Basic ICT skills Free Online Learning Resource

ALISON

an organisation on a mission to make education in all subjects free worldwide – a great idea.

12 Technologies

Intended Consequences.

Short videos on emerging education trends in ICT including Virtual Worlds and Flat Classroom

Full 2009 Horizon report here

Whiteboard video clips for Eng Lit teachers – shameless plug for my work

60 minutes of HD video clips for secondary schools based on popular texts for Literature.
They go out as a programme on BBC2 in the Learning Zone from 5-6am on March 19th. Soon after the BBC will make them available as individual clips on the BBC’s class clips website, where they can be streamed in the UK.
The texts are:

• Opening two chapters of Hard Times as a period and modern drama and as a reading
• My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, performances of the orginal text set in two contrasting locations. These also contrast with the original version we made, set at an asian wedding, still available as a class clip
  
• the Gettysburg Address from the point of view of contrasting audience members, with some of the positive and negative press that followed the event
• War Poetry: Anthem for Doomed Youth and The Soldier, alternative readings in battlefield and home settings
• Sonnet 17: readings by male and female characters in contrasting moods 
• Go, Lovely Rose: readings by male and female characters in contrasting moods
• Inversnaid: reading by Hardeep Singh Kohli

The clips are between 1 and 6 minutes long. I hope they can:

• provoke questions about what writers mean 
• to show how meaning may change depending on viewpoint. 
• show how these very old stories continue to have great resonance and relevance in the 21st century.

Produced by me and made by a very hard-working team

Moviestorm 1.1 Tutorial – Using Cameras Video

If your Moviestorm movie is going to look good you need this tutorial – I’m still wrestling with the camera view in Moviestorm.

Moviestorm 1.1 Tutorial – Using Cameras Video

Posted using ShareThis

How not to write a story

Sue Waters blog is a huge resource for using ICT in the classroom.

For English teachers I also like Alan Levine’s blog which has the marvellous 50 ways to tell a story

including a demonstration of how not to tell a story, that reminded me a lot of being in several BBC ‘creative’ meetings:

Rubbish Acronyms

My local FE colleges want staff to meet up with businesses and share good ideas. So they’re going to set up Knowledge and Technology Exchange Nodes which will be known as Ktens. It’s not even snappy.

Twitter in the classroom

Good ideas from Tom Barrett Nineteen ways of using twitter in the classroom

And from successful teacher

Good writing for e-learning

George Orwell gave us six rules government wafflers (see my previous post) should use:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

I would add

7. Pay attention to your audience.

This post offers clear thinking about writing for the web.

Uninformative Government

The innovation select committees’ judgement on the overuse of jargon by the DIUS, is reported in Private Eye (issue 1229 p6).
The committee chastised the DIUS for the ‘inaccessibility of the prose’ and ‘jargon-riddled phrases, assumptions backed up with no clear evidence but designed to provide a positive tone, and euphemisms deflecting likely failure’
Here is the link to this marvellously entertaining report

Over 25 years I’ve seen the explosion of information in government outpourings to schools. Government writers regard a website as an opportunity to dump massive amounts of jargonistic waffle and then claim they’ve increased communication.
The QCA website the DCSF website and Curriculum Online (now deceased) have all left me speechless with frustration on several occasions. Cumbersome, disorganised and uninformative are the politest words I can find.

The sites often abuse the facility to link online endlessly to yet another 30 pages of mind-boggling inanity. These sites are dumping grounds for mountains of unhelpful verbosity piled high with no regard to the needs of the audience. Teachers are now enslaved to the whims of politicians, so they’re forced to try and make sense of this jumble of demands, however poorly expressed and organised.
Government Education departments have lost a sense of their duty to communicate powerfully, with precision and clarity.