EdTechUK

ALT-C 2006: PLEs

The read/write web certainly hit ALT-C this year. If I had the time to make a cloud tag of the event, learning objects would be in tiny, tiny letters, and web 2.0 would only be beaten in size by the word Blackboard, who stormed into first place on the wave of animosity that their software patents have whipped up.  There were some interesting sessions on blogging, podcasting popped up, along with wikis. For me, of course, this has been the year of the Personal Learning Environment, and it’s probably not good practice to say so but I really enjoyed the PLE session the most. It was also cool to finally meet up with Dave Tosh of Elgg/Curverider fame. Also really great to get to work a little with Terry Anderson, although I managed to miss bumping into him for most of the conference.

The low point for me was probably the mushroom risotto along with the giant playstation uninteractive things outside of the Dynamic Earth Center.  I was also sad to miss Brian Kelly’s session that clashed with ours.

I’ve put up the PLE photo set over at Flickr – if you took part in the session, please do head over and contribute some comments or information about yourself (“that’s the back of my head!”). And don't forget to re-live those precious moments with Graham Attwell: Live at Edinburgh.

e-mint, Nancy White, blogs and communities

Nancy White, originally uploaded by Josie Fraser.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be able to attend my first e-mint event – an informal seminar around blogging and communities featuring the wonderful Nancy White, online community guru, consultant and blogger, which turned into a very lively group discussion which included the old familiar (and currently on the boil again as poorly informed myspace moral panics emerge as US legislation for those of you who didn't catch it, DOPA was passed by the House of Representatives.) interweb tension of control vs. chaos. I’m firmly against filtering and gates –walled garden solutions might be useful in terms of licensing and liability, but like other filtering solutions they don't encourage a culture where young people are supported to take responsibility for their own actions and to equip themselves for dealing with unwanted encounters with materials or people.  My new role on the DfES backed Safe Use of the Internet steering group sees me having to sharpen up my act when it comes to what exactly constitutes useful e-safety education, not to mention to knock-on implications of DOPA.

It was great to be able to thrash some of this out with some very experienced community builders and moderators, and beer. I’ve only recently become a member of e-mint.org, the association for online community professionals, and it’s inspiring to be around such a buzzy group.

The e-mint post on Nancy’s visit is up, as is a post on the event by David Wilcox, as has Robin Hamman from BBC Five Live who co-organized the event along with Lizzie Jackson. Lilia 'Mathemagenic' Efimova came along and it was great meeting her for the first time.

If you don't already subscribe to their podcast feed (what's up with you?!) you’ll also want to listen to the 2005 International Edublog Award winners and EdTechUK favorites EdTechTalk crew Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow's EdTechTalk 55 - A Discussion about Communities with Nancy White.

And to finish up, why not check out Nancy Whites own excellent series of recent posts on online communities:

Blogs and Communities - some thinking out loud
Blogs and Communities part 2
Blogs and Communities part 3
Blogs and Communities part 4
Blogs and Communities part 5

 

Online conference/seminar

I’m in the process of organising a couple of online conferences and in the market for some good advice. Has anyone had good or bad experiences with particular services or approaches? The elements I want to include are pretty standard: Speaker presentations via webcam, presentation slides and a chat facility. Is there something else I should definitely factor in? I’m currently looking at WebEx (as the most obvious place to start).

Fat Chance John Cage

Rosie Cardiff, E-Learning Curator at the Tate writes:

"Tate has launched a new online resource exploring Bruce Nauman’s installation 'MAPPING THE STUDIO II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage).'

As part of the EU funded project Inside Installations: the preservation and presentation of installation art, Time-based Media Conservation and Digital Programmes have collaborated to create an e-learning package designed to provide a rare opportunity for the public to go behind the scenes and explore the challenges of collecting, installing and caring for complex installations.

The site includes interviews with Bruce Nauman and his assistant, Michael Short and explores the roles of the curator and the conservator and a range of themes including preservation and co-ownership. While the site presents information of interest to a general audience, it also provides technical material not commonly available to the public. This e-learning package aims to provide a rich source of information to enhance an understanding of this work, provide a tool for adult learners, and a resource for colleagues in other institutions interested in the care and management of installation art.

