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5 March 2013

Nearly Spring News Letter

Newsletter Headlines

Nearly Spring Newsletter

February is an unpredictable month in England when flashes of Spring sunshine are followed by bone chilling cold - but there is hope because the snowdrops, messengers of Spring, are coming up already.

Snowdrops by Cath Walker Hiller sourced by Theo Kuechel

More predictable is our new season of Spring workshops and MirandaMods in Australia, England and New Zealand.

MirandaNet workshops, MirandaMods and conferences

1) Creative and Collaborative Professional Learning
Saturday March 9th: Manchester: MirandaMod. Join us online or face to face.

EEC Logo2) Re-engineering Education: a call for collective action Workshops in Australia and New Zealand, March 2013

A series of workshops, open to MirandaNet members in the Antipodes, led by Professor Marilyn Leask and Professor Christina Preston to be held from Monday 18th March to Wednesday 27th March at the following locations in Australia and New Zealand:

3. Debate the Role of Digital Technologies in Education

IT in Teacher Education (ITTE) UK Annual Conference

Mon 8 July - Wed 10 July 2013

In these challenging and changing times and ITTE and MirandaNet members are working together at the ITTE annual conference, expressly to include practitioners in the debates. The ITTE conference will be a great networking event where ICT professionals can discuss current debates that concern us. We will be tweeting highlights as the conference programme unfolds to build up knowledge about ITTE and the conference, see #itteorg

Invited Abstracts - What would you like to give a paper on? The theme of the conference is ‘debates’ examining technology across four strands:

  1. Initial Teacher Education - current developments;
  2. Primary ICT: new curriculum and applications of ICT in the classroom;
  3. Secondary: the computer science curriculum, cross curricular applications and ICT application to other subjects;
  4. CPD and whole school issues: digital technologies and professional learning - opportunities and challenges.

MirandaNetters are warmly invited to the Radisson Park Inn Hotel Bedford in Bedfordshire UK (45 mins by train, north from London’s St Pancras station; 20 mins north by train from London Luton airport). MirandaNet members are invited to attend the whole three day conference, which runs on from the World Conference for Computers in Education in Poland or, if preferred, MirandaNetters can also attend for just one day: the MirandaMod will be on Tuesday 9th July, followed by a dinner in a boat on the river.

Read more...

The ICT curriculum: what next?

One of the liveliest debates on MirandaLink in February has been about the new draft of the ICT curriculum. MirandaNet will be responding to the second consultation on 16th April with a submission based on the views that members have expressed.

Overall MirandaNet members agree that there is a serious lack of school students across Europe who are enthusiastic enough about the STEM subjects to take them up at university. Rethinking the ICT curriculum and increasing the computer science and computation thinking element meets general approval. However, there is distinct concern about the imbalance created by dropping digital literacy as well as the lack of trained teachers to deliver such a weighting towards computation thinking.

Since the announcement of the proposed disapplication of the ICT curriculum by Gove at the BETT12 exhibition the arguments have progressed in MirandaNet about the best way to respond. These have built up into a repository of different perspectives which members will use to plan a submission on the final draft to the Department for Education in England on 16th April.

The Westminster papers

The Westminster Forum on 28th February showed the breadth of our vision as a membership: Christina Preston presented the questions the membership would like to see debated on content, formal professional development and informal learning through communities of practice were presented on MirandaLink that provided the material for an article. Rachel Jones, a MirandaNet Ambassador, gave the industry perspective from her Steljes standpoint. Professor Carsten Trinitis, a Senior Fellow, Professor of Computer Science at Munich and Bedfordshire, looked at the plans from a German perspective. You can also find all the MirandaNet articles that led up to our current views on the subject. Read more...

The ICT consultation 16th April

Meanwhile MirandaNet will be sending in our submission about the new ICT curriculum on 16th April. Please send in the comments you want included by 9th April to christina@mirandanet.ac.uk.

BETT13 review

Thanks to the generosity of our annual associates, Iris Connect, Group Call, LightSpeed, Oracle and Steljes, we were able to run a four day debate at BETT13 this year in the new location, Excel, in East London.

Those of you unable to attend MirandaNet's opening session may enjoy Christina Preston's interview with Sir Bob Geldof about his own schooling and his approach to technologies. Sir Bob's appearance was sponsored by Group Call.

We think it is important that those who cannot attend our events can have access to the resources. In this spirit of sharing the videos were filmed by IRIS Connect, the sound equipment was supplied by Light Speed and the projectors and screens by Steljes. We will be putting up the BETT13 videos over the next few weeks. Oracle also helped with our expenses.

Our tabletop associates who offered some interesting demonstrations were: KO-SU, My Knowledge Map, Gebol, Ingot and TSM workshops You can read more about our associates here.

Terry Freedman says the show: "The BETT Show is, I’m reliably informed, the biggest education technology show in the world". Read more...

Merlin John Online also provides a round up.

New Fellows

The MirandaNet Fellowship was founded thirty years ago. So many colleagues have given their time and energy to making the events still relevant that we have instituted a new award, a MirandaNet Ambassador. Many thanks to Dr John Cuthell, Rachel Jones, Theo Kuechel, Dr Katya Toneva and Lawrence Williams.

Members who have recently shared their expertise with the membership at BETT13 are: Senior Fellows: David Obst, Dave Smith, Dr Mirka Cernochova and Jim Fanning, Fellows: Dan Bowen and Denis Lundie. The abstracts and presentations are here. Videos will go up soon.

Two Fellows have sent in case studies about tablets in schools: Kevin Burden and Abi James. Fellowship articles have also been submitted by Yunusa, A. Abdullahi about Developing and Evaluating Instructional Resources and by Atif Hussain, the ICT & Curriculum Specialist at an International school in Cairo Egypt, about The Essential Qualities for Effective Leadership in Schools.

The archive of all our case studies is here. Thanks to all our Fellows for swelling the MirandaNet resources. If you have a case study or an article to submit, or a multimodal comment on digital technologies in education please send to christina@mirandanet.ac.uk.

Recommending blogs

Some of our members publish valuable blogs around the topics we are interested in. These are some of the ones that I enjoy are:

Let me know which ones you enjoy for the next newsletter: christina@mirandanet.ac.uk

Events coming up

Being creative with digital technologies

Look out for the next MirandaMod: July 9th. Bedford at the ITTE conference

The Last Word

Learning Fundamentals

Here is a handy resource from Dr J. P. Cuthell

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