Head in the Cloud

http:/worldofoddballs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/BROKE.jpg Yesterday I ran an inset day for staff at a primary school. The aim of the day was to introduce my cloud based ICT scheme of work. This normally involves firstly talking to staff about digital competence, as it's been written in a way that I believe will address the new digital competence areas. I then plan in an opportunity to log into the cloud platforms mentioned in the scheme and look at some of the available tools. In this particular school the focus was on Office 365 and J2E , both of which are available through the  Hwb  platform. First part of the morning ran smoothly until we all tried logging onto Hwb. Internet access ground virtually to a standstill. Pages were taking an age to load, if they loaded at all. So, here am I talking about moving much of the school's ICT curriculum to the cloud and about 28 people in an ICT suite bought the internet to a complete halt in the school. Very frustrating and...

Spent some time today looking at a relatively new feature available in 2Simple's Purple Mash platform . 2Email is basically a safe place to teach young children how to use email. The interface comes in two 'flavours', one for the foundation phase (KS1) and the other for KS2. Each being tailored for those groups (see images below) Foundation Phase Interface KS2 Interface Teachers can set class permissions on where emails can be sent - to others across the school, to teachers, or to their pupils in their class. Teachers can also 'approve' each email that a child may want to send. Therefore lots of control over how you want your class to use it. There is also a 'Report to teacher' option if a pupil receives an email that is inappropriate. This email is then deleted from the child's email and the teacher is alerted and can view it (and the email conversation) from their email account. A very neat feature. If you don't want pupils emailing eac...

Since September 2015, Digital Pioneer Schools from across Wales have been involved in the development of the new Digital Competence Framework. This framework will be available to all schools in Wales from September 2016. If you've read any of my previous posts on Digital Competence you would have seen that there has been much work done in this field already by many organisations around the world. Therefore we could take an informed guess as to aspects that would be covered in any newly developed framework. I made a stab at this sometime ago, coming up with: Digital Citizenship / eSafety Communication and Collaboration Solving Problems and Thinking Critically Creativity and Innovation These are basically the 'strand' headings to my ICT scheme which many schools are now using. A colleague of mine has just pointed me in the direction of a presentation on the Welsh Government website that does show the headings that the Digital Pioneer Schools are now working to: Citiz...