ETRU Hub

Over a week ago I was invited by Toucan Computing to give a brief presentation on Felsted’s use of mobile technology at Apple’s European offices in London (just above the Apple Store on regent street). Other schools also discussed their experiences/programmes too and it was interesting to note the high proportion of primary schools seem to be leading the way in using the iPod Touch in the classroom. The one notable exception at the briefing was Essa Academy in Bolton (I will return to them later). A few Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) were also on hand to offer (sometimes very strong) opinions on how they saw mobile learning. Although I found what they said useful, I really wanted an ADE who still worked at a school to voice their opinion. What was clear from the mobile briefing is that a few schools are starting to move away from the ‘office’ dominated view of ICT to one that complements teaching and learning.

On the Friday, I visited Neal Watkin in Ipswich. Neal is an Advanced Skills Teacher in History and over the last year he has been looking at incorporating some of John Hattie’s effect size research into his lessons. What impressed me the most was the collaborative nature of the work; the county advisor (Dale Banham) had brought together a group of ASTs in English and History to come up with the general principles for the project and as a result, it had been tested in a variety of schools. Neal has managed to bring the latest research on teaching and learning into the classroom and and gained support from a variety of quarters. I look forward to the presentation of the results at next year’s Schools History Project Conference.

On the following Monday, I went to visit The Bishop Stortford High School, courtesy of the incoming Head of Sixth Form, Tom Capewell. Tom organised a great series of observations and I was most struck most by the English lesson I saw taught by Nick Patterson, the subject leader for English. He had the boys get to grips with the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth on London and used a great strategy to get them to compare the poems in a table using only one word to describe each poem, giving a clear structure of points to would later be used to write an essay. I thought this was inspired and will have to adopt this method in my use of source work next year. I also spent a a good amount of time talking to the Head of ICT about their use of the iPod Touch next year. They are asking every parent of the incoming Year 7 to buy one so they can use it as a personal organiser and web device for work. The school is in an affluent area and many of the students already have an iPod Touch so this seems sensible to me, especially when the students have access to the latest technology and schools are always playing catch-up.

I then made my way to Bolton with the Head of Classics to see the work of Essa Academy and Abdul Chohan. Achievement had previously lurking around the 20-30% pass rate for 5 GCSEs including Maths and English but projections show an incredible upsurge and they are looking forward to August. The work at Essa covers many areas but the one aspect they have gained attention for is by giving each student an iPod Touch. This has had a dramatic effect in terms of student organisation and curriculum delivery in particular as the school has subscribed to a company providing podcasts covering all GCSE subjects so learning can happen anywhere. After spending the morning there, it was very clear that this is a school going places. The innovative approach to teaching and learning at Essa is remarkable. One aspect was teaching Year 7 in ‘pods’ of 40 under the watchful gaze of a secondary specialist, a primary specialist and a teaching assistant as they go through different topics to enhance their basic skills. Another was the novel approach to giving students a broad education by giving them the ability to change subjects every 6 months (everyone would study the core of English, Maths and Science but the other subjects did not have to be a full GCSE in a particular topic although they could choose this).

After leaving Essa, we went to visit Heathfields, a local primary school. Dianne Spencer (the Head) and David Mitchell (the Deputy Head) kindly showed us around and some of the work of the students. I was very impressed with the extended writing one young lady; her use of connectives through the VCOP method made me rethink how I get students at secondary level to write essays. Continuing the primary theme, I visited Flitch Green Primary School on the following day to teach a lesson to Saturn Class on the Vikings with Chronology as the key conceptual focus. Flitch Green is also an Apple Regional Training Centre and the use of technology to support learning is something to behold. In preparation for the lesson, I visited the school a week before and I saw some wonderful animation work with strong narratives which sparked the use of Ian Dawson’s work on active learning in History. The pupils and I worked together to construct a narrative of the Vikings as part of the History they had studied.  This worked really well especially as the tabards they wore gave them a nice visual and physical reference of the overlaps between the Romans and the Saxons. I then got them to sequence a series of pictures by telling them a brief history of the Vikings which seemed to work well. What I did not expect was the lovely messages and feedback about the lesson from the pupils. I would like to thank Katie Coburn for allowing me to hijack her class for the morning!

