NewsDesigns on the future
Well-designed school buildings with high quality facilities, especially for ICT, are the key to delivering effective, personalised education.
The Government’s £48bn Building Schools for the Future program aims to help local authorities update and improve school buildings, or rebuild secondary schools if necessary.
Crucial to this programme is the need to integrate digital technology into school infrastructure. Read on »
A virus ate my e-portfolio, miss
An e-portfolio is a digital collection of pupils’ education documents, but it has the potential to do much more.
Before technology got sophisticated, pupils stored their work in notebooks or folders, which were vulnerable to loss and damage and filled up. Read on »
Education without frontiers
Imagine a world where education fits the pupils, rather than the pupils learning to fit into the system. Sounds simple, doesn’t it.
Well, that’s ‘personalisation’ in a nutshell.
The Plowden Report of 1967 says that:
“The school sets out….to devise the right environment for children to allow them to be themselves and to develop in the way and at a pace appropriate to them…”
Yet the practicalities of a teacher led classroom based education has not been able to deliver on ideals. Read on »
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. Read on »
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. Read on »
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. Read on »
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. Read on »
Mick takes digital media class at Winchester uni.
At the end of 2008 Vivid MD Mick Landmann took a class of digital media students at Winchester University. In this session he explored the possibilities of change that digital technology offered the education system.
“The session was very well received with the results that it prompted more interest in how digital media products to facilitate the revolution that you (Mick) described could be conceived, designed and developed.”
