Tag Archives: Web2.0

If This Then That – Automating Your Web

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I’ve been playing around with a fascinating website called If This Then That http://ifttt.com.  Think of it as virtual gaffer tape that automatically ties all of your online activities together in a myriad of possible ways.

When you sign up you then need to connect it to as many of your online presences as you choose, there’s an impressive selection of so-called ‘channels’:

ifttt Channels

ifttt 'channels'

Once you’ve done that you enter the beautifully designed ‘creation’ tool and design you ‘task’, where in essence you choose ‘if this then that’. Choosing ‘if this’ happens in one of your ‘channels’ ‘then that’ automatically happens in another channel.

Rather than twitter on here are some tasks I’ve been experimenting with:

Those are some obvious uses but you can be much more creative with some of the other channels on offer.  The GMail channel allows emails to be sent from your account based upon one of the triggers, although my test of this using the Weather channel to email Mrs Stucke every time it rains in Manchester hasn’t amused her on this wet May weekend!!

You are currently allowed 10 tasks in total – the service is in limited free beta at the moment so I wouldn’t be surprised to see options to expand this for a fee in future.

Overall this is a stunningly designed tool that has massive potential and could prove incredibly useful if you manage many different online tools (and I know most people reading this do!).

I have 5 invites available, if you would like one please leave a message in the comments. And then share your creative uses of ifttt.

A Progressive Approach To The Internet In School

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A post I’ve been meaning to write for many months…

Battles:

I have had my battles with Internet filtering in the past, but I’m now the man in charge.  Every school I have worked in so far in my opinion has had an old fashioned ‘head in the sand’ view to filtering and acceptable use of the Internet within school.  I’ve ranted about this in the past.

Reversing a Head In The Sand mentality. CC licensed image from David Barrie at Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/addictive_picasso/

Battleground:

I would estimate that 95% of our pupils now own a mobile phone, and that 80% of these have unrestricted access to the Internet on these devices.  This doesn’t factor in devices such as netbooks, iPod Touches and PSPs that are also brought into school.  What this leads to is unrestricted, unfiltered access to the Internet within our school, and at a pace and quality that is ever increasing.  I also regularly receive requests from teachers to block this that and the other as a classroom management tool.

Battle plan:

I strongly believe that in response to this situation we need a new approach to Internet access within schools, something that still protects our children but also that prepares them for the World in which they live.

This comes in 3 parts:

  1. An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that is relevant, understood by all parties and linked closely to general school behaviour policies.
  2. Relatively unfiltered Internet access.
  3. Quality monitoring solutions.

Continue reading →

Facebook Groups in School?

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Facebook recently updated their Groups feature.  Allowing finer control over groups which you set up, who can join, who can post, who can share etc..   Their are also improvements to how you are notified about group updates and a new feature called ‘docs’ that provides a Google Docs-esque shared notepad / document. Group chat is also built in allowing you to talk to everyone in that group at once. For a demonstration head over to Mashable or watch this video:

So, the million dollar question… Could this be used in education? Could it be part of a VLEesque home-school link? Continue reading →

Influencing Policy Part 2: Becta-X: Old Conversations, New Connections, Bright Future?

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I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break.  The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector.  Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated.

The aims of the day were:

The way the digital media industry influences young people is both a threat and a real opportunity to education. As part of its “Fit for the Future” programme Becta has asked Just-b. Productions to independently bring together thinkers and doers from both these two worlds

We hope this participatory and distributed forum will break down walls between these two sectors, between big and small, between speaker and delegate, between real and remote participants and create fresh thinking on all sides.

I’ll not describe the entire order of events, if you want the details or indeed just the perspectives of others then please have a skim through some of these posts from other educators who were in attendance:

Fred Garnett / Tom Barrett / Doug Belshaw / Dai Barnes / Kristian Still / Nicola McNee / Ewan McIntosh

As you will see from those posts there was some discussion and reflection afterwards as to how much of a success the event was.  My 2-cents worth: Continue reading →

Surfing the wave – How I filter MY Web

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The best bits of MY web (Image by Niffty on Flickr)

The Internet I love (Image by Niffty on Flickr)

Inspired by Simon Job, this is a post about how I surf the torrential tidal wave of information that is out there on the Internet, how I filter it down into a manageable stream to consume and how I save the best bits for later.

