BBC News - Essa Academy: Bookless school where everyone has iPad

BBC News - Essa Academy: Bookless school where everyone has iPad:

An interesting article that offers a number of questions. I have a concern though whilst I am used to students contacting me at any time this is a culture change and needs managing. As teachers we are being expected to work longer hours and take work home - now the work may not stop. Whilst sat at home marking into the evening can I expect interruptions from students asking questions about their latest homework. Surely a better system would be to encourage the students to help each other, set up forums to enable students to help each other. But that's just 'cheating', I here you say, oh no my experience is that students just need a pointer and they do actually want to learn, anyway who's to say they are not learning by collaborating.

I am all for it, bring on the technology but please make sure our students can use a pen as well, we don't want handwriting skills to disappear in the same way as numerical skills have since the advent of the calculator.

I eat humble pie

Original links to elearning tools page.

iGoogle is dying - I have spouted on about certain tools for a few years now and iGoogle has long been a favorite of mine. One web page that enables links to be stored and post-its to be formed. I posted my use of this to fellow students a while back and shared my homepage the advantages were clear to me as demonstrated to the right. Sadly though overnight the links app stopped working and although Google will not be shutting down the tool till next year it is already rendered useless because

iGoogle page rendered useless

developers have withdrawn and taken there apps with them this active page linking to a range of useful tools has been rendered to nothing more than a useless untidy web page. This is a draw back with working in the cloud you will always be reliant of the tools being available. and when this is not the case you are left in the dark. Good old Google - never mind I guess I will have to fall back to Symbaloo but it does make you think - whats next?

E856 - Ends

Another Module comes to an end, its been a hard slog this year, too much happening at work to really get my teeth into the project as i wanted too. I still consider it a success but I had more ambitious ideas - still time will tell.

It's been a strange year one way or another a lot has happened this year many family successes and as I write A'level results bring good news to one young man who now starts off on his Higher Ed journey. Whilst mine is coming an end, this completes my Masters and will probably be the last formal qualification I push myself towards (Well that's what I said last time).

Time for a treat I think and welcome a new gadget, enter the Nexus 7 with a priority to start reading non technical stuff for a while.

Suckers this way

Social Networks Popularity (Lynch, 2011)

As social networking becomes an ever increasing part of our on-line lives, some news this week must surely raise concerns over how much personal information is left on-line. Linkedin has been hacked with over 6 Million users passwords on the list. An interesting spin off, Osborne(2012) invites users to enter their passwords to see if they are on the list. Get real you may work for the Guardian but seriously? You want me to type in my password to a site? What a great way to collect additional passwords. Needless to say I didn't put my password in but I thought I would try with 'bollocks' instead (forgive my French). Surprisingly it was on the list. So someone out there is using this as there password on linkedin, amazing.

Passwords like this are so predictable my password is much better its 'HyrJ3t%23a' very difficult to hack because its not a word, has upper and lower case and a non standard character. Now are you thinking 'the idiot has just put his password on a website', well I will leave you to ponder over that but if you check it you will find it has not been hacked - YET.

There is no doubt the trend in social networking is on the rise and as Lynch (2011) graphically represents Linkedin is up there with the best. I am off to change my password now I think.

References
Lynch,L. (2011) ‘How college professors use Facebook’, Schools.com, April 27[online], http://www.schools.com/visuals/college-professors-on-facebook.html (08 Jun 2012).

Osborne, H.(2012) ‘LinkedIn hacking: a timely internet security reminder’, The Guardian, 7 June 2012 , [online] http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/work-blog/2012/jun/07/linkedin-hacking-internet-security (08 Jun 2012).

Professional Development | Changes in School Leadership

Professional Development | Changes in School Leadership

This resource is from the series Need to Know. New models and new routes into headship. Mike Baker helps clarify the new landscape of school leadership, including hard and soft federations, and the new NPQH. Finding creative ways of addressing the difficulties faced by a shortage of prospective school leaders has become one driver for new models of headship. For example schools can now share heads, from informal arrangements through to formally binding legal federations. The flexibility is encouraging if you're considering leadership, but now prospective heads must also ensure they hold the NPQH - as from April 2009 only NPQH graduates will be able to apply for the top jobs. Produced in 2008.