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23 June 2008
June Newsletter
MirandaNet afternoon tea : Sunday 29th June - 3:00pm - 7:00pm- South Croydon
I do hope you will be able to bring partners, families and colleagues to this drop-in event to celebrate Professor Tanaka's visit to England on e-security issues. He will have his wife Madoka and a colleague, Professor Nonaka with him too.
Please let me know before 21st June when I shall be leaving for Prague to ensure there will be enough cucumber sandwiches and cake :-). I shall not be back until 27th June. You will be able to reach me on my mobile. I will send travel details on request.
Are you thinking about ICT CPD for next year?
Are you thinking about ICT CPD for yourself and/or for your school or institution? At the MirandaNet Academy we have been developing an innovative CPD programme relevant to the whole workforce that provides a range of accreditation, from Certificates of Course participation, Graduate Certificates, Post-Graduate certificates and Diplomas to full M-level qualifications. Opportunities are available for study at Doctoral level as well.
Our model is unique because the underpinning philosophy is to promote the same kind of collaborative learning for teachers that is advocated for their students. This programme with academic rigour represents a major shift away from teacher-dominated learning approaches to a more egalitarian view of learning. It is a methodological innovation which encourages a co-production of knowledge, a co-determination of meaning, collective problem solving, and multiple perspectives among learners and between learners and teachers. It also enhances cognitive skills and harnesses different learning styles. The strategy provides an antidote to individualistic and competitive learning tendencies filter down into the schools. As such, the programme, although still developing critical thinking.
For teachers in England some funding can be claimed from the TDA. We still have some places for whole schools and individual learners. Much of the model runs online so that we can welcome international members.
Please make an initial enquiry by Friday June 13th
YouTube and multimodal concept mapping : Doctorates in Progress
On 29th May at the Institute of Education in London, Christina Preston gave a doctoral progress presentation on multimodal concept mapping and Elisabetta Adami from Italy gave another on YouTube. You will find links to materials from this seminar here.
Report on the IWB seminar : 9th June
The Interactive Whiteboards research group met at the WLE centre, Institute of Education, London to discuss the programme for related conferences next year. MirandaNet members are invited to offer input to a key conference in Cambridge.
June 29-30, 2009 International conference on Research into School Teaching and Learning with Whole Class Interactive Technologies
www.educ.cam.ac.uk/events/conferences/ritwit
Please get in touch if you want to be involved in our group offering. Follow this link for the presentation about our current work.
>Christina Preston, John Cuthell
Send us your reports
We will be delighted to publish other members' seminar presentations if they have value for the MirandaNet community. Please get in touch if you have a presentation you would like to send us. Does not have to be doctorate level - any subjects of interest to other practitioners. Publication of seminar materials with a critique wins you a Fellowship. .
From Pedagogic Research to Embedded E-Learning
The latest issue of Reflecting Education is now available free. This special issue is entitled ‘From Pedagogic Research to Embedded E-Learning' and includes articles looking at practical experience and research about embedding e-learning in course design, development and assessment. Guest Editors for this issue were Harvey Mellar, Magdelena Jara, Martin Oliver and Caroline Pelletier from the London Knowledge Lab.
Follow this link to go directly to this particular issue.
The Machine is Us/ing Us
Some of you may have seen this clip before, although I think that it's slightly different from the one that I first saw.
Anyway, what is does, quite elegantly, is identify a range of possibilities to change the way we expect young people to learn.
Should it be required viewing for all senior managers? It certainly makes a change from PowerPoint ...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
http://ty.slss.ie/aboutus.html)
I have a VERY SHORT questionnaire directed at teachers on the practicability of IGL for them. I would be grateful if you might fill it in if appropriate or direct attention to the URL if you can.
There is a possibility that we can also offer a (funded by the project) CPD session on IGL, technology and related issues (home-school links, digital story telling/gathering, mobile learning....) if you get in touch soon.
The questionnaire is here.
New Scholars
Please feel welcome to send personal messages to new members if their interests match your own.
Robert Hague
I have decided to join MirandaNet following an inspiring talk by Lawrence Williams at Holy Cross School (part of a Specialist Schools (science) meeting). I would like to further the provision of Specialist Science initiatives at our school, particularly in an international context. I would welcome communications from anyone who may wish to develop such links or offer advice or suggestions.
