As the title suggests, this book is concerned with helping you improve your blog. Written by Darren Rowse, founder of Problogger, it started life as a series of daily blog posts and, latterly, a daily email task if you signed up to the course.

So, how good is it, and does it represent value for money – especially if you have already read all the posts?

We take it as axiomatic that we need to attend shows like the Education Show or the BETT show in order to find out what’s new in technology. But are we unduly limiting ourselves?

Can eBay teach us anything about assessment? At a recent conference, John Davitt made an interesting point.

According to David Anstead of Ofsted, there are 4 systemic problems in the provision of ICT, these being the use of assessment, some qualifications, value for money, and getting ICT to the learning. At the Naace 2009 Conference he discussed each of these. Here are my notes from that session.

Assuming that we think e-enablement is a worthy goal (definitions vary, but one of the most popular is that a school is said to be e-enabled if it could not function without its technology; I’m not sure that’s a good position to be in, but I get the point), how do we achieve it?

Or, to be somewhat more accurate, how do we achieve it faster? In the UK we’ve had a massive investment in technology in schools over the past decade, but many schools are still not e-enabled. (Figures vary, but the percentage of schools said to be e-enabled seems to be somewhere between 11 and 20%.)

Perhaps this is an illustration of seeing a half-full glass as half-empty. I certainly don’t wish to come across as a pessimist – I think there have been huge achievements. Nevertheless, I think it would be an incredible feat of self-imposed blindness to not wonder how come we haven’t achieved even more. At the Naace09 Conference, Niel McLean had a few suggestions.

Why does everything have to be so interesting all the time? Here is my attempt to balance the scales by producing something incredibly boring….

Miller (left) is a teenager living in the USA. It's always interesting to hear what young people think about educational technology, so I was delighted when Miller agreed to have a go at answering questions about it.

The questions in this article are all genuine, ie they have been submitted by real people, not just made up by me (although I can assure that I am a real person!).

Equally, Miller's answers are genuine too, which is to say she didn't receive any prompting or assistance from either her teacher, Vicki Davis, or me.

This week, Miller answers these questions:

 
1. Do you or your teachers make use of any social bookmarking tools (like Delicious). If so, which do you use?  Thanks, Ian
 
2. Should teachers stay out of your facebook? Or would you like learning stuff and school info to roll through like status updates? Or maybe an application you can install to see your school related stuff?
 
3. What role would u like to have in helping less savvy adults understand new media?