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Australia’s Digital Education Revolution? 1 June, 2008

Posted by paralleldivergence in Brad & Phil, children, education, ICT in Education, Internet, Life, My Thoughts.
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17 comments

NOT LONG after Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party was whisked into power in Australia after 12 years of conservative government, there were immediate and obvious differences that appeared. Rudd took no traditional “honeymoon” period, instead preferring to get straight to work on delivering his pre-election promises. One of these being the $1.2 billion “Digital Education Revolution“.

AAP image - by Alan Porritt

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Still Interested in a Class Blog? 22 April, 2008

Posted by jeopardygame in blogging, Brad & Phil, children, education, ICT in Education, Internet, Web 2.0.
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12 comments

If you’re still listening, I’ll assume you’re still interested in creating a class blog at your school. In part one, we concentrated on WHY teachers and schools should be blogging. In part two, we looked at WHAT had to be done to ensure student privacy and security. Now, in this third instalment of the class blogging series, we’ll look more closely at the HOW TO get started process.

Key Blogs

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Getting Started with Class Blogs 21 April, 2008

Posted by paralleldivergence in blogging, Brad & Phil, children, education, ICT in Education, Internet, Life, technology, Web 2.0.
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7 comments

In the article “Why Teachers and Schools Should be Blogging“, I discussed the reasons and benefits of blogging in the classroom, but for the blogging-novice, there are student privacy, security and policy concerns that must be considered. Assuming you took notice of the content of that first article, this one will take you through the first steps of creating a class blog and is part of a series that will clarify and develop this process for teachers and schools starting out.

Students Blogging in Class

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Brad & Phil’s Information R/evolution 25 November, 2007

Posted by paralleldivergence in Brad & Phil, education, film review, Half-Life 2, Humor, ICT in Education, Internet, Life, My Thoughts, technology, Web 2.0.
10 comments

In early 2007, I discovered an amazingly-constructed video on YouTube by Dr Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The title of his video is “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and in under 5 minutes he managed to grab my attention like nothing else in recent times.  If you’ve never seen this video, you really must- but you also must concentrate on it for full effect.

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OLPC: The Revolution Begins? 17 February, 2007

Posted by paralleldivergence in Brad & Phil, children, education, ICT in Education, Internet, Life, My Thoughts, OLPC, Politics.
23 comments

In February 2007, the first of almost 2,500 “$150 Laptops” will be rolled out to school children in the poorest areas of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Rwanda and Cambodia. The ambitious “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project was first devised in January 2005 with the concept of producing an affordable laptop computer specifically for the poorest and most-remote children in the world. Just two years and several prototypes later, the impressive lime-green and white “Children’s Machine” dubbed the XO is almost ready for mass-production.

OLPC

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How Google Earth Killed Santa… 22 December, 2006

Posted by paralleldivergence in Brad & Phil, children, Christmas, Google Earth, Humor, ICT in Education, My Thoughts, Political Correctness, Santa.
126 comments

December 12, 2006: GOOGLE releases an add-on to Google Earth in an attempt to reverse the damage it has done to millions of children around the world. But instead of reigniting children’s belief in Santa, it has effectively provided a fatal blow that will resonate in the ears and minds of our now scarred youth.

Santa dead

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The Trouble with Web 2.0 28 October, 2006

Posted by paralleldivergence in Brad & Phil, education, ICT in Education, Political Correctness, Web 2.0.
14 comments

Once upon a time, publishing webpages was solely the domain of a relatively select few. Those who had the ability to code in HTML, who knew how to use FTP to upload files and who had access to space on a webserver connected to the Internet. A decade ago, GeoCities was one of the first sites to offer free webspace for the general public to post their own pages. Many, many bad pages were produced, mainly because you still needed technical skills and ultimately, it was a sea of static pages providing one-way communication. And just because you had technical skills, it didn’t mean you also had writing and layout skills.

Web 2.0

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