Unconference at Southwell School

Well I went to my first official Unconference.  I thought it was fantastic.  Basically it is a group of people that come together to talk about a topic.  You talk to who you like, when you like and about what you like.  You leave when you want to, and fill the gaps in your knowledge.  

Company was good, food was good, venue was fantastic.  There weren't as many people as I would have liked but still an interesting collection of ideas. 

google UNCONFERENCE some good definitions.

Mini laptops

Interface magazine has published an article about mini laptops for individual computer access. I wonder how this will pan out long term in schools. It could go one of two ways in my opinion.

The first way - schools will jump on board with little long term thought about the implications of such machines. Will the children want to use them, what will happen when they break, who will be responsible to buy them and what will the long term benefits be? Are they going to be a novelty for a while and then a big white elephant like the OHP (Overhead projector)

However, success will lie in the hands of the teacher who uses the technology. They need to be educated about what it means for every child to have access to a laptop. They also need to understand how to integrate these laptops into everyday teaching and learning. Hopefully they will be more than publishing machines where Word is over used and web 2.0 applications are under utilized.





http://www.nz-interface.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=13&id=44

Just my sense of humour!!!

iPod touch

Well, I have weakened and brought an iPod touch. My initial opinion is that....it is fantastic. There are lots of features I didn't realize it had. You can download applications for it and the best thing is that they could possibly have some sort of educational value. There is a whole section on educational applications that I browsed through, there are brain developing games to file management. Apart from that it is going to make my life a lot more organized. Thank goodness LOL

As long as you are connected to WiFi you are fine. An iphone without the phone. Perfect I say.

Google Docs

I have decided to experiment with setting up all of my children in my class on Google docs so they can publish their narrative stories and invite other students and myself to edit them and make suggestions. It is very interesting because I have had an email from a parent showing concern over their child having a gmail account as everything can be done via their joint email and they see no reason why their child would need one.

I am worried about this, I believe that cloud computing will be the way of the future and if parents are stopping their children from even experiencing these things then these children are going to be disadvantaged in the future. The Internet can be a scary place but with educated kids this can be limited. Its not about educating the children, its also about educating parents that still want education to be the chalk and talk of 20-30 years ago.