Technology for Learning Blog

After testing many laptops over the past year we have finally chosen the Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1 as the replacement laptop for 2018-19. The Toshiba model we have been using for the past 3 years has served us well and many staff have been happy with it - several of them asking if they could buy back the device - always a good sign! However, the new replacement model from Toshiba, although with great specs and very light, did not have enough ports (2xUSB type C), which ultimately I think would have proved frustrating for staff. The Dell has a rugged design and relatively good specs. We managed to push them to offer the 512GB SSD hard drive so there will be a few more happy campers. My only complaint so far is the cramped keyboard - but after time no doubt I will get used to it, and the stiff hinge - no doubt it's like that for a reason. The sound on the new Toshiba was poor, as well as a very loud fan. The sound on the Dell is very good - almost as loud as a MacBook Air. I'll keep adding material (manuals, reviews etc) to this blog post for others to refer to.

(LA Johnson/NPR)

Summer is tantalisingly close. My eldest is part way through the fourth in the Harry Potter series and we plan to take the family to the Warner Bros. Harry Potter Studio tour in London over the break. This is just one of a list of great ideas from Pernille Ripp’s blog post called ’Parents – How to Create Great Summer Reading Experiences for All’, summarised here:

Have a to-be-read list.

Thanks to those parents for their input in the discussion on the role of technology in our children's' lives. The conversation centered around how we can use positive examples of technology and how they can be used to structure conversations at home. Some of the resources we talked about can be found on the Padlet below. Please do add your thoughts as to what we could discuss at our next meeting, either to the Padlet, as a comment on this post, or directly to ptg@patana.ac.th.

If your children are into games and you have no idea what they are talking about then I highly recommend you explore this site. http://www.everybodyplays.co.uk/parents-guide-to-games. A really good section on the site is The Game Finder - you can search by platform and age.

Source: www.everybodyplays.co.uk/

We update our Firefly installation every second Saturday of the month. This month the following updates and fixes will be applied during the night of Saturday 10th February: