Get Online Day 2009

Yesterday, the 23rd was Get Online Day (although the campaign runs from the 19th to 31 October).
Its aim is to help people who are not online to try computers and the internet at their own pace.  However, it’s not all about beginners; if you have the experience then you’re encouraged to “Pass IT on” to [...]

Web 2.0 in teaching and learning

Web 2.0 and social media are everywhere on the internet and the idea of sharing and collaborating now seems to be the norm.  We know it is used extensively by media literate internet users; is constantly in the news; and has all sizes of organisations scrambling to embrace it as a means of connecting with [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet

myguide is a website that offers an easy and clear introduction to the internet for absolute beginners.
It provides free email, internet search and basic IT courses.  It is also possible to personalise your experience by saving settings such as colour scheme, text size and screen resolution – a very useful feature.
The ‘Welcome courses’ require no registration and [...]

YouTube: What Is It Good For?

Well, apparently, delivering babies!
The guardian.co.uk reports how a father delivered his baby son after watching DIY baby delivery video clips on YouTube.  So being media literate came in very useful.
The father is also reported to have learnt how to play the guitar and solve the Rubik’s Cube from watching YouTube videos.
There’s obviously more to YouTube [...]

New OU Course cuts through tech hype

The OU have started a new postgraduate course entitled “Practice-based research in educational technology” to help educational professionals make better use of ICT within their work.
The OU have stated:
“Podcasts, interactive whiteboards, Second Life and mobile devices are amongst the new and emerging technologies which can be used for educational purposes. But what evidence is there [...]

Using Web 2.0 in an ESOL classroom

The latest edition of Reflect, published by NRDC*, contains a practical article on the use of web 2.0 tools within an ESOL** classroom. 
The author Liz Boyden (http://lizboyden.wordpress.com) outlines the tools she uses which include:

Twitter (http://twitter.com) – micro blog i.e. short messages/posts
Tumblr (http://tumblr.com) – multimedia focused blog i.e. text, photos, sound and video files
pbwiki (http://pbwiki.com) – [...]