This week has been a bit slow and frustrating in terms of Innovation but I have a few things to blog about: 

R.I.P Ning

Over the Easter holidays, while marking and working with year 11’s on their coursework the news about Ning closing their free accounts emerged. Twitter went wild and @chickensaltash wrote a blog all about the news titled, R.I.P Ning – Is that such a bas thing – http://chickensaltash.edublogs.org/2010/04/16/r-i-p-ning-%e2%80%93-is-that-such-a-bad-thing/. The blog discusses how the closure of Nings free accounts is not ideal; it is not the end of the world. Ning is a tool that can be used to support teaching and learning and is one of many tools of its kind. I explored Ning in the early days of the SSAT Fellowship and our Learning Detectives student voice group used it very successfully. As Dan mentions with all free services there is always the risk that they might stop the free accounts and move to a paid premium model. This is one of the reasons our group, ‘The Welsh Connection’ went with Elgg (www.elgg.org – free, www.elgg.com – premium) for our social network project. Elgg was free like Ning, after some initial surveys it came out on top with the students (compared to ning and Google docs) and the major element was that it was hosted on our server so we owned the data created and they couldn’t close our site. One of the differences is that Elgg is open source compared with Ning being corporate and offered for free, this means a community of developers support the open source version of Elgg that we using (currently on version 1.7.1) and this support could stop at any time with developers concentrating on the commercial side of elgg (elgg.com). After discussing this possibility with the rest of the group it seems this would not be a major issue for us as we are running version 1.6 and our students are more than happy with its functionality and usability (regularly being described as the school Facebook). So my advice would be to go for the self hosted version of a web 2.0 tool over a free online version, but this is my opinion and I would be happy for your views/comments on this. Moving on, I have registered at www.savemyning.com after following the links from Dan’s post and have also set up a www.wackwall.com (what is it with dodgy web 2.0 names?) account on the recommendation of Chris Coleman (SSAT Fellow) as it seems you can migrate your ning to wackwall (this is something to complete next week). Overall I am gutted for all the free ning users who have to either pay, migrate or close down but I also have a slight smirk as it seems the time we (The Welsh Connection) invested in researching what technology to use at the start of the year has paid off as our Elggs are growing day by day and going from strength to strength.

Games Based Learning (www.what2learn.com)

My second section is all about the fantastic, award winning games based learning website, www.what2learn.com. After receiving an email from my head pointing me to the following blog post – http://www.getideas.org/getinsight-blog/games-based-learning-leaders-how-video-games-can-improve-literacy-one-semester I followed all the links (www.scratch.mit.edu is another amazing bit of free software and I would recommend downloading and having a play) and found www.what2learn.com . I signed up for a free teacher account and had a play. It seemed great, easy to create a range of games (Hangman, Wordsearch, Anagram, Q&A and Multi-Choice) and already contained thousands of games created by teachers and educationalists. I quickly explored the site before an AM reg and tweeted about the site to see if anyone else was using it. I then received an email from John Rutherford @john_w2l the creator of what2learn @what2learn and we set up a time to speak on the phone. John was amazing and guided me though the site and explained all the different aspects such as the micon (an avatar you can customise by earning credits from completing games on the site), sharing (creating class groups/lists to monitor progress and homework. This is also used for students to create league tables and compete with each other), topics (creating and finding relevant topics to use with specific classes and year groups), reports (keeping track of progress and homework completion), creating games and playing games. The site is totally free, easy to use and I can not wait to explore it full potential over the coming half term. This leads into my next topic.

The ‘New Technologies’ group

As well as my Elgg ambassadors group I thought it would be a good idea (well I stole the idea from Sian Morgan, a Welsh Connection member) to create a ‘New Technologies’ group of students to explore how the school currently uses technology and to explore what new technology they could use. I set this group up (on the elgg of course) the week before half term and had 1 year 8 join :( . He designed a logo and contributed to the 4 discussion threads I had created; what’s already happening survey, what technology, research & feedback and elgg feedback. It was fantastic to have 1 student contributing over Easter but we needed more. I approached a few key students and spread the word though year 7 and 8 tutors. I arranged a meeting for Friday period 5 and was delighted when 7 year 7’s and 2 year 8’s turned up, a healthy group of 9 great students. As what2learn was fresh in my thoughts, we started by creating accounts (using a shared school googlemail account as the network manager still hasn’t sorted out the year 7 or 8 school email addresses), the students then created their micons and explored the games. Initial feedback was amazing, they loved being able to create a league and compete with each other and were really motivated to get credits to spend on their micon. I am planning on using the site for some starters, plenaries and homework this week so will tweet @stephenfarmer and blog about how it goes. For the second half of the session we discussed creating a survey to send to all staff and students on survey monkey about what technology is already being used (this will be documented and support out ICTAC work – which I am also responsible for) and to find out what staff and students want to use. This will form the basis of my work next half term and for the first two terms of next year (alongside the social network). They came up with some excellent questions for the survey and we had some interesting discussions about home access (remote desktop), emails, the social network (elgg), texting, games, mobile phones and software such as wallwisher. A lot of the year 7’s are competing in a spelling bee next Friday so I have asked them to contribute to the discussion over the following week and we will all meet again early in the week after the bank holiday. I just logged into the Elgg and 1 of them has contributed 30 minutes a go :) . I am excited by their enthusiasm and drive to help us (St James – @stjamesschool) move forward with our use of new technologies and look forward to working with them over the coming terms.