This article was published in the June 2015 edition of Education Executive.
This is another short clip from my presentation to parents.
You can access the Google Docs slides here.
Watch the 1st clip HERE.
This is a clip from a presentation that myself and a colleague gave to parents earlier this month. The purpose of the presentation, was to give parents an idea of what some children were doing online/how they were using technology. The presentation we used can can be found here.
The talk was 2h hours long and I will post a few clips over the next month or so.
This particular clip if from the short section on ‘Online Gaming’.
Back in June (I think) I had an exciting phone call from Disney, asking if I would like to contribute to a new guide for parents they were creating.
I obviously said yes and my section has now been published.
If you would like to have a read, click on the link below.
The use of Social Media in educational settings is beginning to show terrific benefits. Many schools have already grasped some of these benefits, but many more are struggling to come to terms with the ideology of social media and how it best fits; a number of reasons can be cited e.g. Lack of strategic incentive, a lack of (or the myth of) technical know-how and concerns of e-safety to name a few.
Matt Britland (@mattbritland) and Alan Mackenzie (@esafetyadviser) have joined forces and are going to write a collaborative piece to tackle some of these issues. The outcome of this article will is:
To give examples of the type of Social Media services available.
To indicate the benefits of Social Media and give examples of good practice.
To mitigate some of the e-safety concerns of using Social Media in an educational environment.
If you wish to add further comments that aren’t identified in the survey, please email Matt and Alan as follows:
The answers you give in the survey questions are a building block to this piece of writing; Matt and Alan would like to thank you in advance for your contribution.
I am sure that there are very few people who have not heard of Edmodo by now. However, for those who haven’t, or who are not sure what it is; I thought I would include a very brief overview.
Over the last few years I have used several expensive learning platforms and VLE’s. In my experience they have been overly complicated, time consuming and often did not do what the school wanted. Without going into too much detail, I know two schools who have both purchased a very expensive learning platform and instantly regretted it. Luckily they managed to get their money back. I can imagine these were the lucky ones.
I started using Edmodo a while ago and I have not looked back. Its fantastic, does pretty much everything I want, its easy to use and best of all its free.
Some will say its simply a stripped down VLE, I would say it is just streamlined.
Perhaps it is not as advanced as many paid for products, but how many schools actually utilize all the features found in these?
Please have a look at presentation below. (Click here for the formatted presentation on SkyDrive) It should should give you a brief overview of what Edmodo can do. Hope you find it useful and perhaps it may save your school some money.
UPDATED – New presentation included
Last academic year we had several requests from parents for some information about online and technology safety.
Many parents felt like they were out of touch with technology and what it can do, as well as what was available on the internet.
In order to remedy this, myself and another member of staff set up a parent association evening. I have included some of what we have covered. Several of the slides have been removed as they link directly to files on the school server and would be inaccessibile.