More pedagogy was to come at a JISC-run event in Birmingham last Tuesday, looking at the London Pedagogy Planner and Phoebe - another planning tool. Both planners could have effective roles in planning courses and sessions, but I thought that Phoebe would be more relevant to teaching practitioners, and especially teaching trainees, because it is incorporates a large amount of pedagogical guidance. Both planners are still in development, but existing versions are available for download, and the development teams involved (from IOE, London, and University of Oxford respectively) are happy to receive feedback.
Friday 7 March 2008
A Pedagogic Focus
More pedagogy was to come at a JISC-run event in Birmingham last Tuesday, looking at the London Pedagogy Planner and Phoebe - another planning tool. Both planners could have effective roles in planning courses and sessions, but I thought that Phoebe would be more relevant to teaching practitioners, and especially teaching trainees, because it is incorporates a large amount of pedagogical guidance. Both planners are still in development, but existing versions are available for download, and the development teams involved (from IOE, London, and University of Oxford respectively) are happy to receive feedback.
Thursday 6 March 2008
Many Meetings!
On 22nd Feb, I attended a meeting of Fforwm ITT (Initial Teacher Training) network. Issues discussed included the TQFW, mentoring, finding, minimum core – and on the last subject, I gave some of the ILT Champions’ feedback about the ICT part of this.
Monday, 25th February was a busy day, with Lis and I meeting up with staff from the School of Education at Swansea Metropolitan University in the morning, and then going on to the WAG building at Bedwas that afternoon to meet up with Christine Major and Michelle Sayers, LLUK, about RSC Wales’ role in the SSA (sector skills agreement) currently being drawn up.
Then on the 26th we had a team meeting! Best lunch of all the recent meetings, and good to see Karl too!
Wednesday 20 February 2008
Visiting Time!
At NEWI, we discussed aspects of the new ICT minimum core for TQFW (teaching qualifications framework for Wales) and I picked up some useful points (though I wasn’t happy about being recorded!).
When not travelling, I’ve been doing various things like arranging other visits/meetings, doing online seminars (one on Moodle using Elluminate, which is v. similar to Instant Presenter – the actual presentation wasn’t that good!), contributing a bit to the ITT task group wiki on JSLnet, going to Welsh lessons. (the pic is of Powis Castle near Welshpool - haven't actually been in!)
Tuesday 22 January 2008
w/c 14th Jan
Wednesday 16 January 2008
blogging and BETTing!
A new year and a new blog!
I'm starting this blog with an account of my visit to BETT - this was my first visit to BETT, and I could have done with a guide! The exhibition is huge, and packed full of people and gizmos; it’s hard to find your way around despite maps & signs, and the queues for food and for the cloakroom are off-putting. They could do with more seating, too! (proper old moaner, aren’t I?!)
Overall impressions of BETT: it’s a highly commercial event with a salesperson at every corner. The focus was very much on schools rather than any other educational sector, probably because there are a lot more of them hence a lot more money to be made from them (proper old cynic, aren’t I?!). Possible because of this, there was no JISC presence, though Becta was out in force.
Amongst the many stands I particularly noticed: lots of content/course providers (especially for science and art); lots of learning platform/VLE providers; providers of management information systems, classroom sound systems (to remove the need to shout!). There were hardware suppliers, though personally I saw nothing that looked especially interesting – possibly because there were so many people around the best stuff (but Chris Hall from Swansea University found some interesting things: http://swansea-learninglab.blogspot.com/2008/01/bett-2008-worlds-largest-educational.html ). There were a couple of small stands selling ‘immersive’ learning packages, but this sort of learning figured a lot less prominently than I might have expected.
What was good?
- course creation software for mobile devices from m-learning mobi (
Other info that I picked up included: OS provide free maps for 11-yr-olds; Channel 4 have a ‘clip-bank’ (which is not free, though maybe there’s some other stuff that is)
; and the BBC interesting oranges!