dougbelshaw.com/blog

Welcome back!
#uppingyourgame: an educator's guide to productivity is now up to v0.4!
(I'm looking for people to translate it into other languages when finished - if you're interested get in touch!)

It’s all very well for those of us who are Google ninjas and can find pretty much anything that’s there on the Intertubes. However, spare a thought for those youngsters trying to complete their homework, becoming more and more befuddled when they search for Hannibal (enemy of Rome) and end up with Hannibal (serial killer).

Hakia allows users to search semantically – i.e. for meaning rather than just words. It’s like an amazingly efficient version of Ask Jeeves (as was) in that users can ask questions and get meaningful results. I’ve taken it for a spin and I’ll be recommending it to my students. I’m happy with Google search, though – for the time being….

(via Read/Write Web – 10 Semantic Apps to Watch)

Posted: November 29th, 2007
Categories: Education
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Noel Jenkins, the innovative Geography Advanced Skills Teacher and sharer of great ideas and resources via Digital Geography and Juicy Geography, has written a guide. He, like me, has been using Google Apps for Education with his students and has found it to be really beneficial. I think it’s a potentially free VLE replacement.

The Google Apps for Education guide Noel has written can be found here. Whilst it can be set up by an experienced individual, unless you really know what you’re doing (changing CNAME records, etc.) I’d leave setting up Google Apps for Education to your network administrator.

Posted: November 29th, 2007
Categories: Education
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Google Docs is great and even auto-saves your and your students’ work, but what about if and when your Internet connection goes down? Zoho have just announced that Zoho Writer now has an ‘offline mode’ for both reading and writing documents. Somewhat bizarrely, it uses software made by Google called Google Gears which the latter haven’t managed to integrate into their own offering yet!

Although Zoho does have a paid-for premium service, the basic account is free and ties in with Box.net for (free) extra file storage. It’s looking very competitive, especially with the recent updates to Buzzword…

(via Lifehacker)

Posted: November 27th, 2007
Categories: Education
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Many thanks to those who attended my sessions at the Kings Heath Leading Edge INSET today. I had a great time and your enthusiasm was infectious. I hope you go away and start using Web 2.0 stuff. More at the edte.ch workshop, or click on the image above for the slides!

Posted: November 23rd, 2007
Categories: Education
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I love the ease of use of Google Presentations, part of Google Apps, and – more importantly – part of Google Apps for Education. When it was launched, however, the number of themes available was rather limited. You ended up with incongruities like this (from one of my students):

At least now some customization is possible. According to the Google Operation System blog, 800×600 is the recommended resolution for background images to your slides.

Posted: November 21st, 2007
Categories: Education
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The ed.tech workshop is now open! It’s a wiki which means that it can be edited by anyone. The focus of the workshop is around Web 2.0, Open Source and free tools which can be used in a pedagogically-sound way in education.

Click on the ‘workshop’ tab at the top to access the wiki. Have a look at the different toolboxes being put together so far:

• Customised start pages
• Podcasting
• Social networking
• Student blogging
• Video creation, editing, and sharing
• Wiki creation

Feel free to add pages and information to what’s there so far. In addition, each presentation that edte.ch do will be added to the workshop.

Posted: November 19th, 2007
Categories: Education
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I’ve posted more about the dangers of RFID tags in education over at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk. The post cites a paper by Paul Stamatiou, which is worth a read…

Posted: November 17th, 2007
Categories: Education
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Not much time to give updates as to what I’m up to here, but suffice to say I’ve been involved in the following recently:

• Futurelab’s Why Don’t You…? conference in London
• Getting my church’s website up-and-running
• Preparing for an upcoming presentation I’m doing in Birmingham (through edte.ch)
• Working with Nick Dennis on some interactive resources for Folens publishers
• Oh yes, and that little thing called a full-time teaching job!

Posted: November 15th, 2007
Categories: Everything Else
Tags: blog, church, edte.ch, Folens, Futurelab, Nick Dennis, presentation, resources, teaching, website
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By now, anyone interested in educational technology will have heard about the One Laptop Per Child project which yesterday announced a ‘give one, get one’ scheme. The trouble is, it’s currently coming in at just over $200.

One machine that’s coming in at less than $200 – albeit not a laptop – is the Everex TC2502 (review here), on sale at Wal-Mart stores across America. These have proved so popular, Slashdot reports, that they have sold out. The PC is not only extremely efficient and ‘green’ but runs gOS, a version of Linux that uses Google’s (free) products such as Google Apps to store files and applications online.

I think this is a great way for schools to go. With this and the Zonbu (which uses Amazon S3 for storage), it’s an interesting time for school-based computing…

Posted: November 13th, 2007
Categories: Education
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So… the iPhone was unleashed in the UK yesterday (Friday 9 November) to an over-hyped audience. It has a revolutionary interface and is the must-have gadget this Christmas. I, however, will not be getting one being quite happy with my Nokia N95 and the excellent 5 megapixel photos it produces, ability to record MPEG-4 video, and built-in GPS.

The release of the iPhone does throw open the debate on the use of mobile phones in schools. Most schools in the UK (to my knowledge) have a fairly strict policy of mobile phone usage: certainly turned off in lessons if they are allowed in school at all. The iPhone, which comes with unlimited (‘fair use’) data transfer changes the way in which students can access online information. Coupled with instant messaging, a camera and a fully-fledged operating system (once Jailbreak has been applied), this is a very powerful device.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming storm when pupils, through the increased focus on ‘pupil voice’, start demanding to use the technology they already use every day for learning. If you’re part of a forward-thinking school and want to know how you can anticipate this, please get in touch!

Posted: November 10th, 2007
Categories: Education
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