eLearning Laura

Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood: idealism, experimentation and wonder. In this new world, not only must we behave more like children, we also must teach the next generation to retain those attributes that will allow them to be world-changing, innovative adults who will help us reinvent [...]

    “All change please – the Internet is coming!” I attended my first ISC ICT conference this week, which was hosted at Berkhamsted on Wednesday 7th December. It was a fantastic day and I felt very privileged to speak about the work I am doing in my department on colaborative learning using iPads. Click [...]

The vast majority of my students have already had experience of Apple multi-touch devices and I didn’t anticipate any difficulty in them having the capability to use them in my classes. But we are naive if we believe that students will be able to automatically use them for work without making our expectations clear. Most students have [...]

It has been a busy few weeks in the MFL department at Berkhamsted. We have seen the class sets iPads arrive and everyone in the team has now used them in lessons. I thought it would be a good time to share some initial thoughts about the experience thus far! The Students Unsurprisingly, the students [...]

Here is an open letter to Chris Fuller, who I have to thank for running a fantastic CPD session for my MFL team at Berkhamsted this term. He really got me thinking about sharing student work outside the walls of the school; something I have shied away from in the past. Chris, After your CPD [...]

I received this mailshot this morning from the lovely folks at Solutions Inc. Interested in finding out about scope for the Apple TV with wireless setup and iPad I sent a cheeky email to our Director of IT and our Director of e-learning. The results had me crying with laughter. This is the best email [...]

My Year 10 boys did what they love best today. They managed to take our lesson about French regions off on a complete tangent and we got talking about our iPad project in MFL. The animation and excitement in their entire demeanour when talking about the iPads was an absolute pleasure to see: they literally [...]

This week I have been reading a lot about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). It offers a solution to the fact that schools have been spending a fortune on hardware for far too long (be afraid, RM, be very afraid) and perhaps it’s time to invest in connectivity and network architecture instead. Given that most schools’ tech [...]

As any number of blog posts will tell you, iPads are great educational devices. They are also great fun to play with, but for now the majority of teachers across the UK haven’t been able to test-run iPads and associated apps in languages classrooms. The expertise  on what you actually do with them, week-in, week-out in [...]

Last week I spent a very interesting afternoon as part of the team from Berkhamsted presenting to the Girls School Association ICT group for London on what we have been working on in the Department. Photos can be found here thanks to @svanstraten. My presentation is here. I really enjoyed talking to the group about [...]