Filed under 'Industry':Classrooms without walls
Flexibility is the key to the new national curriculum with learning taking place in and out of the classroom.
The aim is to tailor education to pupils’ needs to a greater extent and to make closer links with employment and the skills required in the 21st century world of work. More »
In the palm of your hand
The Handheld Learning conference 13-15 October 2008
This was a conference where you were spoilt for choice. It was thronged with like-minded people who had intriguing and interesting takes on the future of learning in the 21st century.
Digital technology can enrich the lives of our young people and this was an ideal place to see how.
Highlights included three young people showing their short films, which were astonishingly good, with corresponding confidence and presentation skills. More »
Pupil voice – gathering evidence
So a New Year and new opportunities? I’m not a man who puts much store by new years resolutions, they always seem to get broken, but I do like to see the dawning of a new year as an opportunity to inject new energy and purpose into things.
In the world of education the year just gone has seen some promise towards the potential offered by digital media, but also some signs that there us an awful long way to go yet.
The Handheld Learning Conference organised by Graham Brown Martin in October (reviewed in our current newsletter) attracted more delegates than ever. It included a closing keynote speech from Lord Putnam, long a fan of the potential of Digital Media for education, and participation by such luminaries as Stephen Heppell and writer Steven Johnson.
The conference was full of sparkling examples of the creative use of digital media in its many guises and its positive effect on the education of our young people. More »
Harnessing pupil power
Young people love their technology – mobiles, iPods, Wiis, PS ones, twos and threes, computers, Game Boys, PSPs, PDAs… – and they can all be used to help them learn effectively.
In future, rather than power residing just in teachers, it will move more into the learner’s hands.
A revolution is coming in the next decade, which means that pupils themselves can have more influence on the curriculum, and how and where learning takes place. More »
Making it digital
Why making it digital is so different to making it for paper
Just a few tweaks and we can make paper resources into digital ones, can’t we? Well no, and here’s why:
As specialists in digital media for education, one of our core activities is the design and production of digital resources for educational publishers. These publishers, typically, are traditional organisations whose businesses have been built on the publishing of educational books and other printed matter.
Now, in the 21st century, with technology sophistication and the ubiquity of digital media in all of our lives (partially due to the demise of analogue TV by 2012), these very same publishers are having to turn their attention to the publishing of digital media. For many publishers this has initially meant the production and publication of digital media resources linked to published books. In time, more publishers will produce resources that do not have a book element and are complete digital resources in their own right.
For most publishers the transition is a pretty painful one because it involves more than just tweaking a few processes. It involves very real and significant change. More »
Digital media integration
Ten reasons for an imminent acceleration of digital technology integration into our schools
The pace of technological advancement is fast, often bewilderingly so, everybody knows that. In some areas we have experienced an exponential growth in the take up of aspects of those advances, for example in the use of mobile phones having now reached something like a staggering 95% penetration.
In other areas the take up of the technology is slower. In schools, despite the availability of ring fenced monies to ensure that all schools have interactive whiteboards, modern computer suites and broadband connectivity, the actual application of these technologies is relatively slow. Mobile phones, for example, whilst ubiquitous outside school are generally banned, or banished to lockers during school hours, in most schools.
But beware, this is all set to change. The comforting pace of gradual digital integration into schools is set to become a torrent and below we give ten good reasons why. More »
Digital media – a collaborative approach
Most people know about digital media, have at least heard the term even if not everyone knows precisely what it means. On the whole, people know that their mobile phone is digital, that their TV, if not digital now will be by 2012, that the internet is digital.
What many people don’t know is how this may change their lives. For the purveyors of applications of digital technology there is another dilemma – how to deal with the integration of the different digital platforms with regards to meaningful multiplatform applications.
Whilst all digital platforms share the common fact of being ‘digital’, the requirements for the development of content and applications and the dissemination of these can vary quite radically cross platform.
It would be exceptional for all the cross platform expertise required to be invested in a single place, which is why at Vivid we believe that the way forwards is through collaboration.
Even the mighty BBC, whilst investing in some of the expertise in house, collaborates with other suppliers to ensure a full 360 degree offering. More »
The Education Show
NEC, 28th. Feb – 2nd. March 2008
Another interesting forum event for the education sector, The Education Show caters for practitioners with many CPD seminars and suppliers exhibiting. But it also provides an opportunity for others to see what’s happening in the world of frameworks, curricula and School Improvement; what the buzz is with VLE’s, voting systems and interactive whiteboard applications; a catch-up on the National Healthy Schools Programme; and did you know it’s the National Year of Reading? More »