This is the first time the Conservation Department at Tate has been involved in creating an e-learning resource and as such, the project presented many new challenges around how to present quite technical information."

Educational Freeware

Freeware author Marianne Wartoft has been producing software available as shareware or freeware for education for over a decade. She's set up a great new site, Educational Freeware, and writes:

"During my years as a freeware author, I have come across many good pieces of educational software that I would like to share with others. That's why I created this site.

The line between downloadable, installable software and online resources is getting less and less sharp - both kinds of software often serve the same purpose. I include them both on this site. The downloadable programs all run under Windows, and in some cases under Linux as well. The online resources are, of course, generally available under any operating system."

It's a fantastic project, and I wish her all the best in what will prove to be an invaluable resource for many learners. teachers and parents. On my wish list for future developments would be a submission form for readers favorite freeware sites, and perhaps a voting/comments form for sites people have used. I'd also like to see country of origin flagged up - especially important for literacy resources! 

Foord's MindGenius Wiki

David Frood, ILT Champion extraordinaire and E-Learning Staff Development Co-ordinator at the University of Derby, has created a Wiki to support the use of Mindgenius - one of the commercial mind mapping programme adopted by many UK institutions (including ours). You'll find information on:

Tips on using the software (Version 2005)
Tips on using the software for Mindgenius Version 1
Teaching and Learning Tips
How to guides

He writes: "The software tips will obviously be specific to the version that you are using. the teaching and learning tips I am hoping with apply to both versions. The version 1 tips should show up in red as hasn't any information added, hopefully a Mindgenius Version 1 user will start to build this area of the site for us."

Mind mapping programmes are fantastic, and should be one of the basic programmes offered by all institutions, and introduced during induction. They're great for staff and students (with or without learning disabilities), and can be used for brainstorming, project work, planning, and presentations.

Additional resources:

Mind Map at Wikipedia

Mind Mapping from James Cook University Study Skills Online, Australia

FreeMind - Java-based free open source Mind Map software

50+ RSS Ideas for Educators

Excellent (& very recently updated) pdf from Quentin D’Souza's Teaching Hacks.Com.

Brief, because I'm ill & expect this has been blogged everywhere already. Can't resist that diagram though!

Rubber band physics

Ohmygoshmysonisgonnalovethis! Like most children, my son is fascinated with rubber bands - their stretchiness, their pliability, the fact that they are freely available from most office environments and their battling potential. I've often wondered, was the regularly wheeled-out warning example of the child whose eye was irretrievably damaged by rubber band tom-foolery an actual child, or just an urban myth designed to stifle creativity and keep insurance costs down? Must every school have a sacrificial one-eyed student, and if so, how do you avoid getting chosen?

Anyway - none of this is an issue when you can study rubber bands officially, and thus gain access to protective lab goggles. Check out the Guide to Shooting Rubber Bands - a fantastic site  (although I notice the Safety tips section is a bit wonky) from shootologist Tim Morgan, which includes a little bit on the physics of winning rubber band shoot-outs.

Caught this over at Pasta & Vinegar, another great site that you'll want to spend some time exploring, this time by research assistant Nicolas Nova, which he describes as "research + daily scanning about location-based tech, video games, tangible interactions, ubicomp, hci/cscw, user experience analysis, innovation and various weird things".

BlogSafety

Via Will Richardson ("put the blog down Will...walk away from the blog...") Blogger hosted BlogSafety blog by Larry Magid, which takes a pro-education stance to the thorny issue of teen blogging, providing teachers and parents with a bunch of reassuring, good advice resources including  Safe Blogging Advice for [non-blogging] Parents, a Teachers Guide, Teens Guide (I'd take the word rules out of that if I were you Larry). Part of BlogSafety.com, which also links to advice from the excellent Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Poetry Archive

The Poetry Archive is a great new UK based project with site sections and resources for teachers, students and librarians, and The Children's Poetry Archive - a dedicated site for poems written for younger readers and listeners. Well worth a good look around.

