IT for Education

Time to take a look at applications and other technology I use in my teaching. MS Office I've discussed it plenty in previous posts , but the Office suite is hands down my most used piece of software. There's PowerPoint of course, Word for making all the handouts, official docs etc, Outlook for most communications and Excel for marking, tracking student progression and so on. With the exception of Outlook I couldn't say they are all used every single day, but it's unusual if Word doesn't get launched at least once.  The Web The Internet is central to most things I do in education. It's a subject I teach, it's a research hub for myself and students, its a source of a wealth of material. My childhood took place just before the rise of the Web so I have this position where I remember what the world was like before (more innocent, I'd say) but still having become part of the Internet generation. Nobody I teach any more remembers a time before the Int...

I'm supposed to be reviewing another education-focused blog for my assignment. My first reaction was less than keen, as in my research so far I've stumbled across several blogs via web searches that have served a specific need I've been hunting for, but I've never hung around long enough to delve into other posts and form a reasonable opinion on them. Was I going to need to speed read a bunch of blogs I may not have liked, just to be able to briefly write about them here? As it happens, I was thinking too narrowly. My fairly blinkered opinion on what constitutes a blog is still quite old-school: independent thought trains from the common man, given a voice on the world stage by the democratisation of technology. In reality, the modern interpretation on what counts as blogging has become fairly loose and also seems to be becoming more prevalent from those that would prefer to be called true journalists. I think there's a fine line personally, one that gets crosse...