Anneli Hansson
I am a postgraduate student in what we in Sweden call pedagogics, but others may call education. My research interest evolves around questions regarding the role of the teacher in ICT-rich environment. How does ICT and the use of web based tools affect the teacher role? ...still in my first year, struggling with thousands of questions and piles of reading! I have a background as teacher in what in Sweden is called "folk high school", a kind of semi non-formal school system for adults. Since 2002 I have been working as a teacher educator at Mid Sweden University. Born in the -50s, I have had to gradually adapt to the technical development, using my own questions and curiosity as a main tool... which has taken me sufficiently well ahead in my own opinion, although not at all to the extent of the much younger members of the family, I have to admit. Nowadays, they are my teachers, as I find the time to cope with all the new, all too limited.
Shabbir Khan
I am Teacher /trainer / lecturer.
Experience of teaching from GCSE to degree level.
Always use ICT in my lectures.
I believe that Teacher is the creator of the nation.
Stephen Pusey
For me as a musician, IT has been a part of the teaching landscape for 20 years. I remember having the chance to play with a dedicated Yamaha music computer at the dawn of MIDI - although, of course, I don't look old enough to have been teaching for that long! In that time the technologies available to us have developed beyond recognition - computers with hard drives, the internet in schools, email and social networking, audio applications and the kind of processing power that would have required a room full of hardware back then. The impact that all this has had on student outcomes, however, seems to progress somewhat more slowly. Yes, students can access information more easily and final outcomes often appear more polished but if the increase in student attainment was proportional to technological improvement - shouldn't all students be leaving school with foreheads the size of footballs by now? So where's the gap? Does technology make us lazy (staff as well as students)? Do we expect too much from it? Is it used as a "filler" activity when we need to entertain rather than educate? Possibly all of these are true but I suspect that another factor is more significant here - the time to be creative with technology - and being creative does take time (which costs money). My interest then, is in finding time for staff, through technology, to be more creative with technology in a way that impacts on learning.
Marcel van den Heuvel
I have been teaching at higher education level (Oxford University) since 1990 and have seen the rise of presentation software in lecturing in that time. I have now trained as a Secondary level Teacher of Science and am starting to teach at a school in Oxford in September. As I have seen at higher education level, presentation software is used, misused and underused at secondary level. I am very interested in the use of ICT as a means of teaching, exemplifying and helping students to further their knowledge with an emphasis, as outlined above, in presentation software. I would be very glad to exchange any experiences I have with the larger Mirandanet community as well as learn from what others can offer.
Boris Vidovic
I earned a degree in education and English and American Studies from Zagreb University. I worked a s teacher and educational counsellor before becoming a principal at Pujanke Elementary School in 1991. I introduced the Internet in school as early as it appeared in Croatia in 1994. The teachers and students started using it in the classroom in the academic year 1994/05. An American journalist wrote an article in Kingsport Times-News on December 15, 1995 how a group of youngsters from Miller Perry Elementary, USA, used its 21st Century classroom to correspond with students at Pujanke Elementary School in Split, Croatia, by electronic mail. The American news reporter reported the correspondence of American students with fourth grade students who were trained how to communicate with their peers from many countries in the world. From the article it can be seen, although the school only had one computer at that time, that students came into contact with many peers all thorough the world, that their viewpoints and answers to many of the posed questions were mature, well constructed, even when the delicate questions about war were discussed. Since those pioneering days of the advent of the Internet in schools, we have been exploring new digital technologies and using them in the classroom for curricular, extra-curricular and inter-curricular activities. We have achieved great educational outcomes in learning foreign languages and in designing and doing international projects, based on collaboration and team work. Today, we use e-learning as an experiment with the eight, nine and ten year old students. I made an 18 minute video last year to show how our teachers and students use LMS Moodle for e-learning.
Neil Winton
I am Principal Teacher of English at Perth Academy in Scotland. There are twelve teachers in my department, though only 5 are full-time English teachers.
I have been teaching since the early 1990s and have always been a keen advocate of ICT in learning - a fact I was recently reminded of by an ex-pupil who remembers me going on about how great Yahoo was in the mid 1990s.
As well as teaching English I was very heavily involved in developing Media Studies materials. This helped convince me that what we meant by ‘literacy' was changing.
I started blogging seriously in 2006, though I'd first started experimenting with using blogs to make work available to pupils in 2004... unfortunately, not enough pupils were online at that time to make it viable!
I make extensive use of blogs and wikis with my classes and am very interested in seeing how these tools can be used to develop "traditional literacy" as well as "new literacy".
As a result of my knowledge of 2.0 tools I have been asked to deliver In-Service Training to teachers in my Authority and have been consulted on a number of issues relating to social networking.
I will be delivering a seminar on Wikis and Literacy at the Scottish Learning Festival in September 2008.
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