Head in the Cloud

In my previous post about Digital Literacy I attempted to set the context of what is currently happening in education in Wales with regards to the recommendations from the ICT Steering Group report.  These recommendations included the changing of ICT to the new subject of Computing, and the introduction of a statutory Digital Literacy Framework that would sit alongside the current Literacy and Numeracy Frameworks. The Welsh Government in their response to that report explained that Digital Literacy would now become part of a statutory Wider Skills Framework. Currently Professor Graham Donaldson has been tasked with reviewing education in Wales and one of his remits is to look at the ICT Steering Group report and recommendations. His review findings should be released at the end of 2014. It was was important for me to try and look at the definition of digital literacy. I personally feel that there is some ambiguity about the term, which I will come back to at the end of this post...

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 ...

Some really good news, British Pathe have now launched a YouTube channel. Users now have access to 85,000 historical films, about 3,500 hours of historical footage. Definitely an excellent resource for supporting history in the primary and secondary school. Hopefully your local authority hasn't blocked YouTube for use in school!! I've just been Chromecasting the videos to my TV, but they can obviously be embedded and shared in the usual ways. They also have separate channels focussing on War , Vintage Fashions and Sporting History . British Pathe have created some playlists under different themes to help you explore some topics. A couple fo examples are shown below. World War I Greatest Sporting Moments Vintage Fashions

For the last couple of weeks I've been trawling through the internet looking for resources, articles and research around the topic of digital literacy (or should it be digital literacies?) Lots of good things out there and I now just need the time to sit down and go through what I've gathered. Much of what I find is being curated on this page  which maybe useful for those of you wanting to find out a little more about this area. This morning I landed upon a page titled A Guide for Social Media in the Classroom . What particularly caught my attention was a link to Fakebook and Twister. In my opinion these look like a good opportunity to talk to pupils about issues around e-safety and the use of social media. But it also looks like another useful literacy tool to help pupils communicate information about a class topic or area of research. Watch the 90 sec video showing the making of a Fakebook page for John Lennon. The Twister page also includes many examples of Tweets (Twists...

Well, it's not too often I get excited about websites but this particular one has certainly got the creative juices flowing yesterday! According to their website,  Make Things Do Stuff " aims to mobilise the next generation of digital makers " and will enable people to " make sense of all the resources that are available to them and will help them to navigate a path that will take them from being a digital consumer, to being a digital maker. " The site seems to have the support of Nesta , Nominet Trust and Mozilla . Users can easily find projects around creating animations, building apps, games, physical computing, remixing and mash ups and websites. I was particularly drawn to the website section which took me through html coding, Mozilla X-Ray Goggles which is a Firefox plugin that lets the user easily change html on any webpage and finally the Mozilla Popcorn Maker were you can mash up videos with other digital resources such as photos, text and even ...

After having a trial of some earlier in the term, Rhws Primary School have now purchased a number of Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks to use with their pupils. I've been kindly lent one by the school over the summer break to 'try out'. They are very light-weight, have a good 11.5" screen, full sized keyboard, headphone socket, built in mic and web cam, along with two usb ports, a HDMI out and a SD card slot. Impressively it boots up from off in under 10 seconds, no frustrating time spent waiting while Windows loads up. They appear to be excellent value for money, the school paying under £200 for each Chromebook and £19 extra per device for the Chromebook management licenses. The licenses enable the school to manage the Chromebooks from the Google Apps for Education administration panel. This allows them to assign apps and profiles to different groups or individuals. A pupil or teacher from the school logs into the Chromebook using their school Google Apps for Edu username ...

The report shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been involved with ICT school improvement. Estyn have held up the mirror and confirmed what we already very much knew. It was quite a coincidence that I blogged about the need for a robust, reliable and resilient infrastructure within schools last Thursday evening, and then woke to a BBC Wales breakfast news report saying that this was the main finding of Estyn's report - spooky! For me, the other main highlight of their findings concerns the lack of ICT vision in most schools. Again, this is something that we have been finding in our recent discussions with schools. Even in schools who budget well and sustainably for ICT there is often a lack of vision around what they want ICT to achieve in their school, and very rarely (if ever) the impact it has on standards. Here are my interpretations of the Estyn main findings. A primary school who uses ICT well would be one where: Standards - Pupils develop a full...