What's New: Technology for Learning Blog
A couple of summers ago Sean O'Conner and I embarked on a summer day trip up to York for a spot of CPD (now CPL) at Huntington School. The packed agenda (see below) had a few well-known names, some, in particular, I've been following on twitter for some time and wanted to see in person.
In the welcome address at the 1-day ReseachEd conference they mentioned that some colleagues had come from as far as Thailand to attend. Sean and I looked at each other in disbelief - I had not told them where we had come from - it turns out that a Patana alumni, Roo Stenning, was there in the audience too! It was good to catch up with him during the lunch break. Anyway, the link to today's post is that Alex Quigley is now working at The Education Endowment Foundation and their first podcast (the new) has just been released. I think it is a good start to the series with the first episode on metacognition. So far, on the way home in the car, I've listened to the first 27 minutes in which Alex unpicks metacognition in a teacher-friendly way, giving useful examples and the common misconceptions around the topic. Catch the episode on the link below:
When I get home from work it's playtime with the children - I don't have the desire to write a blog post after spending a lot of the day in front of a screen, in and out of meetings or teaching. It's family time - time to switch off the devices and go analogue. So, at present, I'm sort of writing this post a day behind in the morning, if that makes sense.
Digital travels.....
1) This guy has a lot to say about the design of technology - I cannot believe his talk was four years ago, he predicted the future with all of the big tech companies now focusing on the 'time spent' on their platform. Watch the talk by Tristan Harris given in December 2014 (it was published on YouTube in 2016).
Playing email tennis at the moment - I was doing so well a couple of weeks back too!
One gem from the 5th November was the sample implementation plan EEF gave. I really like the fact that it focuses on the impact on the learner and the 'active ingredients'. Nice to see the word fidelity in there and giving short, medium and long-term plans helps too:
Today a long journey in the car (4 hours to be precise) afforded me the opportunity to catch up on a couple of podcasts I've been wanting to listen to for a while. The first is a piece on the evolution of Facebook's community guidelines - what is (to them) acceptable to post or not. There are other articles I've watched on this issue - filter bubbles etc, but this one does quite a good job on presenting the timeline of the development of their guidelines. It will be interesting to see where they go with this as very few of the younger generation (school age) go anywhere near the Facebook platform (they use their products however, namely Instagram) and the older generation (mine for example) are becoming more disillusioned with the data breaches and growing lack of confidence in the 'purity' of posts on their wall. Take a listen for yourself:
In the latest episode of Seth Godin's podcast, Akimbo, he talks about games. Early on in the episode Seth mentions that "all of us play games". This resonated with me since we have a parents' workshop on computer gaming coming up on November 22nd. Many of our parents, including myself prior to listening to this podcast, would say "I am not a gamer". Seth goes on to explain that many of our day-to-day decisions are part of the game of life - what to wear each day or what we post on our social media platforms. I'm considering using this analogy in the workshop - I'll have to listen to it again a couple of times over the next week to help me make the decision on whether or not to use it. Listen for yourself to Seth's podcast below: