Sutton Trust - EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit

If you are wondering about ways to spend your PDG effectively have a look at the Sutton Trust EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit. It provides guidance for teachers and schools on how to use their resources to improve the attainment of disadvantaged pupils. You'll find a wide selection of approaches that a school can take, along with the estimated cost, the availability and the quality of evidence, and finally the average impact expected estimated in terms of additional months progress pupils might be expected to make as a result of that approach being taken in the school.

We can see from this screen shot of the tool kit that Digital technology approaches are high cost approaches with moderate student progress, which is supported by extensive evidence. Whereas Collaborative learning approaches for instance is low cost that produces the approximately the same student progress. Certainly makes me think.

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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

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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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