The best of the blogs this week…

Augmented Reality in education: Some ideas on the user of AR in schools and FE institutions.  http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/mlearning/augmented-reality-in-the-library/

dICTatEd: Funding for ICT will be tight in coming years, making it essential that a consensus is reached on its application.  http://flux.futurelab.org.uk/2010/07/05/dictated/

Why email is not good enough for modern communication: Tools like Posterous encourage the sharing of ideas with  a community.  http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2010/07/08/why-email-is-not-good-enough-for-communication-today/

The Periodic Text Message Table: A helpful table to help teachers keep in touch with their students.  http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2010/07/take-15-years-off-and-understand-your.html

The benefits of online degrees for people with learning difficulties: Online education has clear advantages for many learners.  http://successfulteaching.blogspot.com/2010/07/benefits-of-online-degrees-for-people.html

augmented reality, blogs, email, ICT, online learning, SMS

We’re into double figures…

Online population rises by 2m users in past year: Numbers boosted by over 50s, particularly men, and women of all age groups. http://www.nma.co.uk/news/online-population-rises-by-2m-users-in-past-year/3015239.article

PSL reveals the latest theory and practice in partnering in education: Discussion on the need for partnerships in education in a time of public sector cuts. http://www.trainingpressreleases.com/newsstory.asp?NewsID=5524

Research shows iPhone users download twice as many paid apps as Android users: article looks at why Android users are less willing to pay for apps. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apps-iphone-ipod-android-2010-6

The Great Outdoors: article about using ICT and technology for schools outdoors. http://technostories.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/the-great-outdoors/

Google to challenge Facebook with new social networking service ‘Google Me’: rumours about Google Me came from a now-deleted tweet. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-to-challenge-facebook-with-new-social-networking-service-lsquogoogle-mersquo-2014621.html

apps, blog, blogs, Education, google, iphone. facebook, partnerships, web

Round (-up) 3. Fight.

• Mobile phones and literacy in rural communities: MILLEE is studying how underprivileged children can acquire language literacy outside the classroom. http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/mobile-phones-literacy

• Nearly 5 years later, “@gmail” set for a UK comeback: After compulsory switch to cumbersome “@googlemail” because of a legal dispute, “@gmail” to become available again. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/03/gmail-uk/

• Mozilla gets it right, moves identity management into Firefox: Mozilla puts its browser in charge of your online logins through a new menu item in the main toolbar. http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/04/mozilla-gets-it-right-moves-identity-management-into-firefox/

• Apple iPad to be handled with care, publishers warned: Publishers warned that publishing opportunities for iPad will come with strings attached. http://www.nma.co.uk/news/apple-ipad-to-be-handled-with-care-publishers-warned/3012923.article

• Assessment using technology: BECTA booklet reveals that few teachers are making use of useful technology which can assess and suggest learning tasks. http://blog.core-ed.net/derek/2010/05/assessment-using-technology.html

blogs, Education, email, ipad, literacy, Mobile, Publishing, web

Wednesday 13^th January sees this year’s BETT Show roll into town. Housed within London’s cavernous Olympia and playing host to 600 exhibitors and almost 30,000 visitors, BETT is the largest educational technology conference in the world.

Every year BETT gives teachers and those involved in education the opportunity to enhance their knowledge of learning through technology. We will be there, catching up with friends, partners and clients – and investigating some of the new developments at the start of an exciting new decade for ICT in education.

The central theme that seems to be coming out of the build up to BETT 2010 is playfulness. Professor Stephen Heppell will be running a new feature at the expo entitled ‘Playful Learning’ – an interactive area where visitors can immerse themselves in educational gaming at its best and use fun technology to overcome learner engagement issues.

Prof Heppell points out that “survey after survey suggests that our UK schoolchildren may be some of the least happy in Europe” and thinks he has the solution: “Playful learning is great fun and has re-energised classrooms, rekindled school-parent relationships and re-engaged brains.”

Other new features for BETT 2010 include the Future Learning Spaces area, which will give visitors a glimpse of what classrooms could look like in several years’ time, and TeachMeet Takeover – thirty minute slots when vendors hand over their stalls to informal, teacher-led discussions.