Feedback from Saturn Class using Wallwisher on the Viking lesson

So, after all this wandering and wondering, what have I learned? There are a lot of people, both primary and secondary, who are also ‘travelling without maps’ in terms of curriculum design, lesson planning, pastoral care and the thinking about the environment students work in. What guides them in this creative uncertainty is the conviction that the children in their care deserve their best. I am very grateful that they have allowed me to share in their journey.

Front image: half alive@Flickr.com

World Map - 1689

‘We could roll up the map of the Cold War and travel without maps for a while’
E P Thompson on the possibility of social groups affecting the Cold War in 1982.

The academic year has finished and as you often do when things end, I started to think about my assumptions at the beginning of year. In some cases, I exceeded my expectations and in other areas I have been left with an uneasy gnawing feeling that only exists when things are left undone or have been completed poorly. Thinking about my role as Assistant Head in particular, I have come to realise that the plans I made were just guesses, contingent on a range of assumptions (succinctly and brutally put in Fried and Hansson’s ‘Rework’) that I was not really in control of despite my best efforts. Of course, there were variables I could control myself but my ‘map’ of how I thought the year was going to go did not lead me to plan for all the changes I was going to encounter. It is impossible to plan for everything but one thing I can do is to get better at preparing myself before I start. I have learned from experience that the best way to challenge and stimulate my own thinking is by seeing the excellence displayed by my peers. It was obvious that a journey around the country to see and experience excellence would help me create a more detailed ‘map’ for the coming academic year.

Source work at Diana Laffin's workshop

The first ‘stop’ on this journey is the Schools History Project conference in Leeds. This is a good place to start as it provides an amazing opportunity to see many History teachers and trainers at the top of their game in one place. One person I always try to see is Diana Laffin. Her work with her A Level History students always forces me to raise my expectations on what can be done with History in the 6th Form. This year was no exception and the source analysis activity she and Emma Kelley modelled using Enoch Powell’s speech was brilliant. They gave us the text of the speech but also said that an extra sentence/paragraph had been inserted and we needed to identify it. What this neat trick did was to force us to read the source a few times, getting a feel for the overall speech and looking for a specific phrase or wording which would betray the inserted text. This ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ reading worked brilliantly. They also asked us to annotate, in silence, the questions we would like to ask and any observations we wanted to make before we could discuss it as a group. Finally, we were instructed to make up a tabloid headline representing a particular point of view using a variety of sources, making the seemingly ‘dull’ topic of housing an engaging and ‘live’ topic. There are so many ways that their work could be deployed in my planning and I hope the students feel the benefit of Diana and Emma’s inspirational workshop.

Another stimulating experience was chairing the TeachMeet session with able assistance by John Heffernan, Sarah (Head of Classics at Felsted) and the brilliant ICT technicians at Trinity and All Saints. 39 people turned up to find out what other teachers were doing in their classroom and I was impressed and challenged by all the presentations. I would like to thank all the people who volunteered to present, Steve Bunce for booking the Flashmeeting and Doug Belshaw for keeping things running virtually. In addition, I also want to thank the sponsors: Beedocs, Vital, Heinemann and Toucan Computing. After the frenetic pace of the TeachMeet I had hoped for a rest but I readily volunteered to became a ‘common soldier’ in Parliament’s Army as part of Ian Dawson’s brilliant Saturday night extravaganza on the English Civil Wars in the North of England. Ian’s work is interesting as he has the knack of making the fiendishly complex easy to understand through active learning and this session was no different. The weekend was rounded off with a session delivered by Christine Counsell on Change and Continuity. What I loved about this session was Christine’s use of the Cambridge PGCE students’ work to illustrate her points and the understanding that her thinking on the issue was still developing. I was also struck by her use of Playdoh to get the delegates to represent key concepts in a visual way. This is a brilliant way to get the students to genuinely show their understanding of a concept even though it appears to be simply making shapes to represent a word.

Christine Counsell at the SHP conference.

