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Posts tagged edtech
Lucio Bragagnolo – An Italian Steve Jobs
02 months ago
Lucio Bragagnolo was one of the key speakers at the recent Erickson “Schools in the Digital Era” conference. Introduced by the Eriksson host as a “guru” in the Italian technology world. I have to say after seeing his talk I wholeheartedly agree!
Lucio was one of the penultimate speakers at the conference, which had dealt with several extremely interesting, but fairly heavy themes to do with students and the “dangers” of the Internet. It was in this highly-charged atmosphere, where many of the teachers present were starting to wonder about the risks of using technology with their students, that Lucio gave his talk. And wow, what a talk!
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TED-ED – The Flipped Classroom Has Officially Arrived!
02 months ago
The incredible TED, purveyor of fascinating video talks on Technology Education and Development by some of the world’s most interesting people, and a personal online favourite of mine, has announced this week that they are starting up TED Ed, a series of lessons by some of the worlds best educators, which will be available online for free.
As well as a set of “powerful learning tools” that Ted has announced will be launched in April, they have a mission statement which, If the quality of their wonderful talks is anything to go by, will mean some pretty awesome teaching and learning opportunities are on their way.
TED-Ed’s mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.
Pete Sharma Associates and Digitalang – An Exciting New Collaboration!
12 months ago
We are delighted to announce that Digitalang have teamed-up with The Pete Sharma Associates, and we’ll now be “officially” offering courses on behalf of PSA in Italy. We are really excited about this, not only because such a top-quality teacher-training company has recognised the standard of the courses we offer, but also because Digitalang training material, along with the already established training material available from PSA, will now also be offered worldwide by the network of PSA trainers.
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Teacher Development Webinar – “Using Virtual Meeting Tools with Students.” #besig
22 months ago
The excellent English360 online learning platform are holding a community webinar next week, with the guest speaker Mike Hogan. (Disclosure: English 360 is one of the companies I do consultancy work for.) The webinar is on the topic of Virtual Meeting Tools and even though it’s geared towards those using, or thinking of using the English 360 platform, it will definitely be of interest to any language teachers who are using online meeting tools, or who want to, with their students.
Valentina Dodge, on the English360 blog has the following to say:
Are you using English360 in conjunction with real-time tools?
Do you have experience teaching in WebEx, Adobe Connect, or on Skype?
How can these virtual meeting environments be used with learners?
Come along to our English360 Open Community Webinar to find out more on delivering lessons in real-time when learners are geographically dispersed or unable to attend face-to-face classroom lessons.
Register now to enjoy Mike Hogan ‘s expertise and experience of using virtual meeting rooms.
Send us an email to Register for the Community Webinar 28th Feb 13.00-14.00 CET
I’ve personally spoken to Mike about e-learning quite a bit over the last few months and he certainly seems to have a good deal of practical experience of what “synchronous” e-learning requires. As it’s being organised by Valentina Dodge, too – I’m pretty sure that it will be well worth attending.
Video – Build a PLN Step-by-Step (Personal Learning Network)
22 months ago
Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) are nothing particularly new, fancy, or special: just by being here and reading this you’re becoming part of my network in a way. PLNs have such a huge potential, which I still don’t think is being talked about widely enough.
I was doing some e-tutoring for The University of Dresden recently, working with a great bunch of PhD students looking into digital literacies together. The group were really mixed, with engineers, forestry, medical and humanities students all in the same group. In the final week of the course I wanted to encourage them to create their own Professional Learning Network (PLN) so that after the course they would become more autonomous as learners and hopefully pick up new digital lietracies as they went along.
I wanted to show them a simple video to start off the week’s learning that would define PLNs in general terms. Try as I might, every single video I could find on YouTube was aimed squarely at teachers, or educators (and many of those were aimed at language teachers, too!)
So cutting a long story short, I decided to make my own video which in under five minutes could explain in clear terms:
- What a PLN is – and why it’s worth having
- Things students should consider before setting one up
- Some basic web-based tools that will help you get started
8 hours later, after lots of cutting clips, editing audio, shunting slides about to fit the narration, the final product is here.
Please really do feel free to use this with your students, trainees and colleagues – I made it using a Creative Commons license deliberately so that other folk could also use it. The only thing I ask is that you kindly credit me as the author of it 
So, like I said at the end of the video: Let’s try to get as many useful PLN connections going on as possible in our network. I’m @SethDickens if you want to connect on Twitter, alternatively, if you have any other questions, queries or are looking for help in setting up a PLN, do please ask away by posting a comment in reply to this post!
Best of The BETT – Part 4
03 months ago
For the third in my series of Best of the BETT interviews I spoke to Anne Gilleran, from eTwinning.net. I’m happy to say that amongst the hundreds stalls at BETT, eTwinning’s area was a real breath of fresh air. Their service is a real help for language teachers who want their students to get some authentic speaking practice, it’s also huge (currently there are more than 150,000 members) and best of all it’s free. In their own words:
eTwinning is the Community for schools in Europe. Teachers from all participating countries can register and use the eTwinning online tools (the Portal and the Desktop) to find each other, meet virtually, exchange ideas and practice examples, team up in Groups, learn together in Learning Events and engage in online-based projects.
I’m a big fan of free stuff that makes teachers’ lives easier and I’ll definitely now be looking into eTwinning.net further. I’d like to see how I could work it into some of the seminars I teach at the moment.
Anyhow, over to Anne, who describes (in a very noisy BETT conference hall) exactly what eTwinning.net does:
Tomorrow’s post will be my last, but I’ve saved the “big one” or scoop until then. I was very lucky to get an interview with William Florance, the head of Education at Google for Europe The Middle East and Asia.
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