital may also be closed. If the content is of a high quality then this can be justified.

    But if everything is open then how do we make money?

    This all sounds a bit communist… Not at all, schools will steal need teachers, learners will still need resources. I get paid for what I release publicly too. There are lots of revenue models other than the simple pay for knowledge.

    Today’s great debate

    Today was great, I was using twitter(A free service) while talking to some resource creators who felt it was inappropriate that Primary Games Arena(A free service) had an iframe linking to other websites which had games for kids(All freely available games). The argument was that it looked on the website like Primary Games Arena is taking credit for the resources it links to. On each game there is some text that displays who the publisher is of the game.

    In my nature I feel that if something is available on a website then referring to that resource should never be a problem as you are making it easier for the learner to learn and/or teacher to teach.

    After our short < 1000 word debate we decided that Primary Games Arena will now email each resource creator asking for permission to put games on Primary Games Arena. This is a simple procedure that will take a matter of minutes to accomplish and should keep everyone happy.

    Thanks for everyone who got involved in today’s debate.

    I do hope we can encourage teachers to share more and for websites to show more respect to the resource creators/authors and publishers who create the content.

    This post will probably spark some conversation and I hope that it does because I feel this is an important issue that needs addressing.

  • How to implement a wireless solution in a Primary School – Part 1/6 (HD)

    Date: 2009.07.04 | Category: Laptops, Wireless Networks, Wirelessly, connectivity, eda, education, ict, laptop, netbook, pda, primary, school, wifi | Response: 0

    The first part to the long awaited wireless presentation I did for curriculum ICT in Bradford. It is taking me a day a video at the moment to upload them to youtube so I will blog each time a new parts finishes uploading.

  • Second Life or Virtual 3d Worlds in Primary Schools

    Date: 2009.06.23 | Category: 3d, education, educational games, learning platform, lpmud, naace, opensim, primary school, pupil games, secondlife, virtual, world | Response: 0


    Naace are running a conference on using 3d virtual worlds in education. I can’t help but feeling this is mostly focused on the secondary market but I guess it has some relevance to Primary.

    Right now, even though I feel it has relevance I feel skeptical that this is a good idea but I could be wrong, it’s happened before :P

    Try to remember most primary school kids don’t even have email addresses provided by their schools yet and we’re going to open them up to a second life (be it walled or not)

    I’m not going to rant about security or child safety. I want to focus entirely on the point. Right now, I just don’t get it.

    I’m not going to download it or try it out, I don’t want to know if it feels good or clever. This isn’t a particularly new concept. Games have been used in Primary Education for years, mostly cartoony games that are very simple. Why do I need my character to walk to a piece of work to pick it up when its available on my VLE.. (I’m pretending I’m a kid…)

    I do however think games is a great way to encourage kids to learn, Primary Games Arena is having huge success worldwide with engaging children in fun learning.

    Virtual worlds should be all about engaging with other people, school mates for example.

    Maybe the whole Digital Citizenship is what I don’t get. Being that I started with BBS, moved to IRC + LPMUD, now I have every possible way of being “Hailed” 24/7… Come to think of it I think I probably learned a lot of social skills through LPMuds (Multi user environments)..

    I think I will go spend some time thinking about what Digital Citizenship is and how it will feel in 3/5 years time when virtual worlds MAY be at their peak. They certainly haven’t peaked yet and all the hype from Second Life is blatant hot air..

    I may have just begun a revolution in my head.. Oh dear..

    If you read this all the way through then you may wish to consider reading this article of Terry freedmans interview of Miller – its focused more at secondary but you get the picture..

  • eSafety – Software for schools, have we gone too far?

    Date: 2009.05.15 | Category: Safe Search, eSafety, educate, education, empower, gmail, google, hotmail, internet, pshce, pupils, safety, search, teach, teachers, teaching | Response: 0

    In the education sector there has been a massive push towards software that makes children using the internet a safer experience. eSafety is commonly taught in all schools and interestingly enough there is also an approach to “schools must teach more” with the recent formal introduction of PSHCE. From an outside point of view that seems to me that the 2 angles of approach must meet in the middle.  

    It seems to scream to me “Teachers must teach more eSafety!“.

    Consider a man wanting to cross a road, he can be instructed by the signs to a safe place to cross or we can only allow him to cross in one place. By allowing children to be educated into where we cross the road we don’t restrict them to closed options. It seems to me that we actively encourage them to make decisions and therefore learn.

    Is our current approach correct?

    In many ways no. We still have a compulsive fascination with ways to protect our children. Being that I was brought up in the soils of Yorkshire, I find it hard to understand a constant barrage of rules, regulation and “health ‘n safety”. We are not doing enough to empower pupils to make decisions in eSafety and this is mostly to blame on Software houses and the demand on software houses to make overly protective environments for children to learn in.

    Are we confusing eSafety with a need to have extended controls?

    The example I like to use is a teacher asking his or her pupils to sign into their hotmail accounts which they created. The pupils begin logging, suddenly a scream from the back bellows “Miss I can’t remember my password!”. The teacher is Shocked and now baffled by the puzzle they face. The teacher doesn’t have time to run through the registration process all over again and they can’t reset the password.

    The only way this could be resolved quickly is by giving the teacher the means to reset a pupils password or by having a helpdesk type system.

    Another great example where extended controls is Primary School Safe Search. With Primary School Safe Search you can Google search any site you want. Instead of displaying a set of search results from a few hundred sites, Primary School Safe Search displays all the safe search results but prioritises the educational and school related materials to the top of the search – filtering only websites catagoriesed explicitly.

    My final example is that if a teacher wants to open a pupils mailbox and its with gmail/hotmail etc. to find out if that pupil is being bullied, can they?

    We must educate the pupils, and empower the teacher.
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