A recent US Department of Education report concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. With the way current e-learning environments are set up, I don't see how... with usability barely registering in the mind of most course creators, students are left searching the labyrinthine maze of hyperlinks to find...
September's top links for ICT teachers.
We’re not in the ‘90s anymore, and sitting a kid in front of a computer generates little more excitement than sitting them in front of a toaster. In a society where computers are truly ubiquitous, they can’t be expected to be intrinsically exciting. How impressed would you be to find a TV in a classroom? What if I said it received Ceefax?
The social & moral implications of ICT are fascinating, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion - I'll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario.
When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled "vocab". At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan - the kids know the vocab, right?
It’s freebie time again! Inspired by Will Lion‘s excellent “mind bites” series of desktop wallpapers, I started putting together a series of A3 size posters for my classroom wall. These posters include quotes, facts & figures relating to the impact of ICT on society so should make for good display fodder in computer suites. If there is no citation for images...
The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.” Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now? For decades, gadgets...
One of the big rubs in this brave new world of technology-assisted education is getting students to realise that not everything posted online is true. With young children, even getting them to realise that search engines don't actually provide you with information - rather, they link to websites that do - is very difficult.
One of the problems with a subject like ICT is relating seemingly abstract terms. In a recent discussion about storage & computer memory, I found some of my Key Stage 3 students had little concept of the units of file size. After a little while we established that a kilobyte was bigger than a byte, a megabyte was bigger than a kilobyte, and a gigabyte was bigger than a megabyte, but that was...
The requests for ICT level descriptors in pupil speak continue to pile up on the TES forums, so I thought I'd make mine available for download. Personally, I think they make a lot of sense, and cover the array of ICT skills we ought to be covering in high schools very well, but at first glance seem inaccessible, particularly for assessing pupil progress.