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Recently I heard Sir Ken Robinson (Don’t forget you can follow him on twitter @SirKenRobinson) talk about what he called the ‘Education Revolution’ one of the key drivers of this is that technology is advancing at a phenomenal rate, 10 years ago Google was a novelty, giants of social networking like facebook and twitter simply didn’t exist, know one really knows where we will be in 10 years time as technology advances? Have we ever been able to predict successfully what will happen?

As Sir Ken said ‘we can’t predict the impact that technology will have on innovation in education, the possibilities are limitless’  well Microsoft Office Labs have set there vision out for the next ten years from 2009-2019 you can see from the video here:

In July last year I was lucky enough to visit Microsoft HQ in Redmond with 49 other teachers from 32 different countries worldwide, one of the things we got to do was tour Microsoft’s home of the future which you can see brief glimpses below.

So what do you think technology will be like in 10 years time? How do you think this will impact on our homes? What do you think the impact will be on education? What 21st century skills will students and teacher need in 10 years time?

Imagine facilitating high-level workshops in Bahrain on ICT and Education – check the article on UNESCO at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/news-and-in-focus-articles/all-news/news/regional_ict_centre_in_bahrain_organizes_two_high_level_workshops_on_ict_and_education/

What is your organisations core purpose? Whether you are within education or business this great TED talk by Simon Sinek on How great leaders inspire action is great food for thought.

Simon talks through leadership in essence as what puts others, (as individuals or organisations) apart from the rest? Ultimately ‘they think, act and communicate differently’  I have been lucky in my career that the educational establishments I have worked in have approached our core business with an ‘inside out approach’ (for more information watch the talk below) As a collective community all stakeholders were signed up to the core vision, they all gave 110%, they gave blood, sweat and tears for the cause and that is why the organisations I have worked for have always been on the up.

Another idea that arises from watching this talk is the development of distributive leadership within your school or organisation, if everyone pulls together and shares the vision and focuses on the why we are doing this, is there more potential to increase the distributive leadership within? if so this can improve and enhance any future succession planning and therefore sustain the future success of your organisation.

How do you think this talk applies to your organisation or your school? Do you think you are more like Apple or more like Dell?

Ever since I started teaching ten years ago the videos from TED have been an inspiration to me and the other teachers I have worked with and even the students. I was so excited to hear this week that TED Ed is now beginning to happen, which is a great idea!

The YouTube channel will be a huge collection of animated videos that will be based on real lessons taught by real teachers in real classrooms all over the world. A great feature of this new channel is that you can nominate your own lessons or other teachers lessons that they teach to the channel through an online form, once nominated the special TED team of animators will then recreate the lesson. In addition to this you can nominate good animators which could be kids at your school to join the team of animators at TED-Ed. More details of this and other new features will be available on the channel when it is officially launched in April.

When I first saw this I thought so is this going to be like the Khan Academy, well it doesn’t look like it or feel like, I guess it has a different purpose, these videos can be shown teachers and students to fire their imagination where as many of the Khan Academy videos purpose is to learn a specific curriculum topic.

Check out this one:

The site says that there are innovative and amazing educators who all over the world are delivering amazing lessons, this is a chance for them to have their ideas and practice amplified to the world. Are you one of these educators? Have you got a lesson worth sharing? Or have you ideas on how you will use these videos in your own school? We would love to hear from you.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDEducation

So finally after much talk about it, I mean even my nan mentioned it to me the other day, last week the Raspberry Pi went on general sale. Is it ‘pie in the sky’? Is it an optimistic goal? Is it a promise of heaven? Well quite possibly yes but do we really need it?

Photo by The-Nancy-minor-team Flickr

What is it?

If you are one of the few people in the UK who don’t know what it is then please read on, if you do then just skip to the video to see it in action.

“The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation plans to release two versions, priced at £16 and ~£22. The Raspberry Pi is intended to stimulate the teaching of basic computer science in schools.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi 

It is the latest thing that is set to help rescue the way ICT is taught in secondary schools according to most news articles, it is hoped that it will be a cheap and effective tool to allow young people to learn more about computer science and more importantly begin to code. However I think that this is not necessary a ‘promise of heaven’ (one definition of ‘Pie in the sky’), it won’t be the single device that ‘fixes’ the way students learn about ICT, the thing is there are already thousands of other tools that are already out there that can also do that. When we talk about ‘fixing ICT’ does it really need it? There are schools, teachers and students in classrooms and outside of classrooms all over the world that are learning about ICT and computer science in the most amazing ways, perhaps we need to focus on sharing this good practice and enabling this kind of education for all children all over the world. So does it have ‘an optimistic goal’ (another definition of the phrase ‘Pie in the sky’) I think yes because with all this aside it is a great new gadget and I have joined the queue to get one!

To read more about it check out this recent news article from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190918

Are you lucky to already have a Raspberry Pi? What will you be using it for? We would like to hear from you.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whlwcl/

So when Dr Martin Cooper invented the first mobile phone (Cell phone) in 1973 it was the start of some big changes in how we communicated (certainly in my life time, I was born in 1978). It then took 10 more years in 1983 to get the first commercial mobile phone on the market and a further 10 years to 1993 to send the first SMS from phone to phone. So now less than 20 years later from the first text message we see this from Microsoft Research, how long will it be till the mass market can use it? What will be next?

How does it work?

IllumiShare uses a camera-projector pair which in the video looks like some kind of ‘big special desk lamp’. The camera captures video footage of the local workspace and sends it to the remote space where the projector then projects it onto the local space again. As you can see they sketch together using real ink and play a game of cards. What other possibilities are there with this?

This would be an amazing tool to use within education, I could just see students collaborating completing projects and homework with other students not just locally but globally, teachers planning together outside of school and many uses within the school itself.

Also what would the initial cost set up be? In the video they are connecting through Skype so obviously there wouldn’t be a cost with that however the actual ‘big special desk lamp’ may be expensive especially when it is first released.

What do you think? How do you think you could see it being used within education or within business? We would love to hear what you think.

We are delighted to welcome Dan Roberts to our team. Dan will be working in our Asia Pacific office as our Senior Education Consultant. Dan is a world renowned innovative educator and is perhaps best known as The Chickenman! He leaves his post as Deputy Head at Saltash.net to join us and we are delighted to have him on board. Dan has won UK, European and Worldwide Teaching Awards for his innovative use of technology in the classroom, as a teacher and senior leader he has a proven track record of facilitating training and supporting schools nationally and internationally.

To find out more about Dan’s past work please visit this link http://chickensaltash.edublogs.org/ and view the video below:

From 1^st March 2012, Imagine Education will be opening an office in Brunei to provide a localised service to the Asia Pacific region. We are delighted to announce that Dr Baldev Singh, a founding director of the company, will be managing the office and will be joined by a further staff of 9 over the next month. We look forward to continuing to deliver excellence to existing clients in the region as well as developing further opportunities to support local and global organisations as they seek to help transform education through the effective use of technology in the learning and teaching environment. We wish Baldev and his team good luck in their new and exciting venture.

Please contact Baldev directly on baldev@imagineeducation.net should you wish to discuss using our services in Asia Pacific.

Check our Twitter Feed for the Imagine Advent Calendar of free classroom Tools!

Imagine is proud to be working with Dr Paul Howard Jones. Here he assesses whether the latest scientific findings support popular fears about what technology is doing to us.