Having just spent the last two hours following a number of live blogs and chatting with fellow fanboys on iChat I am left deliberating the iPad. Personally speaking I didn’t feel the buzz of excitement that came when the iPhone was announced and although I probably won’t buy one myself I do predict I will be surrounded by iPads by this time next year.
This week @colinnapier has produced an invaluable resource for our students. Seven completely free applications to replace their expensive commercial counterparts. These applications have been put on CD for those pupils who would face problems downloading over 600MB of software. We tried to select applications that offered both Windows and Mac support.
I have been thinking over the last few weeks about school based pupil email provision. I have to confess we have been considering investing in an advanced Google Apps for education (paying so we can apply a policy) system for pupils after a very successful model with staff. When providing for pupils a school really can not provide any sort of ICT system without some sort of save guarding filtering or quarantine policy and this is what Google charge for.
I would be interested in hearing your opinion on teachers using social networking in particular when school life and out of school life overlap. Should there be a school policy for social network usage by teachers ? I have been pondering with other social network education users this very idea, one suggestion is a policy along the lines of :
Firstly let me explain that this is a post documenting an exploration in the benefits of ICT, creativity and communication in learning. In many ways it is a post asking for opinions on an idea rather than presenting a definitive view.
There is nothing more motivating (and exciting) as digital creativity in the classroom. I personally think you would be hard pushed to find a teacher who doesn’t love offering their pupils digital creativity opportunities yet we all face the age old problem of having little TIME to learn new technologies and even less time to freely experiment in class.
I was thinking back to this time last year, the stress of the O2 upgrade process over at about 10am the iPhone 3G would arrive on the doorstep despite being told my upgrade hadn’t been processed. I was happy, the Apps Store was open and MobileMe was in the throes of an upgrade….
The new Flip Ultra HD camera was released in the UK today. We reviewed the Mino HD that offered 4GB of storage a few months ago and loved it. The Flip Ultra HD offers a massive 8GB of storage and is actually cheaper than the Mino !