Christine’s activity with the Playdoh resonated with most of what I had seen that weekend in terms of the role ‘play’ has in learning; being a journalist or a common soldier increased my enjoyment and understanding of the topic we were looking at. How could I thoughtfully use such activities to increase engagement but also develop ‘deep’ thinking to allow my students to see and touch the different textures of the stories within my lessons? A possible answer to this question was given by visiting Dawn Hallybone at Oakdale Junior School in East London. This was an unusual place for me as a secondary teacher but Dawn is well known in UK educational technology circles as an advocate and leading practitioner of Game Based Learning. Seeing her class ‘On Safari’ radically altered my perception on Game Based Learning and my own teaching. Using the Nintendo Wii game, ‘Wild Earth: African Safari’, Dawn’s class roamed around the virtual Serengeti national park taking ‘pictures’ and recording information meticulously about the animals they encountered. When they were given a task by the game to find an animal they did not know, Dawn directed a student to find out and they shared the information with the class (like the case of the Zorilla, which I had no idea about). Always mindful of the environmental impact of their exploration (due to the bar on the top of the interactive whiteboard), they continued to record information about the animals they encountered in their notebooks until the game clock had elapsed. From a secondary school point of view, the level of concentration displayed really impressed me and what happened next really made me rethink writing at secondary level. Without the use of a writing frame, the pupils in pairs (via Purplemash) began to produce fantastic descriptions of the animals they had seen, using the facts they had gleaned from being ‘On Safari’ in their notebooks. I realised in that moment that what I had just seen was a creative approach to knowledge acquisition augmented by the intrinsic motivation of the pupils within a context where saying ‘I don’t know’ was seen as a necessary and normal part of learning. Dawn did guide her class at times but they were merrily recording information and writing without much external pressure. For a secondary teacher, it was revelatory and I would like to thank Dawn and her class for sharing their learning with me.

Both the SHP conference and the visit to Dawn’s school made me challenge my ‘map’ of priorities for next year. I still have two more schools to visit this week but it has become clear that in order to renew my focus and deal with the rapid changes and demands, I need to roll up the map of my current way of thinking and travel without maps for a while.

Front and first image: Chuck ‘Caveman’ Coker @ Flickr.

‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions’ – Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon is one of my favourite writers for a number of reasons but mostly because his work opened up to me a world of understanding I could only touch the edges of before. His quote, seemingly out of place in a blog about education technology and History teaching, sums up one of the things that I strive to do, even when I ask the questions myself. Who benefits from me asking? Do my students? Do I? Do the people I lead, the institution I work in or the various groups I might represent? It seems to me that two types of question that I can ask – authentic and disciplinary ones.

Questions can enable the person asking them to reach a position of understanding that was previously beyond their present understanding. This is what I would call an authentic question and the questions I am asked in my classes are a good example of this. Questions can also be used to ‘speak truth to power’ when the people asking the questions have no power at all and want to highlight the injustice of a particular situation (the Civil Rights Movement, a topic I am exploring with my Year 10, would be an example of this).

However, one of the most valuable things that I started to learn as a research student is that people sometimes ask questions they have already formed an opinion on, or have an answer for. In other words, some people ask questions not because they are interested in the truth, but they want to confirm their own version of the truth. These questions, can be used as a means of exerting power and influence, becoming tools to discipline people or ideas and excluding people by creating false boundaries and pushing people ‘beyond the pale’ of engagement. These types of questions are what I would call ‘disciplinary questions’ and I was very fortunate in my graduate studies to have supervisors who asked ‘authentic’ questions rather than the ‘disciplinary’ kind.  Why the talk of ‘authentic’ and disciplinary’ questions? Well, I was reminded of their power this week in very different ways.

The first event that reminded me about the power of questions was the work at Cramlington Learning Village. Cramlington is a hotbed of ideas, achievement and awards but they are not quick to judge the development of others, as they believe they are still developing. The key question they asked when re-examining their curriculum was, ‘what do you think it is important for young people to learn’? From this, they developed an impressive system to help students attain these skills. The school was already known for its innovative work but it asked the question to improve its own work, not to show how brilliant it was and how its methods were the only way for students to progress. Most impressive is its desire to share its understanding and where it thinks it needs to go next.

The second event that reminded me about the power of questions is the date for the first ‘official’ Apple Regional Training Centre event at Felsted on the 16^th September. What brought this into being was a genuine concern about whether the History and ICT conundrum had been solved (we were unhappy with what we did and wanted to provide something better for our students). We believe that in sharing our work with you, you can join us on our journey to create something unique for our learners and yours.

Authentic questions drive authentic learning and are interested in dialogue as this leads to an understanding that did not exist before. Disciplinary type questions are merely self-seeking attempts to create a veneer of respectability and even-handedness; it is not about dialogue, no matter what the questioner says. There have been elements within the educational technology landscape of late that have fallen into asking disciplinary questions. Fanon’s challenge to himself reminds others and me that only when you ask the right questions of yourself, can you really ask the right question of others.

