Twitter in Education

I recently read David Muir's posting: CPD, Staffrooms and Twitter and was prompted to respond as follows.

When twitter is used sophisticatedly it becomes an excellent tool for knowledge management. When multiple participants hashtag an event they capture knowledge that can be accessed directly at a later date.

Twitter/blogs/social networks/web 2.0 tools, etc support learning communities. They facilitate the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.

This, for me, is why twitter-like-tools should be viewed as part of a modern teachers way of working.

We should be countering the bad press! Arguing for these tools and this new vision rather than running silently scared.

We should be discussing the knowledge in a tweet not worrying about the method of communication.

Any thoughts from the blogosphere?

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An Issue of Privacy

I recently posted a short video onto Youtube- Samba Demonstration. It show a collection of PGDE students playing drums to a samba beat, outside the faculty building. What has this to do with privacy?

I received an email this morning from YouTube indicating that an anonymous individual has flagged the video for "violating privacy". I have not named any of the individuals on the video. The performance was in a public place and as you can hear was very loud. So how have I violated an individual's privacy?

I had viewed this interesting video - "You Can't Picture This" on YouTube. John Toner of the National Union of Journalists states:

"If you're on public land, filming in a public space, there is no law to prevent you either taking still pictures or moving images."

The UK Film Council states:

"You do not need to ask passers-by for permission to feature their faces in a film. Under UK law, the copyright of film shot in a public place resides with the filmmaker."

So the question that this raises is have I violated the privacy of those on the video?

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World Domination?

View Paisley College - Computer Science Alumni 91/92 in a larger map

The map above is the distribution of fellow students who studied Computer Science at Paisley College graduating in 1991 or 1992.

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A Year On: Are there teaching jobs out there?

This time last year I posted the question Are there teaching jobs out there? I used the Times Educational Supplement jobs site to gather raw statistics for teaching positions across Scotland.

I searched for specific secondary subject jobs that were not promoted. These were all the newly advertised jobs in Scotland on TES. I have laid them out along side last years numbers

TES Vacancies - 29/5/9

Subject	Jobs 08	Jobs 09
Art	5	14
Biology	3	8
Business Std	3	7
Chemistry	5	3
Computing	0	2
English	21	25
Geography	7	8
History	2	5
Maths	14	19
Modern Lang	1	17
Modern Std		5
Physics	5	11
Religious Ed	4	4
Totals	70	128

Comparing the totals we see an 83% increase in class teaching jobs during this week from 2008 to 2009. I'm not claiming that this indicates anything other than more jobs were advertised in TES during this one week from last year to this. But it should be thought of as a positive indicator to probationary/starting teachers that there are more jobs on offer at this time of year than last. The number of probationary teachers in the secondary sector is approximately 1300: so approximately 1 in 10 of probationers might get a permanent job. Obviously this is unlikely as there will be other teachers on temporary contracts looking for permanent contracts so the figure is bound to drop.

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Technorati Tags: Times Educational Supplement Scotland, Teaching jobs, Probation Teacher Scotland

Who are these ScotEduBloggers?

I was wandering around the blogosphere and returned to ScotEduBlog. The page that struck me as interesting was the Statistics page. The second graph show that the least number of blog post happen in July! I think we all could have guessed that.

But I had to laugh when I looked at the Posts per Authority graph and pointed to the biggest bar for East Lothian; the number of posts disappear off the graph. The teachers/edubloggers in that authority outstrip all other authorities in Scotland!

The last graph is the number of blogs registered per authority. The lead authority is Argyle & Bute with 98 blogs. I then wondered what the average posting was but maybe that's a graph that can be included for next time. The average posting per blog for A&B is 2,263/98= 23. The same stat for East Lothian is 6,456/72=89.6

Now I began to wonder why these authorities lead the way in the edu-blogosphere? I think I know the answer!

In East Lothian you had Ewan McIntosh and Don Ledingham leading and promoting the use of blogs within that authority. In Argyle & Bute there was Andrew Brown and Ian Stuart. I'm sure there are others that I'm not name-checking but these are some of the key players who are blogging and have encouraged blogging within these authorities.

The last three questions I have are:
1 Why is blogging not happening, to a greater extent, across all authorities?
2 Is it the lack of blog evangelists or authorities limiting access to Web 2.0 in there schools?
3 Is it the lack of awareness of the ScotEduBlog facility across Scotland?

Technorati Tags: ScotEduBlog, edu.blogs.com, EduBuzz, whereisab, IslayICT.

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School Bullies or Violent Society?

Do our schools have lots of bullies and victims or are there segments of society who advocate violence as a resolution to conflict?

Alternatively are there segments of society that are claiming to be bullied as an excuse for their own or their child's behaviours?

Technorati Tags: Education, Bullying, Violence.

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You Have to Laugh

Here's a sentence from an assignment I have just finished marking.

The newer term ASN encompasses any child who needs additional support to fully access the curriculum, whether this be permanent (eg a child who is deaf) or temporary (a child who's parent has recently died).

My response was: Death is permanent, mourning is temporary.

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