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 ...

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Safer Internet Day 2012

If some of you weren't already aware, next Tuesday (7th February) is Safer Internet Day . The theme of this year's campaign is Connecting Generations with the slogan "Discovering the Digital World Together Safely". We are encouraging our schools to take part in this event. In fact we are suggesting to schools that they use could use this event to raise the issue of e-safety across the whole school community for the whole week. I'm going to one school next Tuesday to talk separately to both parents and to staff. We have, alongside a group of ICT coordinators, put together a series of assemblies for primary schools for the whole week, and should also have ready a brand new interactive esafety resource aimed at teachers and school staff on how to keep themselves professional online. I'll blog telling you more about these resources shortly. If you go to the UK Safer Internet Centre you will also be able to download a school pack containing an assembly, a s...

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