Front image: emagic@Flickr

The end of term is almost upon me and the theoretical ‘free time’ I should gain by losing my examination classes has been filled with other important bits of school work. This is usually a critical time for me as I start to plan ahead in detail and the need for ‘thinking time’ as part of the process is vital. I was provided an opportunity to think very carefully about plans for the next year by attending the Apple Regional Training Centre (RTC) conference in Manchester last week.

This was my first RTC conference and it brought home how wide and diverse the RTC programme is for Apple covering schools, City Learning Centres (CLCs) and other educational organisations. The theme for the conference was mobility and we were taken through some astounding numbers in terms of mobile device adoption in relation to other kinds of technology. One thing was made clear in relation to the adoption of mobile technology; content, provided by the teacher/web/company, was a key driver for use. After the introductory sessions by Apple staffers, delegates and Apple Distinguished Educators took the floor. I was particularly drawn to what Gillian Penny, a Headteacher from a primary school in Scotland, had to say about ICT. She made it clear that the learning has to come first in the use of technology. Abdul Chohan, Director of IT at Essa Academy, echoed this but I fear the message may have been lost on the conference by the sheer scale of the project at his school. Essa made the news last year when it gave an iPod Touch to every student. Whilst the media focussed on this aspect and the cost, Abdul in his presentation touched upon the change of ethos that governed the use of the iPods; All Will Succeed. This belief has led the Academy to reshape its curriculum and its teaching methods and the interim results look impressive.

On the technical side of things, there were two highlights to the conference. The first was Steve Beard’s ‘Making an iPhone app’ session using Xcode and Freeway, which he did in about 10 minutes. The second was Chris Jinks’ talk about the deployment and configuration of devices using Snow Leopard Server and the free iPhone configuration utility which allows you to manage the use of the device (you can disable the camera or remove the ability to browse the web for example). My colleague, the Head of Classics felt this was a great feature and would help allay fears surrounding behaviour management issues.

I was also reintroduced to a technology I had first heard about in 2006 from Doug Belshaw. I have also been looking at it again in relation to discussions with folk on Ed Tech Round Up and Johannes Ahrenfelt (especially in relation to Augmented Reality). Richard Clark’s talk about the work at Leicester CLC and QR Codes has reinforced my desire to look at this technology again more seriously. He and his team have used QR codes in primary schools to embed links to video on worksheets to model the learning so the pupils could complete the tasks. The potential for this technology is huge and all I really need for this to be work within my classroom is an iPod Touch with a camera…

Overall, I found the conference to be an enjoyable experience – I learned some new things but the key aspect for me was speaking to other RTCs about what they are doing. It also left me with some questions about the emphasis placed on the technology and missing  the context that gives rise to the use of it in the first place. For example, Joe Moretti gave a workshop on Stanza and Calibre for producing Ebooks. It was useful to be reminded of the tool, but as a teacher, I was particularly interested in the way it was used to help literacy.  I could not get to grips with how the technology would allow me to do something beyond what I could replicate in the classroom with a computer or with a piece of paper. I suppose the reason why I was so concerned is because this is something I constantly struggle with/ask myself about; does the technology helping the learning process or not? Is there enough pedagogical thought behind it to make it a genuinely useful tool which allows you to do something more quickly or even beyond your current set of tools? I don’t think this is a particularly innovative thought; this is something I am asked by many people I meet and to be frank, this keeps me, and my work, honest.  Thanks to the Apple Education team and the Cornerhouse in Manchester for hosting us and for giving me the time and space to reflect. The next RTC conference is in November and I, alongside some of the other members of the mobile research team at Felsted, may present our project there.

The learning journey continues over the next month or two as I am heading to Cramlington Learning Village on the 25^th June for their conference on teaching and learning.  The following week sees me heading to the national Schools History Project conference in Leeds to present some work on technology and History teaching and chairing the TeachMeet session there. I’m really looking forward to the sessions on Change and Continuity by Christine Counsell, Diana Laffin’s presentation on A Level History teaching and Ian Luff’s workshop on active learning.  After the conference, I am going on a grand tour of Teaching and Learning. First on my list is  Neal Watkin‘s classes to see how John Hattie’s work on visible learning has affected the progress of students in the History classroom. I am then off to Essa Academy to learn about their framework for the use of technology and finally, I plan to see Dawn Hallybone’s school in action.  I am also hoping to teach some History lessons at the local primary school (Flitch Green, also an Apple RTC) in the last week of their term.  If you have any other ideas about what I should see, let me know. I will document each visit here on the blog.