BETT 2010 looks set to reflect the trends and developments of the past year. The last twelve months has seen the continued rise of social media, and particularly the explosion of Twitter into the mainstream. There has been a degree of acceptance that these media are valid forms of communication for children and young people, with suggestions that they can improve confidence and literacy.

The prominence of these topics is reflected in the seminar programme at the event. Other significant issues of the past year include augmented reality (AR) and eSafety. The former is represented by Futurelab’s Spark, a mobile exhibition which uses 2D AR markers to enhance pupils’ experience in the classroom. Meanwhile Roar Educate’s Us Online seeks to educate pupils on safety, security and good citizenship in the online world.

The Government’s Home Access scheme is being formally launched at BETT 2010. A trial of the scheme – which will seek to remedy the ‘digital divide’ by providing 270,000 low income homes with computers and internet access – “went like a rocket” according to Becta, the government agency in charge of it. The scheme is exciting news for all those working with ICT in education – but it is likely to cause controversy given the state of the economy as a general election approaches.

We will be helping our good friends at QCDA. Since last year’s event we have been working hard together on mycurriculum.com, a website which allows teachers to connect and collaborate with each other by discussing best practice and sharing resources, activities and examples of pupils’ work. QCDA will be showcasing the site on two of their four ‘pods’ so come and check it out at Stand J30.

See you there!

BESA, BETT, BETT 2010, conference, Education, event, exhibition, expo, ICT, schools, technology

“Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words” – Shailesh Nalawadi, Product Manager for Google Goggles.

Google’s new Goggles project allows users to gain access to information about an item or location simply by pointing their phone at it. So the phone can connect to reviews of a restaurant, the history of a landmark, or price comparisons for a book – all without any text having been inputted.

The technology works in conjunction with a mobile phone camera; the user takes a photograph of an object and the application scans it, comparing elements of that digital image against its database of images. When it finds a match, Google tells the user the name of what they’re looking at, and provides a list of results linking through to the relevant web pages and news stories.

The results can then be saved as a history, allowing the user to refer back to these links of interest. As the results are programmed to be relevant and are adjusted to each object: if the user takes a photo of an artwork, the results include the artist’’s biography; whereas for a landmark, the phone provides historical background information.

Google Goggles also uses optical character recognition to identify text, allowing items such as business cards to be snapped and scanned to make phone calls and to add as a contact in your phone directory. Some results don’t even require a photo to be taken due to integration of GPS, augmented reality and digital compass technology. Simply pointing the phone at a location (a business or shop for example) allows the app to place a button with the company name at the bottom of the screen. This can then be touched to load information from a web search.

Google Goggles demonstrates the potential for computer vision technology, but it is not at its full strength yet (hence it is being released by Google Labs). At the moment users will be able to lookup things like CD, DVD and book covers, wines, barcodes, businesses, artworks, logos and landmarks with great success but other objects will not work so well. Cars, animals and food are still in need of development to be photographically understood. Despite the immaturity of the technology, Google states that Goggles can recognise tens of millions of objects and places.

Google also claims that the technology has the potential for face recognition. So in theory a mobile phone could provide personal information on anyone in its viewfinder. Clearly this raises some pretty major privacy issues – and there are currently no plans to release this feature of Goggles. As Vic Gundotra, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, has said, “We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place.”

With this new technology comes exciting prospects for education. Visual search allows for a more interactive and creative form of learning; education can be taken outside the classroom without the need to carry text books for reference. And the fact that these searches can be stored in a history allows for retaining and referring back to this knowledge later.

For example, a class could visit an art gallery on a school trip and simply take photos of the exhibits without having to make a note of the artist. This allows for a liberated experience not tied to pens and paper. Web links generated by these photos would allow a student to purchase a(n e-)book about the artist before they have even left the gallery.

This mobile learning style could engender a sense of adventure and exploration while still linking learners to reference material. Classes could strolls around a new city, capturing images to discover the history of buildings and landmarks. Google Labs state in their accompanying video that they envisage Google Goggles being able to discover the species of plant from a leaf. An added bonus to this visual search ensures that the students need not worry about spelling mistakes and the phrasing of searches in order to gain the results that they require.

