ICT Nuggets

The question is  … is there an analogy with ICT anywhere?

Youtube Link

A longish film of Sir Ken Robinson.  I guess most of you know Sir Ken and where he stands, personally I think he is spot on.  Please watch the whole thing, if not then just 2 minutes near the end – just skip forward to 35 minutes 10 seconds in.

He mentions a language teacher who explains that “Some aspects of French are just boring” ..

it makes me think ….

Sir Ken Robinson Video

Another bit I like is at 37 Minutes when he talks about ….”If we just standardise everything it’ll hum along nicely” the problem is that schools have humans in them and they are all non standard so sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it won’t.

Have you ever tried Microsoft OneNote – it is maturing into a really powerful and useful tool.  If you could get it for around £35 it would be a bargain

Well – guess what – now you can.  Oh and by the way you’ll get a fully licensed version of Word, Excel, powerpoint, Access, Infopath, Groove, Communicator, publisher and outlook thrown in for free.

Yep – the full Office 2007 Enterprise suite for £35 – the only snag is that you have to be a student

The Software4Students catalogue also includes music software, Adobe Creative Suite for Macs and PCs, as well as other software.

There is also a free promotional pack for their school through the Software4Students website. This includes information on how pupils can earn the school money via a rebate on all purchases.

http://www.software4students.co.uk

Expected to be released in 2010 the upgrade looks to be useful with some features that should have been there for many years.

• A proper print preview will now be available for all application.
• Much better sharing through Sharepoint (Merlin) and Windows Live – making collaboration much easier
• Paste preview seems like a good idea as well.
• There will also be some ‘on demand’ translation features available in several (if not all) apps.
• Word will have image editing in place (no need for additional software) – this will include ‘effects’ as in the current powerpoint 2007
• Fonts control will now be much better (though I still think that a ‘proper’ font management system is a missing component from the OS)
• The much hated ‘Word Art’ will have a work over as well – more effects, glow, neon and the like
• Excel will be able to link with SQL servers more easily
• Better pivot tables (called ‘Slicer’) making summarising much better
• A graphic called ‘Sparklines’ look interesting but I need to find out more about these – they seem to be a visual (eg a line graph) for a row of data.
• Outlook gets the ribbon treatment so will look much different
• At last you’ll be able to follow conversations in Oultlook
• Powerpoint will allow embedding of online video and will make it easier to break a slide deck into (what I call) chapters (or maybe sections)

Sounds good to me.

I came across this blog entry showing another teachers thoughts on the new GCSEs.

http://happyhippy.edublogs.org/2009/07/02/new-gcse-ict-specifications/

In a nutshell – he doesn’t like the Edexcel idea, its “worse than DiDA” apparently.  Given that DiDA was the only explicitly problem solving based course you will infer from this what you will.

OCR are offering a ‘Computing’ GCSE.   NOT based in the  National Curriculum – music to some peoples ears I suspect.  Lots of Binary to hex conversions, OS comparisons and programming – woo hoo.  Their new GCSE on ICT also looks quite interesting.

WJEC and AQA seem fairly traditional (but quite rigorous assessment proposals).

More on this later I suspect.

Refers to Generation Y – the children of Generation X (the baby boomers).  Millennials are born around 1985 – 1990 making them just about starting Secondary education now.

So what is so special about them?  well, they expect the ability to work together without sitting in the same room, they want to take their data with them wherever they go, they want to chat (over voice and video) with friends and family, and they expect instantaneous and unwavering access to the Internet.

Hummm

I’ve just seen ‘Milo’ on SEN Nuggets and have to tell you about it.  Go and have a loot – it just takes a couple of minutes

This may be somewhat ‘staged’ at the moment but imagine where this will take us.

Awesome – and think –  – it’s here and now.

SEN Nuggets Article

FutureLabs have produces a series of Posters that they are giving away free.

A4 versions are downloadable, larger format are ordered online (but still free).

The themes are:

Adult Informal Learning
Family Learning
Games and Learning:

If you’ve not come across this yet then do so now …  WOW

At the moment this is about controller free gaming on the XBox but the implications are massive.  Not only voice recognition but now face and body recognition allowing for ‘natural’ control of the computer.  And available now!

YouTube Video

I’m sure that you’ve heard of the TED talks – if not have a look at one of my favourite:

• Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity.

I recently came across this article that gave the 10 golden rules for TED talks as well as a list of some other interesting presentations  (including a comparison between Bill Gates in ‘TED’ style and ‘powerpoint’ style – just showing that everyone can improve).

The 10 golden rules are:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.