PicLits was really very easy to use with students last week. They had great fun exploring and combining the words and photos. We used a class login and there were no issues at all. I just made sure I changed the password after the session.

I left the school with the community still buzzing and learning.  The technology had made an impression but it was the contagious approach to its introduction that has laid the foundations for its successful and sustainable integration.

PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture. The PicLits site is a great resource for inspiring children and adults to write. It lends itself to use in a whole number of settings.

Steve Wheeler is posting a bite-size series of blog posts over the next week around the theme of  ’Digital Tribes, Virtual Clans.‘ They are based on a chapter he contributed to a wider work entitled ‘Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures.‘ The first two posts on ‘Digital tribal identity‘ and ‘The digital tribe and the network nation‘ are highly accessible and have made fascinating reading thus far. His writing got me thinking and I respond to it, tangentially and with a lack of clarity but grateful nevertheless for its inspiration.

Mack Collier’s ‘Social media needs fewer rockstars, and more rockstar ideas‘ makes some really interesting points about how, in his world of social media, ideas are often valued on the basis of how prominent (in terms of followers/subscribers etc) the author is the online community – the so-called ‘rock-star’ effect. This makes the threshold too high for getting new ideas from new folks out into the effective thought- and collaboration space online. This is not only a concern in the world of social media but also in the world of online education.

Leaving Silverstone Study Centre for pastures new was a difficult decision. In so many ways, managing and teaching there has been the best post of my career, rewarding and challenging in equal measure. However, the opportunity arose to develop and manage Northamptonshire County Council’s Harnessing Technologies (HT) strategy as it relates to schools and school improvement. The prospect fired up my imagination and whet my creative appetite to see the Northamptonshire schools landscape, with all its formal and informal facets, transformed into networks where all children and young people make...