Bromley ICT Forum Blog

(from Pippa Grayson NAACE)

The vast majority of the teaching force still do not use web 2.0 and distributed resources on the internet.

What are the barriers to them doing this at the present time? At present the main barrier to even becoming aware of such facilities is probably time and institutional buy-in to the whole process. Whereas their students are happily at home with social networking sites and the process of friendship groups and online communities, their mentors do not have the time or the facility to start learning about these processes.

One of the main barriers to enabling teachers to engage and risk take using web 2.0 is the fact that they are working within an outmoded system of institutional pedagogies based on the shifting sands of rapid reforms, which have left everyone punch drunk at the scale and speed of tweaking the system. There needs to be a rapid overhaul of professional development based on action research and communities of practice within the teaching community, with new roles and practices based more on the models used in current business practice rather than an outmoded curriculum.

Interested in thinking about Naace’s role as an innovative community? Come to this FREE to members event and contribute towards the future direction of Naace. Taking place at Harrow Teachers’ Centre on the morning of 17th May, you can find the full programme and booking instructions at: www.naace.co.uk/618

Hold on to your hats folks…it might be a bumpy ride next week 

Update 23/4/2008 

The Synetrix / LGFL Web Hosting upgrade scheduled for Thursday 24th April 2008, has been postponed in light of the pending National teachers strike, along with the current Email Hosting issue. Schools are reporting to us that they wish to communicate to parents, the affect of such a strike on their school, via this LGFL hosted service. Access will therefore be restored within the next 30 minutes. This upgrade has been re-scheduled to take place the following week, starting Tuesday 29th April, with a targeted completion date of Friday 2nd May. I hope that you agree that this is a sensible approach. Should you wish to discuss this further then please do not hesitate in contacting the Synetrix support team on 0870 300 4010

We have received this invitation from our colleagues in iEARN Pangea (Spain) to participate in their public art project - this uses photography, environmental considerations and ICT to promote the consideration of the public spaces around us. Further information is contained in the invitation:-

Dear friends in iEARN,

We would like you to remember that the enrollment in the Public Art Project is open.
This project is designed to promote the respect for the urban environment and to encourage relationships between students in Europe countries.

*Deadline for subscription is near!!!*

It is a didactic proposal that applies the use of ICT in several curricular areas and promotes the attainmentof several basic competences.

We have thought the project for 10-18 years students, the participation is with every country language as well as English. The schedule of participation run from February 4-
April 30, 2008.

For more information see our web site: http://www.iearn.cat/publicart

Interested in free software to support your school curriculum program?

Below is a comprehensive list of free software resources for teachers. (Thanks to Alison Tanner from Darrick Wood School for this entry).  Are any of you making use of these programs? Do they work well? Share some of your thoughts in the comments area.. Continue Reading »

(Thanks to Darrick Wood Junior Primary School)

As you are aware, Digitalbrain have made updates to the VLE software which has led to changes in the ways adaptamation elements are handled and edited.

A bug has been discovered in the adaptamation editing process, which prevents the user from editing their current adaptamation page. This bug has been reported to Digitalbrain who promise that a fix will be in place by tomorrow night (23/5/2007.)

Update 30/5/2007

It looks like we were being optimistic. The bug still hasn’t been fixed yet although Digitalbrain have indicated that if schools are desperate to make changes to their adaptamation pages they should email the page link to me and I will pass it on to their programmers (sigh).

Bromley Schools may be wondering why the Digitalbrain Helpdesk is being …well.. not so helpful. The reason for that is Digitalbrain and the LGFL have created a new ‘premium support’ service for schools which requires each Bromley school paying an extra fee  of £600 per year.  As the LBB of Bromley  haven’t entered into this deal on your behalf,  this service is therefore unavailable (at the moment). However if you do have an issue which requires technical support please contact me (0208 461 6224) or email me and I will see that it gets attended to.

If you want your school to be part of Digitalbrain’s premium support package and you are prepared to pay the necessary money, please indicate by dropping  a note on the Comment link of this blog entry.

Update 2

I received the following email from Patrick Rutherford  on Tuesday 6th

My colleague Martin Machado asked me to confirm to you our progress on the issue of our customers not being able to edit some of their Adaptamations; for example in their homepages. I am happy to report that we released a fix for this on Friday 1^st of June. Details of the fix can be found here: http://www.lgfl.net/updates/known%20issues/adaptamation/.If you have any further enquiries please do let me know.

Patrick Rutherford