IT for Education

So the good new is the ICT module for which this blog was my assignment is done and dusted. Results are in, did pretty good thanks for asking, now I need to make a decision over what to do with this here blog. I hadn't posted for a while partly because I wanted a break from it, plus I don't think adding to a work while it's being assessed is all that smart of a move. I don't think I'll be posting again for a little longer at least since I've got a bunch of other stuff piling up, but I'm pretty sure I'll get back to it eventually. The focus will undoubtedly change; without a brief to follow my personal choice of relevant posts is going to differ somewhat, but in what direction I can't say yet. It will definitely keep the technology angle and I'm sure it will be relevant to education still, but I think pure 'ICT' would be a bit restrictive. Since technology is at the core of most parts of what I do I'd like to spread out a bit, encomp...

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...

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...