I have been using Google Reader for the last 3 years or so to read the latest updates from my favourite websites and blogs.  I have just spent about the last 4 hours tidying up my list of 400+ websites which I follow after reading an article on Lifehacker about how to declutter and streamline you google reader inbox.

I hope there are some useful tips about Google Reader, Delicious & Instapaper for newcomers to rss, and to old timers with a bulging reader like myself.

I’ve split this little guide into three sections:

  1. How I read just the best bits of the Web that I want, filtering out the noise.
  2. How I save the best bits to read later or for future reference.
  3. How I find retrieve my archived information.

I’d be fascinated to hear how you filter the Web to your liking, and whether any of this was of use to you :)

Simon Job has created a great little graphic to explain this process:

Using The Web

Using The Web

Continue reading →

Twitter in the classroom rocks!

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Following yesterday’s use of Twitter in the classroom, I was walking to Period 5 (same class as yesterday) after lunch, when inspiration struck.  I remembered this post from @tombarrett .

Go and read it.

Go on!

I threw my lesson plan out of the window and did exactly what Tom did, here are the replies: (click through for them all)

This caused great excitement and interest in the topic, and really helped us look in to the language and mathematics of describing chance.

This class have really been inspired with the idea of my network, I had to stop them spending the rest of the lesson bombarding you all with further questions!  Bringing global connections into the classroom is a real attention grabber, and like it or not we are entertainers!

Nothing more to say – thanks Tom –  a great idea, and thanks to everyone who contributed to the lesson.

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Questionnaires Take 2 with Twitter, Google Forms & Wallwisher

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I had an observation lesson today and decided to pull out all the technology tricks!  We happened to be at a point in the scheme of work looking at data handling and collecting data in particular.  I decided I’d develop the Questionnaires lesson which I used at interview last year.  60 minutes should be enough to do it more justice.

So here’s the plan:

  • Discuss data quality based on previous lesson
  • Tweet a link to my questionnaire and a Wallwisher for feedback on the questions
  • Fill out my questionnaire full of deliberate mistakes in class
  • Look at the live data spreadsheet
  • Groups look at the data for one question, suggest problems with the data collected, and suggest improvements to the data.
  • Discuss findings, looking at key points of: Leading Questions, Bias, Open/Closed Qs, Personal Qs, Options Boxes, Group boundaries etc.
  • Look at Twitter feedback on Wallwisher, compare to our own thoughts
  • Each team leaves one learning point on our own Wallwisher.
  • Compile new Qs into anew Questionnaire

Continue reading →

Google Wave – First Impressions for Schools

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Well you can’t have missed the fact that Google has finally unleashed Google Wave to 100,000 lucky testers, and with it a tsunami of hype.  I was lucky enough to be one of the 100,000 first wave.  Enough of the puns, if you want a bytesize explanation of what Wave is then this video is the best start:

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TeachMeet North West – My Presentation

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I’m doing a quick presentation at Teach Meet North West tomorrow night in Manchester.

If you haven’t been to a Teachmeet before it’s an ‘unconference’ where enthusaistic teachers get together to share ideas, usually with an E-Learning theme.

I’m doing a 2 minute nano-presentation on Google Forms, based on my interview / blog post from earlier in the year.

Here’s the presentation.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there :)

The VLE debate, my thoughts

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There has been much debate of late about whether Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), particularly in their British state sponsored variations are dead.  For some of the thoughts check out Lindsay Jordan, James Clay, Matt Lingard and Steve Wheeler.

One week today I finally start my new job as Director of E-Learning at a high school in Manchester.  One of my key priorities is to run the school’s VLE.  My current understanding is that they played with their own Moodle a few years ago which was then replaced with Trafford LA’s Fronter based system.  I’ve not heard a good word said about Fronter whenever I have come across it, and have had poor experiences of it myself whilst using the NCSL’s VLE.  As with most of the UK, this VLE is the only one fully supported by the LA, and it is heavily subsidised for at least a few years.

I am yet to be impressed by any of the commercially available, BECTA approved VLE solutions.  The only one I have heard numerous positive remarks about is Frog, but I’ve yet to see it in action myself.  I agree with a number of comments made in the discussions linked above, particularly that these commercial systems appear ‘clunky’ at best.  That there is almost always a better solution for each part of the system available on-line and often for free.

So many tools! (CC Attribution by Felipe Ibáñez Guzmán)

Continue reading →