Andrew Motion, the UK's Poet Laureate is the driving force behind the new site which aims to make oral recordings - especially those read by the poet themselves - freely available. There are interviews, historic and newly commissioned recordings, and also guided tours of the archives available.

Gunpowder, Treason & Plot

Bonfire night (November 5th) is one of my favorite celebrations, a particularly English and pragmatic event, allowing people to either celebrate or commiserate Guy Fawkes failed nefarious plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. With fireworks.

This year is 400th anniversary of the proposed explosion and the Parliamentary Archives have commissioned a great website - proof positive that the UK government is capable of commissioning a useful and usable online project:

"Produced in association with the History of Parliament Trust and the 24 Hour Museum. It is designed to provide an objective introduction to the Gunpowder Plot with information about its background, development, discovery and impact on the history of Britain and Parliament over a period of 400 years. The story is supported by documents, pictures, books and other items drawn from a range of institutions, which together constitute a unique learning resource."

There's some excellent uses of a wide variety of historical resources. The site has areas designed for 4-11 year olds, (with accompanying teachers notes) and older learners/adults. It's "a grisly, bloody tale of wars, murder, secrets and lies" which is "particularly suited to use with whiteboards". There's even competitions for you to factor into your classroom activities.

iStanford

Wow. Stanford is now officially on iTunes. Free and as easy to use as iTunes, there are currently 21 faculty lectures up (from Race, Class and Katrina to Why Zebras Don't get Ulcers), along with heard on campus (interviews, speeches and performances), Stanford Initiatives (multidisciplinary addresses) Sports news and interviews, Music performances by students, staff, alumni and visitors, and books & authors, interviews and commentary from Stanford's book salon.

Shiny New Toys

...but not for me! Take a look at my lovely new Frapper map for UK & Ireland based edubloggers and see if you can spot what's wrong with it.

Frapper looks like being potentially a great service. it stands for Friend Mapper, and it's a simple way of producing interactive, geographic representations of communities.

Widen those horizons Frapper people!

M-learning roundup

Image by malias distributed under a CC 2.0 licence

Only a few days to go to mLearn 2005 - The 4th World Conference on Mobile Learning, "the world's largest conference on mLearning and emerging ambient technologies", taking place from 25 to 28 October 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa.  If like me there's little to no chance of making it there in person, you'll be pleased to know they're podcasting the keynotes. 

I also stumbled across Adam Burt's m-learning pages and blog. Sort out your about page Adam! All I know about you is that you're dyslexic and you work for Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication in London.

JISCs recently published ‘Innovative Practice with e-Learning’, a good practice guide based on 10 case studies of education institutions making use of mobile and wireless technologies.

TechDis, the UK's accessibility and inclusion advisory service for education, have some m-learning resources, including overviews of advantages and constraints.  In partnership with CETIS, The CETIS-TechDis Accessibility SIG (Special Interest Group) are holding an m-learning event on Wedensday 23rd November in Birmingham, which looks pretty good.

Still hungry? Ask Butler over at the new LSDA staff development site already has a few m-learning resources and events (although you can't search the directory by 'm-learning' - try 'mobile').

Games & Learning

Nesta Futurelab have just released their latest research handbook - Games & Learning, by Richard Sandford and Ben Williamson. You can download the 30 page pdf for free or read the web version over at the handbooks page - where you'll also find Designing technologies to support creativity and collaboration and Designing educational technologies with users.

Games & Learning gives an intro and overview to the current interest in using computer games to support teaching and learning, looks at non-educational use and examples of current educational practices. They also throw in a couple of case studies, an annotated reading list  and a key features table - in fact, everything you need to get up to speed on the current debates in one well-designed package.

There's also an accompanying article from Futurelabs new magazine Vision, by their Director of Learning and Research, Keri Facer Could computer games help to transform the way we learn?

Edubloggers directory update

Adrian Lee has recently updated the UK & Ireland Edubloggers directory - here are the new urls - we're up to 32 entries now, and there are some more on the way. Adrians switched from MediaWiki (the Wikipedia scaffolding) to WikkaWiki - which is easier to customise. Once again, many thanks to Adrian for being such a generous host. 

