A set of questions emerged:
No answers just thoughts J
Just looking at a new website developed for PGCE ICT collaboration by Rob Harrison. Well done Rob early days but this website is exactly the kind of thing that helps micro group CPD during ITE and after ITE into the first years and beyond.
The problem typically with these types of sites (IMHO as I have tried to run several) is sustainability.
There is a growing number of great communities out there my Twitter friends are probably the best!
Take a look at http://www.oko1.eu/
Yes it works
It’s been found recently , by Ofsted, that teachers tend to teach ICT up to the limit of their own knowledge, and that this effectively holds children back. In my experience, where ICT is taught by non-specialists, this kind of “dumbing down” goes on as a matter of course. It’s not deliberate: teachers don’t know what they don’t know. It’s therefore not a criticism as such. If I taught English, it would almost certainly be superficial, because I’m not an English specialist, even though I’ve been speaking the language for over half a century. Why should we assume that if we send someone on an interactive whiteboard training course and give them a laptop for producing their worksheets, and they book their vacations online, that they’re qualified to teach ICT?
The Educational Technology Site: ICT in Education: –> Computers in Classrooms 3 April 2009
It is interesting to observe so many similar patterns beginning to emerge in different contexts in various spheres around Social Networking this year. From my focus, Education, E-Learning and EdTech, there is the growing TeachMeet phenomenon; smaller cadres of smart educators like the teachers at the EdtechRoundup weekly Flash Meetings on a Sunday night; larger and more aggregated events like Amplified (facilitated and recognised by NESTA) and, indeed, direct action like the recent writetoreply site rezzed up in a couple of days by people responding to a need within the community to easily feed back and comment on Digital Britain and other forthcoming interim government reports.All this activity does seem to be pointing the same way like iron filings around invisible social magnetic fields and there are opportunities to effect systemic change from the ground up in a distributed way - in part. But each group seems to share some of the same frustrations, cul de sacs and challenges that involve such emergent change.
The question of implementation is simply whether or not a given idea, practice or program
gets “put in place”. In focusing on teaching and learning, for example, I have suggested
that implementation consists of (1) using new materials, (2) engaging in new behaviors
and practices and, (3) incorporating new beliefs (Fullan, 2001 a). The logic is
straightforward – no matter how promising a new idea may be, it cannot impact student
learning if it is superficially implemented.
Implementing change at the Building Level 2001
The time has come to start the process off and get my prep unit for the final part of my studies underway.
I have been thinking of some working titles for some time but I became increasingly frustrated that I would not be able to sustain the depth of work for most of them.
I have had some long thoughts and discussions about CPD lately and I decided that this may be a focus some time ago.
I try to develop some themes but got nowhere fast.
I went back to one of my original papers and the first paragraph stole it!
I wrote the paper in 2001 and I was looking at how Computer Supported Collaborative Environments could support learning.
I realized some 8 years later that I was still trying to achieve the same thing and that CPD and school organizational change was at the very heart of my journey.
My thoughts on CPD that had been drawn out for discussions at Mirandamod BETT 09 where I was asked about Critical incidents in my CPD. I realized preparing some research for this discussion that My CPD is all about my belief system.
So there will be a range of foci here:
The study will focus on a critical look at the difficulties ofschools achieving suggested good practice models in e-learning.
So Firefox add on’s are cool right?
This one called Scribe Fire allows me to blog from within the browser and is cool, nearly as cool as Flock!
