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A personal reflection on my ‘learning journey’, written as an exercise for Roehampton’s PG Certificate in Learning and Teaching in HE.

Education is something I care passionately about.  I love to learn new things, I love to share the things I learn with others; I feel fortunate to follow a career which allows me to do something I love doing for my job!

A number of themes emerge from the way points I’ve selected from my personal learning journey – autonomy and independent learning, participation in a community of practice and a willingness to pursue excellence. These are factors which fit well with IT as my subject domain; computers and the net are great tools to facilitate independent, autonomous learning, the web has made it much easier to participate in distributed communities, both formal and informal, and the interactive, provisional nature of computer based work facilitates an iterative process of development. These shouldn’t detract from the idea that learning is fun. Right from early years up, discovering new things about ourselves and our world is, I’m sure, an intrinsically exciting, fulfilling thing. Enjoyment features highly too in my experience of technology, and my aspirations for IT education. Read more

It was a great pleasure to attend last Tuesday’s Mirandamod to hear Etienne Wenger discussing communities of practice (CoP), with particular relation to education, both in schools and, particularly, in relation to teachers’ continuing professional development. I’m sure that the CoP approach to CPD is both more fulfilling for the individual and more effective for the profession than the traditional training model of courses and powerpoints that we see so much of: my own professional development has owed far more to colleagues in the various staff rooms, communities and networks with which I’ve been associated, not least MirandaNet, SchoolForge and Naace, than the training courses I’ve occasionally been sent on; I doubt my experience is that unusual.

Mirandamods are a particular style of unconference, bringing something of the reflection of an academic seminar to the participatory, micropresentation format of a teachmeet, and thus I took my turn presenting, taking the above title as my theme. Read more

Moving between Windows computers in my new office and teaching rooms, my Ubuntu netbook and my MacBook Pro, I find myself relying more and more on web-based tools, particularly google mail, calendar and docs. I also find myself valuing ever more highly Mozilla Firefox’s rich armoury of extensions, which are rapidly transforming the humble web-browser into my portable desktop and, in effect, my personal learning environment. Below are a few of the extensions I’ve discovered, but I’d be very interested to hear about extensions you use yourself, and any you use with pupils. Read more

An article in today’s TES about ways in which schools might encourage more pupils to take up places in science, technology, engineering and maths, including comments from me and others involved with Computing at School:

“With an extra 10,000 undergraduate places in ‘Stem’ subjects, how can teachers encourage sixth formers to take the technical route into higher education? Hannah Frankel reports

So you thought the dot-com bust in 2001 spelt the end of the computing boom? Well, that’s not what the Government thinks. Despite the chronic shortage of university places this autumn, it recently announced 10,000 extra undergraduate places for the so-called “Stem” subjects: science, technology, engineering and maths.”

Read more on the TES website

Some notes written as introductory material to this year’s primary PGCE course

What is meaningful learning? It is learning with a purpose, learning which allows those who engage in it to attach more meaning to the world around them, learning in which things make more sense. Jonassen’s exploration of this area (2007) argues that meaningful learning is characterized by its being: active, constructive, intentional, authentic and cooperative. It is worthwhile thinking about each of these aspects to consider how ICT might make learning more meaningful. Read more

Originally published at http://opensourceschools.org.uk/michael-k-lling-greenfoot.html

It’s great to see Open Source Schools community member Michael Kölling’s new book, an Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot published.

Greenfoot is one of the new wave of graphical programming environments written with learners in mind. Like Scratch, Alice and E-Toys, it’s open source software, and as with these other examples, it’s a toolkit which lets learners start writing code for themselves, taking control of the computer and learning through problem solving and experiment, providing a powerful way of looking at the world. However, where Scratch, Alice and E-Toys all nod in the direction of the historically significant (and still used) Logo programming language, Greenfoot supports Java, with its users learning standard object-oriented programming in Java, admittedly within a development environment that makes working with interaction and graphics very easy. As Michael puts it in his introduction, “While Greenfoot is an educational environment, Java is not a toy language”. Read more

The BCS have published their response to the Rose review recommendations, which I was pleased to have contributed to:

Members of the BCS (British Computer Society), including those on its Education and Training Forum and Expert Panel, have studied Sir Jim Rose’s recommendations for changes to the Primary Curriculum and associated documents released by QCA. BCS is pleased to submit its online response to QCA on these recommendations. Read more

From http://opensourceschools.org.uk/schooltool-v10-released.html

Those who’ve been following the recent Open Source Schools discussion thread on open source MIS systems will be pleased to learn of the release of SchoolTool v1.0 after what developer Tom Hoffman describes as a long and winding road, stretching back to 2000.

SchoolTool, whose development has been supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation, is a web-based, open source, student information system and calendar server designed for primary and secondary schools worldwide. The goal of the project is for a simple, turnkey system. Today’s version 1 release supports demographics, gradebook, attendance, calendaring (inlcuding timetables and resource booking) and reporting. With a well documented API and modular architecture, it should be possible for other developers to customize SchoolTool to local requirements and add in extra functionality, as well as supporting integration with other web-based tools. There are more details of the feature list at http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/features.html

SchoolTool is released under the GPL v2, and is buit in Python on Zope 3, with internationalisation already in place via Launchpad’s Rosetta service. It’s a three step install on Ubuntu Linux.

Tom and his team are commited to continued, brisk development prior to a number of scheduled deployments for the next academic year, and are keen that “schools, service providers, government agencies, vendors, hackers and other interested parties” have the chance to test, use, deploy and offer feedback on SchoolTool over the next few months.

There’s already been some discussion on the SchoolForge UK MIAS list.

Sugar, the operating system and GUI for OLPC’s truly innovative XO-1 laptops is now available, in beta at least, as a bootable USB stick, allowing any netbook, laptop or desktop to run this amazing re-interpretation of educational computing.

Sugar is built on the idea of activities rather than programs, with an interface designed to be ‘discoverable’, ie one which children can learn through play and experimentation. Sugar also affords a social experience of computing, as activities are sharable with other students using the same mesh server, thus allowing collaborative text editing, browsing, graphics and indeed programming. Read more

Written for Open Source Schools

Ofsted’s report on The Importance of ICT was published over a month ago, and was met with perhaps a degree of surprise at some of its criticisms about aspects of ICT provision in schools, most notably for higher attaining and older pupils. There’s much in the report to strengthen the case for greater use, and indeed development, of open source software in schools. Read more

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