Main page
Notices and Calls
Meetups

The next meetup is now only 5 days away, so if your going to be in or around Birmingham let us know!

Black History Month

October is Black History Month in the UK. Theresa has already listed some resources - here's my contribution to the celebration - I'm including both Black and Asian resources.

The Science Museum in London celebrate with a really interesting programme of events for all ages - unfortunately though they haven't thought to provide links from their text to external articles of the people places and subjects they're talking about. They do have resource pages on inventor Garrett Morgan, a mini-site on People and Space, a pdf key stage 2 teachers pack on the Egyptians (their link is broken - use this one) and another pdf on inventor Lewis Latimer.

Planet Science has pages on African Caribbean scientists and mathematicians, including Dr Katherine G Johnson, space navigation pioneer.

Muslim Heritage is an extensive site covering the Islamic Enlightenment, and looking at Muslim contribution the modern world, including science, technology and medicine.

The History of Indian Science covers a lot of ground, or try this extensive wikipedia entry on Science and technology in ancient India.

bloggers & cyber-dissidents handbook

Reporters Without Borders have just released their new handbook for reporters and cyber-dissidents, in PDF format. The first third covers pretty familiar introductory ground, with Dan Gilmore expanding on the  liberal ethics of the Bayosphere citizen journalism pledge.

The next section rapidly takes off though as it provides examples of six international bloggers experiences. These kind of stories really help to illustrate the point of blogging to non-bloggers in ways that list of blogging tools and etiquette never will.

The third section concentrates on handy hints and tips for evading censorship.

EduGeek

Who's your favorite technician?  There is no way I'd answer this question in public, apart from to say at Wyggeston & Queen Elizabeth I College they're all pretty great. Why not show your favoritism (or just your general appreciation) by emailing your nominated tech with the url of EduGeek, the UK based online community by and for IT professionals working in education. There's a whole load of great resources over there - check out their wiki and forums. And they're having a conference next month, which will be a great opportunity to meet others in the same boat.

Remember - url's are an edugeeks best friend!   

Educause 7's

Just stumbled across these very handy and recently updated guides from Educause. Available in PDF format, the Seven Things You Should Know About... mini series offers a brief, straight-forward introduction to and overview of the following technologies and practices for information civilians. Currently available:

Blogs

Video Blogs

Wikis

Podcasting

Clickers

Social Bookmarking

EduBloggers Jisc List

In addition to the UK & Ireland EduBloggers Directory wiki, there is now also a JISC list for EduBlogger alerts, meet-ups and events - it seems as if there will be quite a few this year, including another meet-up in October. If you want to sign up, please head over to the homepage and click on join the list.

If your a blogger based in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland and haven't yet left your blog's details at the wiki, please do so! Just click on the Edit tab at the top of the page.

Blooming Bloggers Show

There's a handful of comments on Anne Davis's current inspirational school edublog project, The Write Weblog, commenting on how useful teachers are finding the student's PowerPoint, the Blooming Bloggers Show.

No kidding. It's absolutely fantastic, and a gift to edublogging students of all ages. I'm certainly going to direct many people over there for the solid advice and the inspiring work these kids are knocking out.

Once again, in case you missed it the last time, check out the JHH Blooming Bloggers PowerPoint.

Wonderful work Adrieana, Alejandra, Alejandro, Ashley, Estefany, Jhonathan, Juan, Lacey, Marcos, Maria, Patrick, Paulina, Shelby and Yessenia from J. H. House Elementary School in Conyers, Georgia, US - many thanks for a world-class example of good blogging practice. 

And thanks Leon for making sure I didn't miss this!

Online hard drive

Back in March I reported an Engadget hack for using all that gmail account space for something other than email storage - namely, personal hard drive space. Still seemed a bit too much like hard work?

Wouldn't it be great if someone worked out a way of accessing your gmail account online, as a stellar storage solution? And wouldn't it be great if they provided a nice, simple interface so you could save stuff really, really easily? And even better, if it was free?

Check out XMail hard drive in beta. Astonishingly useful. Compatible with all the Operating Systems you're likely to use, and their also in the process of removing the file upload size limit. You don't even need a gmail account - mail them & they'll sort you out with one.

