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...

The first week of ICT on my PGCE course has now happened. We kicked off with a look at a few utilities that might be useful as teaching aids. Hot Potatoes http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ Hot Potatoes is a suite of educational tools that let you generate web-based crosswords, word searches, quizzes and so forth. Judging from some of the feedback from the web it's quite highly regarded by teachers. It seems to be abandonware since 2009 though, so the UI feels very dated and the whole package is lacking in modern refinements we've rapidly come to expect. Still, there doesn't appear to be anything else available that could be a suitable replacement. Would I use it? Probably not. Undergraduate-age students are at that point where they've discovered their independence so solving a word maze might be seen as beneath them. Ironically, once you get to post-graduate ages you're more likely to find use for the tools as mature students have that bit more maturity so as not to sco...