Finally, a word about the mobile learning project. I’ve had a few requests for information about it and once we have ‘sharpened the saw’ on a few of the research issues, it will be publicised on the school website and on this blog. It is taking a little longer than expected but we want to make it as good as we can before the end of our term. I’m really excited by what the team here have come up with and we can’t wait to share it with you and our students.

I’m not going to bore you with the details about the iPad because if you read this blog, chances are you have already read the many reviews out there. What I will say is that the screen is fantastic and applications load very quickly in comparison to my iPhone 3G.

What really matters is how the iPad will fare in everyday use in a school environment. It is patently clear that this is a great tool for busy Headmasters/Headmistresses; the ability to respond to emails on a large keyboard, view diary events/reminders in a familiar format and to edit/present documents in a lightweight package is something they will cherish. My Headmaster will be using one as soon as we receive our batch from Toucan.

Of greater interest to me is its potential in the classroom. Applications like iStudiez Pro and Todo clearly show the iPad’s ability to help organisation (the students and myself) and applications like eClicker can help in assessing students quickly and easily. What really excites me are applications like Alice, The Elements and Wired Magazine. Rich interactive content practically leaps out of the screen, giving clear indicators of the way future textbooks/educational resources should be redesigned to be more engaging with tightly woven learning activities. By this, I mean a way where completing a chart/graph can be done within the application and shared with the teacher, class or the world by publishing the work to a virtual learning environment or the web. Not radical stuff but it removes the steps that often occur where students move from textbook, to page, to computer and then to the web.

Doug Belshaw and I have a few interesting ideas for History applications that we are putting together for the iPad over the summer based on rich interactive content with a strong thinking skills element (living graphs are an example). If you are a publisher and are interested, get in touch. My aim is to trial it with my students next academic year as part of the school’s mobile learning/Apple Regional Training Centre project and everyone is welcome to come and see what we are doing.

Where should I be?

Typically for this time of year, I have put off doing non-essential things like updating this blog to focus on the ‘business end’ of the year. My IB History students have now finished their exams, I have marked/moderated the A2 History coursework and I have been prepping my Year 11/Year 10 for their GCSE exams. The hardest thing I have had to do this term was coming to terms with the fact that I am not Rick James and should not attempt to sing ‘Super Freak’ to help a student’s Music Technology coursework (I have asked him to use the ‘autotune’ function liberally). If it were not part of the Assistant Head job description, I would never have done it (I am praying it does not make it on to Youtube).

Another enjoyable but less terrifying aspect of my work this term has been the reading and planning in preparation for the mobile learning project that will be launched at school this year. I am really looking forward to see how we will use the technology to enhance the learning of the students and to the professional dialogue surrounding it; there certainly is a ‘buzz’ around the proposal and I hope to elaborate on the specifics in a few weeks. As a happy coincidence, the Languages Department have bought into the idea of mobile learning and are moving towards a new Language Lab next year that will be made up of iPod Touches and Flip Video cameras. Combined with the upcoming use of the new information management system and Moodle across the school, it is easy to be carried away with big plans for the future and forgetting the pull of the immediate. I was reminded of this earlier this week when I returned an iPod Touch to a student. He clicked on it and I noticed a strangely familiar picture on his screen. He noticed and said, ‘It makes it easier to find out what class I have’. He had taken a screen shot of his timetable from the school website and saved it as a background picture on his iPod. Genius.

Innovative and effective ways of teaching and learning using mobile technology is great, but sometimes it is more than enough if it can help you get to where you need to be. I went back to my office and did the same thing. Now if only I could find out a way for cover lessons and appointments to show on it…

Image: Leo Kan @Flickr

The school has its mock general election today with the staff and the students voting. The results will be uploaded to Google Schools UK Election site and I am looking forward to seeing the result. I will write more later on but think the image made in Comic Life Magiq will help…

I have been intrigued by the tweets that have been tagged #newleaders over the last week or so. Being a relatively new ‘leader’ myself, I hoped that just like #movemeon, there might be some practical tips that I could use. However, as I began to read the contributions I had a growing sense of unease that many of the contributions seemed to be based on wishlists or ideals of leadership.  I also began to wonder whether the immediacy and character limit of Twitter had caused a complete separation of ideas and context (as I have learned, it is ALL about the context). The result of this personal unease forced me to reflect on my own (short) journey and I’m happy to share what I have learned so far, not as a corrective, but as a supplement to the many ‘crowd sourced’ ideas (and situated with lots of context).