Eduforge Blogs

Eduforge has recently undergone a transformation, with the help of the eXe Editor Project. It's now full of read/write web goodness - including fully featured blogs, Planet Eduforge - a feed aggregator, wikis, and a new teaching tools showcase. All very exciting!

From the press release:

"Eduforge is an open access environment designed for the sharing of ideas, research outcomes, open content and open source software for education. You are welcome to use our community resources or start your own project space. Registration is free. Eduforge offers a wide range of collaborative tools as well as project spaces for the development of educational software, content or to faciltate collaborative research and discussion."

Britcaster Wiki

I've just stumbled across the Britcaster Wiki pages - a community and resource for podcasters UK & worldwide.  Brit casters and directories. as well as news on the very first Podcastcon UK taking place in London on September 17th 2005.

VLE accessibility

Guidelines on improving provision for disabled students through use of a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) are now up at the ALERT (Accessibility in Learning Environments and Related Technologies) project website.

The guidelines have been developed over the past two years as part of the HEFCE funded Strand 2 ALERT project and are based on a series of case studies with staff and disabled students. Themed guidelines include the following:

• Introduction to ALERT guidelines
• Holistic use of a VLE
• Delivery of learning support materials through a VLE
• Asynchronous discussion through a VLE
• Synchronous discussion through a VLE
• Assessment through a VLE
• Group work in a VLE
• Technical aspects of VLE use
• Practical aspects of VLE use
• VLE recommendations

The guidelines are aimed at use by academic and student support staff, such as learning technologists and disability support staff.

Wikipedia in the news

Following the recent bombings, there's been a resurgence of attention drawn to how well the Wikipedia and Wikinews communities did in delivering clear, up-to-the-second coverage, particularly in comparison to legitimate media (actually looking more and more like an unfair comparison for the poor old regular news channels - given Wikipedia's scope, resources, and community based commitment to accuracy).

Derek Morrison convinced me to go read Clay Shirky's interview for On the Media (there's a Real Audio file as well as the transcript, but it was down when I visited), Get Me A Rewrite. It briefly covers wiki's, Wikipedia, and why people should know about both.

Wikipedia often comes up in a variety of workshops I run as an example of an new application and practice that educators need to be aware of - whatever the view they eventually take after investigating it. Students are already using it, and that's the bottom line. They need to be in a position to discuss what it is and how it works and how it should be referenced - or to offer viable alternatives.

A great activity, for both staff and students, is to assign a relevant Wikipedia entry to individuals or teams, and get them to verify the content and offer an alternative version. The work can then be used to lead discussion on finding and evaluating information online (BTW, Stephen Downes has just written a great resource, Principals for Evaluating Websites, which would support this approach perfectly).

Free Software for Busy People

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli seems like a pretty amazing guy, a medical doctor and computer programmer, originally from Bahraini, currently working on a million things including as a Research Fellow for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US.

He's also a champion of open source and has a collection of on and offline resources to that end: His blog, Free Software for Busy People and a book of the same name that you can buy in hard copy or peruse online.

The book is aimed as what Cory Doctorow terms information-civilians (what a great term! That'll appear again) - regular people who need to work with technology. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli has created the six characters above - who include a primary school teacher and a captain of industry-  to address a series of real life scenarios where open source software provides the solution.

Top ten...philosophers

In Our Time, the Radio 4 show which pioneered podcasting for the BBC, recently held a poll for listeners favorite philosopher of all time. Surprisingly (to me at least), Karl Marx won by a wide margin. Yesterday, in the last programme of the current series, the Melvin Bragg discussed Marx's legacy and relevance with an invited panel. The cast of the episode is available for free download for the next 6 days.

The programme's Greatest Philosopher Vote pages are also up - find out who the top ten were, listen to experts talk about them, checkout the timeline, play the quiz. It would be a really great model for a class project, and easily tweaked for any age group. Get your students to research and argue in a range of media for their top ten poets, feminists, superheros or what ever (you don't even have to restrict yourself to people - it could be historical events, or artifacts.), take a class vote and then put the whole shebang online.

