EdTechUK

Food Force

The Food Force site from the United Nations World Food Programme has a wealth of resources to support learning and teaching about food aid and hunger crisis. Their key resource is a downloadable game (for Windows or Mac) where the player is a member of a new WFP team. The game is pitched at 8-13 years olds, and involves narrative introductions and real world clips, along with different mini-games representing the various stages in crisis response and recovery. There are also a ton of other resources across both sites, including photo and video clips, and an interactive world hunger map.

My son (Joseph Ishmael, aged 8), my niece (Talia Shortland, aged 11) and I (33) all trialed the game. We all learned significantly more than we new before about dealing with famine, and they both gave very positive feed back. Talia in particular played the games several times, although skipped through the narratives framing them. The games are easy, addictive and educational and the variety is good. We found the driving level a bit buggy after a few uses, but there were no other problems apart from this - downloading and instillation were simple.   

Recommended.

Bloggsavvy

James Farmer's empire continues to grow - proving there's (virtually) no problem that doesn't have a blog based solution.

If you need advice, assistance and/or information on blogging for Education, Business, Communities, a Cause or for Money, you can turn to James's new blog, Bloggsavvy in the first instance.  He also provides personal consultancy.

Downloadable learning products

Kyle Johnson at Educause notes that Audible have announced a partnership with Pearson Education to develop down loadable, college level (It's US based, so 18+) educational audio files.

My first thought is: why isn't IT Conversations looking in to this as a way to supplement their consistently excellent, free content? They're perfectly set up to produce some really interesting resources - and some educators have already been using their stuff in this way. If this is you - don't forget to make a donation.

Second thought is - why don't educators make their own. It's fun and it's cheap!

Apple Digital Campus Exchange

D'Arcy posts about his involvement in the embryonic Apple educommunity, Apple Digital Campus Exchange, consisting of news, forums, and eight blogs. He's a contributing blogger on one of the edu-based blogs over there - Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning in a Digital World.  It's worth a look around - although you'll have to jump through some hoops - you need and Apple Connect username and password and a key. Apologies, you'll also need these to access the links in the rest of the post.

I'll definitely be subbing some of the blogs - D'Arcy's and the iPod one for sure. Navigating around the site and the sections of the site isn't as easy as it should be though, and an available RSS page would be appreciated (although the conversations feeds from the forums are in one place at least).

My other gripe is that of all the community leaders/primary bloggers are men. They couldn't even come up with a token woman to invite?

Helen Chen, Jennifer Reeves, Melissa Poole and Yvonne Belanger are all listed as contributing bloggers. Good luck to them!

Reload V2 available

Version 2.0.0 of the Reload Learning Design Editor is now available to download for Windows, Linux and Mac. I've used Reload extensively (especially for reconfiguring the NLN materials) and have had very few problems with Version 1.2. I'm really pleased that the project funding was extended to support this new release - I've already installed a copy. It's a very strait forward tool for organizing, disaggregating, supplementing and reassembling learning content.

Well done to the Reload team : Professor Oleg Liber, Phillip Beauvoir, Paul Sharples and Colin Milligan

Remix MoMA

Art Mobs current project is Remix MoMA:

" “Art Mobs” is a project designed by students in Dr. David Gilbert’s Organizational Communication course at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City.  For Spring Semester, Gilbert’s students have produced unofficial audio guides for the Museum of Modern Art and made them available on the Web as podcasts.  They are inviting the public to submit homemade audio guides to their podcast feed, which the students hope to make a permanent distribution system for audio guides that anyone can produce, share, transfer to an iPod or other MP3 player and take into MoMA. 

"MoMA provides official audio guides, on proprietary audio devices, for a fee.  The Art Mobs project exploits the ubiquity of iPods and other portable MP3 players to offer museum-goers a free, grassroots alternative.  Gilbert explains:  “In a sentence, we are democratizing the experience of touring an art museum; we are offering a way for anyone to ‘curate’ their own little corner of MoMA.”

"To learn more about the project, subscribe to the podcast, or submit an audio guide, visit http://www.mod.blogs.com/art_mobs "

What an inspiring project! And one which could easily be customised to suit local conditions:

"Need inspiration? Here's a sample of our projects:

"If a painting could speak, what would it say? Two MMC students and a cinema professor go slumming as they lend character and voice to an expressionist painting set in a conspicuously disreputable French cabaret.

"We do it for moving images, so why not compose soundtracks for still images? Listen to our student musicians—and a professional hip hop artist from Brooklyn—as they sample and remix everything from symphonic themes to vintage 1950's television ads to speed-metal licks and wafts of ambient trance, all inspired by selected MoMA works.

"Do you like your art criticism served up more sardonic than saccharine? Thanks to an MMC art history professor who knows his profession but doesn't take it too seriously, you'll hear things you'll never hear through MoMA's headphones."

Thanks BoingBoing!

UNESCO resources

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has both Education and Communication & Information pages worth looking at. Amongst their recent publications you'll find the following (all in PDF):

Information and communication technologies in schools: a handbook for teachers, or how ICT can create new, open learning environments
  Publ: 2005; 242 p., illus.; ED/HED/TED/2.

Integrating ICTs into the curriculum: analytical catalogue of key publications
  ICT for education catalogue series; 1
  Publ: 2005; 110 p., illus.

There's also:

Girls in science and technology education: a study on access, participation, and performance of girls in Nepal
  UNESCO Kathmandu series of monographs and working papers; 4
  Publ: 2005; 139 p.; KAT/ED/2005/04.

Which points up some very familiar enablers and barriers. 

Image taken from the UNESCO e-card service

Thanks to Jane