Finnberry does Ed-Tech

You would think that, as a teacher, I would have asked myself this question... probably sometime between 1989 and 1993 (when I did my teaching degree). But no! I think I first consciously thought about this in January 2016. We sort of take education for granted in this country... in most of the western world. Okay, at some point, many kids ask the question, why do I have to go to school? Do they get a proper answer? So what happened in January 2016? Well, I can't even be 100% sure it was 2016... but I think it was. I went to BETT and the keynote speaker was Professor Sugata Mitra. He's the Indian guy who did the Hole in the Wall experiment and came up with SOLE (Self-organised learning environments) and the Granny Cloud. He has a voice I could listen to for hours! He is such an engaging speaker! He was talking about assessment really, but he started off by asking about the role of the teacher. He showed pictures of what society needed adults to be like for most of histor...

If I were in a position to start afresh with online learning provision, what would I choose? This is a question that I've been asking myself over the last few months. I guess it's really part of a bigger question of what our education system could look like if we built it from scratch, with no preconceived ideas of what it should be. So would I go for an all-singing, all-dancing VLE or would a combination of individual online tools be more useful? Would I be prepared to pay or should it be free? Are there certain things that are more important in adult learning than if I were in a school? So many questions! So many options! Somewhere down the line of thought processes, I ended up looking at Microsoft 365 for Education. That's where I'm currently at. This morning, I've been playing around with Microsoft Forms. Forms looks like a good-ish tool for doing quizzes and surveys. It would also lend well to learning activities where learners need to gather opinions o...