UK online legal resources

Five new publications, written by Pinsent Masons solicitors, are now available in both PDF and Word formats on the JISC website:

• Copyright Law for e-Learning Authors
• Copyright Licensing for e-Learning Authors
• Accessibility Law for e-Learning Authors
• Data Protection Law for e-Learning Administrators
• E-Commerce Law for Web Administrators

The GERI project

The 'Gender Equality and Race Inclusion' (GERI) Project is an initiative aimed at careers advice providers, including school teachers involved in careers activities. It is  organised by the GERI Development Partnership, an organisation which aims to 'implement a series of initiatives to reduce gender and ethnic stereotyping in the area of careers information, advice, guidance and choice'. GERI is implemented in several EU countries, including the UK, Austria, Finland, Spain and Denmark, and is funded by the European Social Fund.

The site already carries some interesting resources - including a mini-bank of role-model case studies, where you'll find a woman programmer, techie, and, uh, Secretary for State. No games designers yet, or edtechs, but I'm sure they'll be appearing soon.

There are some extensive focus area resources, including Science, Engineering and Technology careers for women. Some modules for teachers are available online, with guidance for key stage 3 and 4 delivery including Careers in Information Technology - Myth and Reality (comes as a huge PDF file. You also have to register at the site to access it).

Thanks to Anna Round, University of Newcastle School of Computing Science.

Phishing sence

David Penrose links to the all new, mark II MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test. A great little quiz with 10 new example emails - can you tell which ones are phishy? US based, but still a very useful exercises, and one that could be easily Incorporated in to staff or student web awareness training.

Language is a Virus

Over at 43 Folders, Merlin tempts his usually well organized and time managed readership to splurge on creative activity over at Language is a Virus: Writing toys, games and gizmoz to inspire creativity - "a site full of fun tools and tricks as well as a bunch of interesting old articles from some notoriously wild Beat and Dada writers."

Don't just spend the day playing - introduce your student to the site. Some excellent classroom friendly stuff & ideas over there.

Weblog presentation

As promised, here are the PowerPoint slides I used at last weeks East Midlands e-Fair, for my short (and hopefully sweet) presentation on edublogging. WARNING! the penultimate slide may provoke mild agitation in your audience. Use with caution.

Many thanks to Scott Wilson, Ruth Reynard and Anne Davis and to the rest of the edusphere.

Download edublogging.ppt

Fun with Copyright

How do you make copyright an interesting, engaging topic to regular faculty and students, who tend to gaze off in to the middle distance whenever you raise it?

Here's an idea: talk about cake, something most people are happy and familiar with. There's a great post over at Boing Boing this week which discusses the legal implications of putting other peoples images on to cakes. Either use it as it stands, or split your participants up into teams - individuals or groups representing the bakery, the company holding the trademark/copyright, and of course the parent who just wants a cheap, locally make cake for their little darlings birthday. It's US based, so another task could be to get learners looking for your local countries equivalent laws.

Euro Science frenzy

The Xplora portal was launched today, a new European gateway for science education, providing resources for primary and secondary education. They've gone for a funky design which is fairly easy to navigate, although the front page reloading time is a bit annoying, even on my swift connection. It's for teachers, pupils, and other scientists.

Also new is Athenaweb – a European Commission production for audiovisual information on science. There is some really nice stuff over there but the access process is a little laborious.

SOSIG blog

SOSIG, the Social Science Information Gateway, already offer some pretty good features over at their website, including subject specific email alerts for events and resources, and it's Grapevine community areas. They also run national subject specific seminars on internet research skills. They've now gone blog, with SOSIG Subject News:

"SOSIG Subject News links to the research sites behind the latest news stories, including Government publications, research reports and existing key websites. Users can view entries by subject whether it is Education, Politics or Business and Management, giving 17 blogs in one and all are available via RSS"

Symphonies composed for mobile phones

Well, not quite. BBC Radio 3 are having a Beethoven season, 5th to 10th June, and are making all 9 symphonies - performed by the BBC Philharmonic and conducted by Gianandrea Noseda - available to freely download for a limited time in MP3 format.

Check the site for the full schedule, lots of Beethoven resources, and downloads. 

