ETRU Hub

In late 2007 I helped bring together a group of UK-based educators with the intention of releasing regular podcasts about real-world educational technology. That group became known as EdTechRoundup. It was officially launched during the TeachMeet at BETT in January 2008. Later in the year, with the weekly discussions becoming well-attended, we made the decision to release our discussions as a separate podcast: EdTechRoundup Weekly.

During February 2009 even bigger changes have taken place. Following a successful ’special’ on student blogging and Wordpress Multi-User, I called a meeting of those for ease-of-reference I called the ‘admin team’. These are simply people who have already got involved with the behind-the-scenes work of extracting the audio from the FlashMeeting, tidying up the wiki, editing podcasts, etc. As such, membership of this team is open to anyone.

The result of our discussion can be found here on the blog. We decided to focus more on developing the community and therefore the following has come about:

• We shall use the hashtag #ETRU on Twitter and other social media sites (#ETR was already taken!)
• As a consequence of the above, we shall be known as EdTechRoundUp (note upper-case ‘U’)
• Those intending to attend our weekly FlashMeetings should sign up on the relevant wiki page. This is to prevent problems if the FlashMeeting becomes full.
• A new subdomain, http://hub.edtechroundup.com brings together blog posts relating to educational technology from those involved in the community. Any regular attender of the weekly discussions can ask to have their blog posts syndicated.
• In order to facilitate better feedback from those who listen to the ETRU podcast a forum has been set up at http://forum.edtechroundup.com. Listeners can then ask questions and seek clarification, as well as it being a place weekly discussion participants can continue their conversations!

If you weren’t aware of what EdTechRoundUp have been up to, we would invite you to come and join us! We meet at 8.30PM every Sunday evening for around an hour. Failing that, please do listen to the podcast, read our syndicated blog posts, and get involved in the forum!

What is safety? Here is the list we compiled in a workshop on the subject of eSafety in virtual spaces.


http://www.wordle.net/
Much of the material we considered n the early part of the session came from the following site -: http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/

Here's the link to a videoclip linked to people not always being quite what they seem online - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp5nScG6C5g

We had a discussion based around the theme - where do you draw the line? Do we mind people taking our photos? Does it matter on the context? What about children? Is this different? Should it be the matter of course that we seek written permission for use of children's images? Does this extend to their work or just their photos?

Then we were asked to come up with a scenario that could be used to provoke debate on eSafety.

Our scenario - a 10 year old child with a Facebook profile. The child has given herself a false DOB to register but then revealed the truth on her profile that she is 10 and single. The profile was open to people who weren't friends as she was member of a network. What issues does this raise?

Another scenario - some pupils in a class don't like a teacher and provoke them - the pupils video the teacher arguing with them in the heat of the moment and publish it online. It is devastating for the teacher and they hung themself.

And a further scenario - pupils make a video on their mobiles of children wrestling and publish it. A few weeks later, the police arrive with a complaint from a parent who feels the school is a violent place.

Very interesting - what do you think? Any ideas of your own on this subject? You might gain further insight by listening to Edtechroundup (ETRU) Podcast 4!

A really interesting seminar with lots of discussion about creativity and innovation.

Key ideas included the need for freedom, for space and for the acceptance of diversity; the need to spark ideas in one another, to accept that there are no right and wrong ideas and that the best conditions for creativity can be different for each person. Here are a number of photos taken of the ideas sparked by the session. Perhaps you'd like to add your own comments.

With the decision to stop using Edublogs, I am left with the question of what to use instead.  This isn’t just a decision for hosting of my own blog, that’s done and dusted now.  The problem is that I am not sure where to point others who are looking for a blogging solution.  In particular, I’ve been charged with providing blogging training after Easter for staff at my own school and will need to have something for these practical sessions

I had heard of Wordpress multi-user before when I had exchanged tweets with David Gilmour, who administers the East Lothian Edubuzz.org blogging system.  Then we had a brilliant session last Sunday on EdTechRoundup, when we had several people join us to talk about WPMU.  In the main meeting and background chat room, we covered the rationale for using WPMU over the established vanilla-flavoured Wordpress solution, moving on to cover the set up and maintenance of WPMU.

Feeling enthused by the discussion, I’ve downloaded WPMU myself and had a go at installing it.  There are ongoing teething issues.  For example, my web hosting company will not allow me to use wildcard subdomains (you’ll know what that is if you read the installation documentation) and issues with too many redirections (stuck in a forwarding loop between the login screen and the admin dashboard screen) amongst others.

All of this makes me agree with comments made during the week on twitter, where Stuart Meldrum and others voiced the opinion that the biggest problem with maintaining WPMU was having the time to do it.  In the mean time, I’ve had a blog comment from Jim Henderson suggesting that there may be a server coming to Highland at some point, giving is all access to a centrally-maintained WPMU installation.  My fingers are tightly crossed now because I can’t wait for that to happen!

After a suggestion received, quite fittingly, from another Twitter user, Tom Barrett is weaving his magic again. This time, after getting educators to collaborate on ways in which Interactive Whiteboards, Google Earth, Google Docs, and Pocket Video Cameras can be used in education he’s turned his (and his network’s) sights on Twitter:

I got involved straight away – in fact mine’s the first tip on there! Get involved by contacting Tom (@tombarrett)

With all the excitement around google Earth and the updated Google maps service I thought I’d try and find a way to use it in education and an oppourtunity arose almost immediately…. …I tried out an activity today to raise the issuse of privacy and personal space and how google Earth etc impacts on this.  We started [...]