30 April 2008
I’m currently reading Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations by Clay Shirky, which is a cracking good read. There is one passage early in the book which really resonates with what we are trying to do with Beanbag.
From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action For the last hundred years the big organizational [...]
14 March 2008
The DCSF campaign to get teachers working outside of the classroom has been boosted this week with the launch of the Teaching Outside of the Classroom website. The aim is for trainee teachers to go on placements during their training at non-school educational sites, such as adventure centres and museums. The manifesto for this was [...]
12 February 2008
After a long silence Maxis (of The Sims fame) have at last announced a release date for Spore.
Spore has been gestating for several years, Will Wright the creator first talked publicly about at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. You can watch a 35min video of his talk on YouTube, below.
5 February 2008
There’s an interesting new project from the fabulous Creative Commons folk.
ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, [...]
30 January 2008
The Doing our homework post on the Lat Long Blog from the Google Earth and Maps team highlights some new YouTube video tutorials that offer up basic tricks for using Google Earth and can serve as inspiration for lesson plans.
22 January 2008
Sanako, a Finnish education software company, are teaming up with Nokia to get their classroom management software working with the Nokia N810 handheld. It’s not a phone but a wifi enabled handheld computer running Nokia’s Maemo flavour of the open-source Linux operating system.
See also: Sanako mobilizes class management with Nokia.
21 January 2008
Blogger and podcaster Dan Benjamin has posted a guide to the equipment he uses for podcasting. His ‘entry level’ setup is a bit pricey — he recommends spending around £90 on a microphone — but there may be some useful tips here for those who are serious about producing really high quality recordings.
16 January 2008
Classroom 2.0 is US-based site which describes itself as a social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.
They seem to be making good use of social software tools themselves, including a wiki and a blog. And the site itself is built using Ning.
14 December 2007
Radio Lingua offers a series of free language learning podcasts in different languages, including Coffee Break Spanish, One Minute Polish and My Daily Phrase: Italian. The focus is very much on short, easily digestible chunks (arguably too short in the case of the One Minute series). The range of languages seems to be growing steadily [...]
11 December 2007
Tomorrow’s Professor Blog is:
A partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to create a forum for comments and discussion about articles from the Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List and about general issues concerning higher education.
The blog and the associated mailing list seems to be aimed at science and engineering graduates embarking on an [...]