Robots

I used to play Star Wars in the playground at my infant school in Langefni, of course I always got to be Princess Leia. I still vividly remember the kids who used to play R2D2 and C3PO - shortish, solidly built red-headed Andrew and tall skinny Stephen. I'm sure neither of them still resemble robots, although who knows?

Helen Greiner must have had an approximate cultural experience of the then fledgling franchise, since her love for R2D2 is apparently what inspired a successful career in the robotics industry. CNN.com have a story about the co-founder of  iRobot, which produces robots for both the domestic and military markets. The interview would make an excellent starting point for a wide range of learning activities within ICT, business studies, critical theory and ethics.

I for one could happily cope with a Scooba while I wait for my own R2.

Blog Guides

Anil Dash for ProNet points up two potentially useful resources available at Yahoo: A comprehensive RSS users guide and their employee blogging guidelines. Cheers Anil!

The RSS users guide is, of course, primarily intended to support Yahoo service users (I do sub some feeds over there, and the service has improved a lot since it was in Beta, but I'm sticking with Bloglines for the foreseeable future), never the less, it's fairly comprehensive. Don't be put off by step five, monitize your feed. It isn't obligatory! In fact, I'm not even convinced that monitize is a real word. However, I'm sure some people will welcome the challenge to Google's current monopoly on the activity.

Strange to think that Yahoo is such an old, established player now. Their recent in-house adoption of RSS is in fact only one of the ways Yahoo are keeping themselves at the head of the pack - they've also recently built a search interface to find Creative Commons Licensed content, as well as video, and are supporting Wikipedia.

Records Management Toolkit for Schools

Over at eGov Monitor, Elizabeth Barber of the Records Management Society introduces a records management toolkit to help schools achieve FOI compliance:

"The purpose of the Records Management Toolkit for Schools is to provide all the records management which schools need to fulfil their requirements under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The toolkit contains:

• a sample records management policy
• tips and hints about records management and how to implement a records management programme
• retention guidelines based on the minimum retention periods for all the different record series which a school may create. "

Online & accessible

One of my many summer projects is going to be a literature and practices review of current online accessibility, prior to a wholesale audit of the College's electronic assets. And here's a great place to start: Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World, a paper by Brian Kelly (UKOLN), David Sloan (Digital Media Access Group, University of Dundee), Lawrie Phipps (The Network Centre), Helen Petrie and Fraser Hamilton
(School of Informatics, City University).

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.

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

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

Break out the cootie-catchers!

I'm English and we don't get cooties here - what ever they might be. From my research to date (watching The Simpsons) they seem to be some kind of imaginary disease you get from kissing or girls, or both.

Anyhow, the cootie-catcher (we call them chatter boxes) is just one of the fantastic paper toy models you can get in pdf format (I knew there must be a good use for pdf files) over at Marilyn Scott-Waters The Toymaker site.

Lots of these would be great for craft and topic work for under 5 - 13 year olds, and there's even a holiday themed section. Older learners could be asked to produce their own models, inspired by the site examples.

There are also black and white photocopiable and colourable toys.

She also has a book which you can buy (seems like a great gift idea, and she ships internationally) or you can support her work by donating (scroll to bottom).

All this and she has a blog too!

René Magritte

René Magritte: the illusion of reality is a really nice collection of resources about the bowler hatted Belgian surrealist.

eToolbox

JISC RSC Wales is hosting an eToolbox Service, designed for use by post 16 education practitioners interested in enhancing their teaching practice through technology.

The eToolbox is a website carrying information and links about learning related or learning supporting software - no reviews or examples of the programmes in edu-action at the moment. Are these coming?

Dance Dance Revolution Demos

I've posted about the fantastic Sonica Spanish before, so I'm more than happy to point people in the direction of the great work being done by Dr. Josh Trout, California State University, Chico - Lesson 10: Dance Dance Revolution

Josh has posted 5 video tutorials/demonstrations using Dance Dance Revolution to deliver the physical education curriculum, including an introduction to the software and hardware.  It's pitched at the 16+ level but should give teachers of students under this age plenty of inspiration.

He's also provided task sheets, links and a standards map.