I am moving on to a secondary school, an interesting job and back to my teaching roots.  It is really nice to have to move from the theoretical frameworks of blended learning back into the reality of the classroom.

So how do you teach ICT skills to 15 -16 year olds, i have the curriculum and it bored me… so here is the plan, and over the next 2 years lets see if it can work.

I am hoping to set up a newspaper (don’t be afraid Bournemouth Echo), within this setting must be almost all of the IT skills needed to pass a GNVQ ICT at least to level 3 or the BTEC equivalent.

Word processing is easy, if you conduct an interview you will at some point input it to a WP package, also students will need to cover stages such as the standards here, which comprise the learning needed for 1 whole unit.

“Documents can be divided into six basic types. These are:
• short formal documents
• extended formal documents
• graphical documents
• promotional documents
• presentations
• informal documents.”

The school is aptly named St Aldhelm, i suspect the patron saint of un-orthodox teaching if he is not then maybe he should be

Also on the School website is the primary vision for learning and teaching which i think sounds great a real move away from the industrial teaching we have inherited from the Victorians, and a positive move towards teaching for learners.

So as I don’t want to miss the opportunity of capturing this experience in a blog this will be the theme for the next two years.

Well it is official, i am moving job’s i have just handed in my resignation at Bournemouth University and it is off to a local Academy, what have i done?

It is always strange to put yourself in that limbo land between jobs, the new post is exciting, challenging and stimulating. A real oppertunity to get back to development of Blended learning and all things VLE.  Only this time it is in secondary education, and this is a chance to start with a blank canvass.

Maybe this time i will remember to Blog it all from the start!

Well the University of the creative arts have just quoted me, actually a really interesting discussion starting on how to present or teach. Thanks

I have a problem, and every time i talk about a possible solution people laugh.

Now you may by now be wondering what the problem is, it is a damaged wrist, it happend in hospital, just one of those things but it has left me unable to use a pen.

So what you might say, you use computers all day what do you need a pen for, well meetings, wrighting that first draft of a report, taking notes, all kinds of things i can not do without a pen. The solution is easy, an Ipad…. now how many of you laughed, sniggerd or just thought yep you would say that.

Think for a miniute, yes i would say that beacause it is a good solution. I can type fairly well with my left hand, i can use the ipad with one hand and it is light, portagble and has a long battery life. The note taking apps are getting better, but my notes are just for me so rough and ready is fine. I can type draft docs in and email them, or save them to dropbox, or google docs, i can read on it and (i think) annotate documents, it is ideal.

So why do people laugh, well it is not because it is a silly suggestion, it is that it is new, or just technology, and well It is Andy…..

http://www.youtube.com/user/EFForg

a panel discussion from electronic frontier foundation, it is long but well worth taking the time to listen.

http://www.privacybird.org/

Many of the web sites you visit may collect your personal information and use it in ways that might surprise you. Privacy Bird® and Privacy Finder are tools that help you find out what web sites will do with your information before you provide it. Privacy Bird is a free tool you can add to your Internet Explorer web browser. Privacy Finder is a free online search engine that will help you identify web sites that respect your privacy.

I know it is Febuary, and the year actualy started in

January but i have had to catch up, i have been looking at my eldest daughters “Facebook” page, just keeping intouch and enjoying being part of her life.  Here it is laid out in feelings and pictures, relationships and friends the private conversation open for others to join in. a family cubed, seen not just by my social network but those of my son and daughter.

Hannah

Just been catching up on my pod-casts, JISC 2008, from the Berlin education conference.  Now we are in 2009, a full year on from that conference but it still makes interesting listening.

The debate on give it all away and hedge it in they wont understand. personally i always end up feeling this is a debate about money, rather than high intellectual ideals, the currency of information and the ability of publishing houses to make luka.

With more and more of our lives focused on the online, Direct gov, wikapedia, email, chat, social networking, networking, the cloud what kind of information should we be putting out in the wild.

The podcast also mentioned the move away from VLE/MLE and back towards individual learning experience, weren’t we there a few years ago, and all the work we put into designing flexible systems which allow the user to pick and choose the communication channel, which largely got lost in the huge corporate machine of the single VLE, will now get dusted off and looked at again.

So what are we trying to do within HE, i do feel we are starting to loose our way,

But i am stuck indoors, often for me that is the problem with much education we do, we take in bright young students, with hopes and aspirations, show them a brave new world , then turn it into something akin to the sims, by divorcing their learning from reality, and dressing it up as academia.