IT for Education

I've written at length about presentation apps, office suites, mobile technology and blogs, but haven't really considered all these things within the wider context of technology in education as a whole. They are just components of a vast collection of hardware, software, practices and concepts that have been working their way into all aspects of education for decades now. Perhaps the most beneficial aspect that technology has brought to teaching is the way it has increased access to education . The rise of the web has opened the doors to the world's knowledge, now searchable and readable to anyone with a browser. It's had such a profound impact on every aspect of society it's easy to forget the World Wide Web was only invented in 1989 . This has been a double-edged sword in university teaching. With tutors able to find and use resources from anywhere on the planet it has made preparation and delivery much more effective. However it also means tutors are now comp...

If you believe Apple, we are living in a 'post-PC era' . That is certainly not true though it makes for a great sound-bite to grab some column inches, but still the importance of the desktop computer has definitely diminished in recent years. This has been driven almost entirely by the rise of alternative computing devices, including ultralight laptops, tablets and smartphones. There are many things that can be done on these types of devices that don't require a PC at all, although from personal experience a full computer makes a lot of it much more straightforward. Tablet sales are on the decline , suggesting they are not the all out replacements for the traditional box some would have us believe, though to be fair desktops have seen declining sales for years. Still, smart devices remain incredibly popular and the technological advances through the last half-decade has been nothing short of astonishing. The capabilities of a handheld device with multitudes of sensors a...

I had my first assessment on my course earlier on in the week, a 20 minute micro-teaching session. It went pretty well, but the thing I was really happy about was my slides presentation. Having to avoid anything requiring specific hardware or software meant my available pool of subjects shrank dramatically. After plans for a practical 'nature of sound' session were dashed I settled on one of the few purely theory-based subjects I've taught: semiotics. This is a subject that (for the part I would be using at least) can be taught with just a PowerPoint. My existing slides were almost entirely text free except where unavoidable, and I'd used lots of simple imagery that were meant to serve more as a backdrop to discussion than a focal point. I was aware the learner group would be vastly different to those I'd taught before, with different motives and life-directions to any of my previous students. The 20 minute cap also meant there was not the time to explore any to...

Work was being... well, work today, so I've had to skip this week's lectures. Apparently the topic was to be 'assessment aids', in particular two utilities, Kahoot and Socrative . Let's take a look. Socrative http://www.socrative.com/ Socrative is a live, on-line quiz/feedback platform that lets you create various types of challenge for students, such as multiple choice, true/false or questionnaires. Students' responses are fed back to the tutor immediately. It's a bit like classroom Who Wants to be a Millionaire with you as Chris Tarrant and no money. There are team options, such as a first-past-the-post rockets game and single shot questions. The whole thing works on pretty much every device from PCs to phones, so you can even have large cohorts joining in. If I have any complaints I'd like a bit more theming options to help me use it with various different learner groups and there are some annoying usability decisions (e.g. if you accidentally...

We covered a bit about formulas and conditional formatting today. I'm not going to talk about that. Instead I'll tell you about the most ridiculous Excel project I've ever worked on. It's one of the reasons why I tend to adopt a 'less is more' mantra. It's also why I know a lot of this stuff in the first place. Many years ago, before working in higher education had ever occurred to me as a possibility, I did some temping work at British Rail to help pay for uni. I was based in an office above a terminus station with just two other people - the boss, who despite carrying himself with an extremely strict, professional manner nevertheless had an obvious screaming fabulousness bubbling away just under the surface, kept under a tight wrap presumably until the weekends hit, and his shy and efficient PA who was very meticulous about the tea area.

Over the last few posts I've discussed a couple of the most important MS Office applications from an education perspective. PowerPoint and Word are two dominant weapons in my preppin' holster and I rely on them daily. Of course Office is much more than two pieces of software, so I thought I'd go through some of them briefly here. Excel When it comes to spreadsheets, Excel is the undisputed market leader. It's got the users of course ( Office 2010 broke the billion user mark  some time ago), but it's also known as a powerhouse of software used by nearly every market sector. That includes a whole lot of using it for the wrong purpose (which seems to be a trend with the whole suite), most classically as a database when Access is readily available (I'm guilty of this myself). I use Excel to track students' attendance and performance, budget for orders and other administrative tasks. I've never used it in teaching and unless I start teaching accounta...

As much as PowerPoint remains top of the pile when it comes to presentation apps the rest of the MS Office suite is also heavily utilised in education. Word is of course the most commonly used one by a long shot. Most types of document we work with are Word files, from assignment briefs to the reams of redundant, badly designed templates handed down as gospel. The overarching problem with Word isn't so much Word itself - as a document layout application it's pretty good. It has a huge range of features (so long as you can find them) and is capable of creating very tight, nicely designed documents. Its templating system has had quite the overhaul over the last couple of releases and can deal with all sorts of forms, hand-outs and official red-tape stuff. It also has a good built-in system for dealing with referencing and automating various tasks. What sucks about Word is that everyone tries to use it for things it was not meant to do. The thing is, Word can do a LOT of th...