Neither the technology behind the application nor the concept is entirely new. Quick Response (QR) codes are two-dimensional barcodes which link to online content when the user takes a photo of one on their camera phone. A simple piece of software enables the phone read the URL encoded within the QR code, and the user is taken directly to that site in the mobile browser.

Image-based searching isn”t completely new either. Prior attempts at the technology include Nokia’’s Point and Find and Amazon’s image recognition search released in October. The most similar product on the market is an application called IQ Engines. But this has a much more commercial focus – connecting mobile users with reviews, prices and purchase links. It remains to be seen whether Google can bring the technology into the mainstream.

Culture, digital, Education, future, google, learning, qr codes, search, technology

Last week, Ed Balls announced the scrapping of SATS for key stage 3 students, which will be replaced by classroom based assessment.

Hopefully decreasing the assessment burden on both students and teachers will allow for greater learner voice and increased opportunities for personalized learning in the early years of secondary school. Perhaps it will also result in more informal learning techniques being used in classrooms for 11-14 year olds… As Dan Sutch pointed out at Education Unbound, assessment is currently one of the most significant barriers to teacher-led innovation in schools.

Education, news

Clayton Christensen’s new book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns looks at the reasons why public schools in the US struggle to help all children fulfil their potential and offers solutions based on Christensen’s studies of innovation in the commercial sector. The answer, he argues, lies with online learning.

In fact, Christensen is so confident of his conclusion that he predicts by 2019, approx 50% of high school courses will be delivered online and by 2024, this percentage will have become 80%.

Christensen works from the assumption that children, and by extension people, learn in different ways. Therefore to teach effectively, schools need to cater their teaching style to the learning needs of each child (personalized learning being the appropriate buzz word). Unfortunately, this is currently not possible as the one teacher, one textbook, one time approach (named monolithic instruction by Christensen) employed by most US public schools leaves little opportunity for customisation. Do not fear, however, because online learning is at hand to save the day. Educational software will facilitate customised learning by allowing students to pick a teaching style, to learn at their own pace and to repeat material as necessary. In such a vision, teachers will act as tutors, walking around the class helping students with particular problems and providing guidance where necessary; instruction will be left to computers.

Unlike the sceptics who have noted the potential for online learning but argued that technophobia is widespread and schools will fail to harness the potential of new technology, Christensen believes that US public schools will adjust with relative ease to this new approach. The book briefly reviews some of the major changes that have occurred in the US state education system in the last hundred years and concludes that schools have proved themselves adept at adopting and meeting changing goals.

Happily the title “Disrupting Class” is not an attack on teachers in anyway but a reference to his theory of disruptive innovation. Differentiating between sustaining and disruptive innovations, Christensen identifies the latter with new products that are more accessible and usually cheaper, but initially of lower quality to existing products in the marketplace. Disruptive innovations therefore first take root among nonconsumers of the older products, whilst the underlying technology improves until the new product is of equal or higher quality to the traditional products. Applied to education, e-learning and its variants will first take root among students that for some reason cannot access their desired subjects within schools. For example, home schooled students, schools in rural areas where there are a lack of specialist teachers, poor rural urban schools that lack funds for specialist teachers or a wide array of course offerings or bright students that want to pursue non conventional subjects that are not offered in their schools. As more students enrol in e-learning courses, (and Christensen cites data showing that between 2000 and 2007, there was a 22 fold increase in enrolments) the quality of the courses will improve until mainstream schools are using online learning as a routine teaching tool.

Christensen’s greatest contribution to the education debate is definitely to place it within the framework of his theory of disruptive innovation. If like me, this was not a theory you had previously encountered, then the book makes for especially fascinating reading. I was so inspired that immediately after finishing it, I ordered The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), Christensen’s first book and winner of the Global Business Book Award for the best business book of the year. And generally, it’s just nice to read a book that is so positive about the future of education, because it seems to me that its predictions are as salient to the UK as they are for the US.

Debate, education_unbound, technology