Thunder

I continue to be amazed by the potential Second Life has for learning, I have just watched the video on this blog post and was completely blown away. Clck below to see a low res version, or follow the link above for a high quality version.

Download link

I seem to be slightly addicted to Facebook atm.  Up until last week I had probably only visited my profile a couple of times, over the last couple of days I have probably spent hours on my profile adding applications, and seeing what my friends are up to.  If you are using Facebook let me know and I will add you as a friend.

Steph is running the ‘Race for Life‘ today, if you would like to sponsor her please do so at her sponsorship page.

WikiMindMap produces a mindmap based on a search of Wikipedia.  This provides an interesting and visual way of researching using wikipedia.  As a test I typed in Shropshire and this is the map displayed:

By clicking on a cell with a ‘+’ it expands the branch for further siblings, clicking the green icon will re-centre the map with that branch being the central point, if you click on a branch without any icon it will open up wikipedia in a new window/tab at the relevant section.

These are my links for July 6th through July 9th:

• plasq.com - Community - Comic Life Education - plasq forums - Forum on the plasq site for using Comic Life in Education.
• E safety for Pupils -
• moka5 | www.moka5.com -
• Crisp - Home -
• Roles and Capabilities « WordPress Codex -

These are my links for July 5th:

• Games Design -
• Welcome to Education UK Island | Education UK - An island in Second Life to support learning & teaching -
• BlogHUD : Second Life blogging system -

These are my links for June 30th through July 3rd:

• Google Operating System -
• Digital Cre8or - training -
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets Help Center -
• My Wikispace -
• Wikispaces » for teachers100K -
• My PBWiki -
• SNP preparation - WikiWorks -

I have just noticed a couple of new icons on the visual editor, the Yellow ‘V’ seems to allow me to embed video into my post, so lets give it a test:

The report highlights how important innovation is to improve education as a whole and to encourage higher learning. The report shows how the every day innovation that occurs in classrooms - from a novel way of teaching to a new approach to student involvement is rarely spread beyond the individual teacher and/or school.

NESTA identifies the need to give teachers more autonomy - supporting more developmental work led by teachers and schools to help increase innovation.  But before this can happen there needs to be more funding and support, and schools and teachers need to be given incentives to engage in it.  The report also suggests the significant impact the available budget for educational research could have on collaboration if more of it was offered to schools engaged in innovative development and research.

You can read more (or download the report) from the NESTA Website:
www.nesta.org.uk/informing/policy_and_research/highlights/hidden_innovation.aspx