July, 2015 | innovative schools

Are you making the transition? – Check your school budget

Tuesday 28th July 2015 When considering ICT services, schools are rapidly transitioning from being providers of desktop PCs for students and teachers, to being providers of network and Internet services over which students and teachers interact with their own technologies. No longer do schools need to maintain on-site file servers or expensive software licensing contracts – this is now mostly available … Read More

Internet boost for schools in Wales

Monday 27th July 2015 In the post-PC era, schools are striving to build collaborative learning environments supplemented by BYOT programs, using online tools such as Google Apps for Education, Weebly, YouTube and a myriad of other ‘cloud’ options. There is one component common to all these tools that is vital to the success of the technology supporting the curriculum – reliable high … Read More

Planning – ICT supporting the Curriculum

Thursday 23rd July 2015 ‘ICT in the curriculum’ is not the same as ‘learning about computers’. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can become an engaging tool to support the learning environment. Is your school developing school management and planning structures that foster the exploration of new and emerging technologies, to support and enrich classroom learning activities? Our goal is to ‘normalise’ technology use … Read More

Google Drive plug-in for Microsoft Office

Wednesday 22nd July 2015 Using this new Google Drive plug-in, people using Microsoft Office for Windows can now open their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they’re done. (Windows only) Read more >>>

Technology is not a learning outcome

Tuesday 21st July 2015 A few years ago I walked into a classroom with a local District IT manager. The class of 9 and 10 year olds were working in groups, all engrossed in producing videos about their chosen topics. Some groups were constructing stop-motion videos, others were outside the classroom conducting hard-hitting interviews with staff. Other students were off in … Read More

BYOD / BYOT – Getting started

Thursday 16th July 2015 When schools begin their journey down the BYOT path – leveraging students’ own technologies to support the curriculum – much planning time is often focussed on which device (or devices) will be acceptable, how these devices will connect to the school network, how apps will be controlled, and other ‘technical’ hardware and software support issues. (Not to mention policy … Read More

Time to ditch Flash?

Wednesday 15th July 2015 The recent tidal wave of critical vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Flash Player has prompted many security professionals to call for the much-maligned software’s demise. Flash has been particularly popular for use on animated web sites used by K-12 schools. Adobe has patched more than twenty Flash vulnerabilities in the last week — some of them days after … Read More

Integrating Classroom, Doctopus and Goobric

Monday 13th July 2015 If you have previously used Doctopus and Goobric (to assess assignments with your pre-made rubrics), you will love the work that the gurus have put in to integrate these tools with Google Classroom. Great overview video from Jennie Magiera… Check out more Google Apps how-to guides >>>