1. Being a new leader means that you are going to make mistakes – lots of them. I made some whoppers at the start (they have slightly reduced on the whopperage scale) and I had to learn to analyse and deal with the disappointment quickly otherwise my ability to influence would never develop. There was once incident in particular that I handled in the wrong way and I felt devastated, personally and professionally, with the consequences. I had to evaluate the situation and rectify it as quickly as possible despite the fact that I was deeply hurt; it also taught me to never put myself in such a situation again. I would like to say that I came to this realisation myself, but I can’t and this leads me neatly to the second thing I learned this year…

2.Get a fantastic mentor. I read the books. I watched the videos. I listened to the audiobooks and I read the webpages. I was methodical with my research. However, it did not prepare me for the changes and challenges I faced when I started. I began to think that the above exists to fill the gap of access to good leadership because they really are a poor substitute for seeing the real thing in action, warts and all. The Headmaster has been brilliant for my development but the Deputy Headmaster has been the Dr Cox to my JD (or should that be Turk?) at my present school. He is a great person to learn from; he has vast experience and is rather good at his job. He is also (and this is the really important thing) happy to fulfil the coaching role in terms of time and effort and as a result he has forced me to look at issues from angles I never would have thought about. He also picks me up and dusts me down when things are not going well (see the first point). This is not to say that he is superhuman; he makes mistakes and is willing to share them, which is all the more important for my development. He leaves for a headship in September and if a Deputy Headmaster position came up at his school, I would not hesitate to apply!

3.Study and listen to your colleagues. I don’t mean just taking advice (or dismissing it if it is not what you would like to hear). I mean really listening to their hopes, dreams and fears because by doing this you can get the necessary information that you need to make a decision. What I have started to learn is that you can pick it up in a very short conversation once you know the person you are speaking to. This skill also helps in judging the mood of meetings, shaping agendas and saying the right things to people because you know them.

4. Don’t take yourself too seriously and learn to laugh at the situation. I can recall one instance where I received an email that appeared to me to be a pure ‘blocking’ tactic. I felt really annoyed at the time. Could they not see they were stopping my grand plan to improve the school? My own self-importance made me laugh and I told myself that it could be resolved with a conversation. I was able to speak to the person comfortably when I next saw them again and realised that their comment was a way of building rapport (the ‘grand plan’ was also implemented too).

In my context, these were important lessons to be learned and maybe that is what #newleaders should be all about – people sharing their experiences within a meaningful context. Without it, comments of leadership may appear banal and devoid of substance. I know this was not the intention of Stuart and Tom who set it up, hence I’ve said that this should be seen as a supplement, not a corrective. After all, as the Scrubs theme goes, ‘I’m no Superman’.

Image: Dunechaser @ Flickr

Scvngr Screen Shot

It has been a busy few weeks and I have yet to write up my thoughts about the EUROCLIO presentation and workshop Doug and I gave in Turkey…

One thing that taken over any ‘spare’ thinking time is how we are planning to use mobile devices next academic year. The school has had a few interesting conversations over the last few weeks and there are some tantalising things in the pipeline. One mobile application I am very excited about is scvngr. This is a mobile/web 2.0 update on the scavenger hunt but with great potential for education (and it works on a variety of phones). Your questions are delivered to the phone (via text or a deicated app for iPhone and Android devices) and you reply using the method of delivery. Where it really comes alive is in the mobile web/dedicated iPhone/Android version as it allows media to be used as clues and supply answers. When I was told about this tool by @rmurry I was immediately interested by possibilities for school trips to historical sites/museums or even a general orientation exercise for new students at the school. I was told by the very helpful staff at scvngr.com that the service will be running in the UK this summer and I look forward to testing it out with my class/delegates at the Schools History Project conference in June/July…

Another mobile application that has caught my eye is the iPhone version of Moodle. Like many others, this could really unleash the potential for Moodle as an aggregating learning space that can be accessed anywhere. The demo uses the great WPTouch wordpress theme and if this is released soon, it will more than make up for the delay of Moodle 2.0…