Embedding and Sharing Pupils' Work

During my conversations with teachers I often ask, "What do you do with the digital work that your pupils produce?" In many instances however, the good work that pupils produce is often stuck on a school network somewhere, never seeing the light of day again. Which sometimes begs the question, what was the reason and context for doing the activity in the first place? I do try to get schools to think about how they go about celebrating and sharing that work with a wider audience. Think about ways in which you can use your school website or learning platform to share that work. Use a class blog or even a YouTube channel as a mechanism for wider sharing.
This morning I've been playing around with 2Simple's Purple Mash, a product that we actively encouraged schools to use in Newport when I was previously working there. In fact, it was built into the skills ladders that many of the schools used there. It's been a little while since I've been back in and today I've had a good look around and one particular feature caught my eye - the ability to share or embed. A simple feature that allows the user to either create a link so that others can view their work, or an embed code allowing them to embed the work into a web page. See an example below - click on the green arrow to see the front of the postcard:

I think this is really neat and easy, and a super incentive to get children to produce their best work if it's going to be published to the world! From what I've seen it looks like you can publish out 'postcards' on a variety of topics, 2Publish Extra Projects again on a variety of topics, and the wonderful 2DIY 3D pupil made games.

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Defining Digital Competence

In a couple of previous posts I looked at what was meant by the term digital literacy and what this could mean in the Welsh education context. These were written in response to a recommendation from the ICT Steering Group report , proposing a new statutory Digital Literacy Framework for schools. I attempted to define what digital literacy meant using definitions from groups such as The Royal Society, Becta, Futurelab , Jisc and Common Sense Media. It was very difficult to pin down exactly what it meant but there were certainly commonalities between all of them. This week however, Prof. Graham Donaldson published his report on the curriculum and assessment in Wales, "Successful Futures" , and in it referred not to digital literacy , but to digital competence (which is a term I'm far happier using). I therefore feel it's important for me to try in this post to understand what is meant by this term, look at some definitions and find out if there are any differences ...

Digital Literacy: The Context for Wales & Definitions

At a time when England have introduced digital literacy elements to their new Computing PoS, and with the recommendations from the ICT Steering Group report for a digital literacy framework alongside the new subject of Computing, I’ve been attempting to look closely into what exactly is meant by the term ‘digital literacy’, and ultimately what this could mean for primary and secondary schools in Wales. I intend to put together a series of blogs on the topic, mainly as a way to help me with my understanding around some of the current thinking in this field, but hopefully it will still be of interest to teachers and others. I'd welcome any of your thoughts or comments on this topic. The Context In June 2012, Leighton Andrews, the then Minister for Education and Skills, announced “an additional £3m of funding over the next three years to support a range of measures to improve computer science, digital literacy and ICT in schools and colleges across Wales.” This announcement came ...

MindMup - Free Mind Mapping Software

For a while I've been looking for a free piece of mind mapping software for schools, and so got quite excited when I stumbled across MindMup this evening. What I particularly liked was the fact that you are able to store public mind maps on their own servers, however private mind maps are stored in your Google Drive. There's no need to register or remember accounts, once connected just go to your Google Drive and create your mind map which is then saved back to your drive. Open Mind Map directly from your Google Drive According to their blog, MindMup is "free, opensource, without any marketing, ads or spam" - what more can a school ask for? ;-) It goes on to say that the u ser interface automatically adjusts to touch displays or desktops/laptops systems, and that on desktops, all map operations have keyboard shortcuts . On mobile devices, toolbars convert to touch menus and buttons become larger. I've had a play around with it and it is easy to use and t...

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