Category Archives: ICT

technology in the classroom

ICT Innovator AUPs for teachers

  March 31, 2013 - 14:58 | , ,
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Acceptable Use Policies are a necessary and important document – contract – for teachers in any school because it is imperative that we are protected from the potential danger working online can bring. Following an intense scrutiny of safeguarding and child protection at our school, we published a strict and comprehensive Staff ICT AUP. For example, staff should not connect with any pupil on facebook until one year after they are of school leaving age, and only then with caution as through siblings and friends it can connect you to current pupils. However, two years on we have included in the new ICT strategy a review of this policy to incorporate a section for innovative teachers who want to employ … Continue reading →

Assessing the Integration of Technology in Learning Part 1

  February 20, 2013 - 11:24 | ,
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It is all well and good discussing or planning the integration of technology in a school, procuring devices and implementing your chosen device platform, but how do you measure if these big plans have had any impact? What are your success criteria? Is it enough to celebrate the individual wins without somehow analysing the broader picture for the entire cohort? This is the first of a handful of posts aiming to research and analyse modus operandi for assessing the integration of technology in a school. My MA research project is based around the evaluation of teaching ICT in subjects, which is related to this enquiry. But before I talk about that, let’s look at what constitutes assessment of technology integration. … Continue reading →

Giphy spices up staff communique

  February 8, 2013 - 11:48 |
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Following James Michie’s persistence on the distracting quality of giphy, I opened up the site and found myself bouncing around animated images for a while. Some of them are awesome. And because I thought so, others might agree and included one in my weekly ICT Tip newsletter. The newsletter email was sent at 07:00. By 09:00, three people had said how much they liked the animated pooch! And one person said how much they liked the ICT tip. Go figure. NB: interestingly, the person who liked the tip is an experienced user. Whereas the newsletter is aimed at beginner users, it seems it is helpful to untrained (self-taught – isn’t that pretty much all of us??) users too. Also, he … Continue reading →

My BETT13

  February 3, 2013 - 11:19 | , ,
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This image is from the DLR platform as the police swooped in to fix something: It was a really productive day attending BETT 2013. The main stand I spent time at was Frog. They pushed the boat out on advertising and PR this year, having graduated from a tech company with a market edge to a big player following the award of the Malaysia contract: some six million users representing every school in the country and their parents. This provides power; who doesn’t want a piece of 6 million users? It probably took a total of two hours of interrogation – ask @4goggas, I am thorough – to see all there was to see and ask all I needed to … Continue reading →

Computer Game Storyboard Design

  January 20, 2013 - 20:52 | ,
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I’ve just finished creating these resources – when I say creating, I mean copying from @dogtrax blogpost with permission kindly given by Kevin – so I thought it a good idea to share it with others. Two documents, made in MS Word and uploaded to Google Drive. In lessons, pupils will be able to use an online copy, an offline copy or a hard copy. 1. Storyboard design template with a table for the game design workflow designed by Kevin. 2. An exemplar of the storyboard design filled in. I might amend these files after I have used them but I like the simplicity of it all. Once again teaching Scratch, I am surprised and pleased by how engaged so many … Continue reading →