The IT industry suffers from a gender imbalance, with a lot of women shunning the sector. It's frustrating to see so many talented girls avoid this sector due to prejudice and lack of knowledge of the reality of IT.
I recently met Sally Buberman at the Microsoft Women in IT day, and at SciTech Girls day organised by the Women's Forum. She is taking the time to talk to girls, explain her job and inspire them to follow in her footsteps. She's set up her own company, Wormhole IT.
Young Europeans between the ages of 15 and 19 years are invited to take part in the“Surf the internet – think Privacy” competition which was launched this week at www.dataprotectionday.eu. The challenge is to create a 30 to 90 second video to illustrate the theme of data privacy and data protection. As entries start coming in, you can visit the online competition gallery to rate the uploaded entries. The most popular videos will then be judged by a panel of experts.
A new podcast has been launched for the eLearning Awards 2008. So far two episodes have been made available. The first one focuses on the awards themselves, and includes interviews with the team behind the scenes. The second episode looks at issues around internet safety by interviewing Janice Richardson, leader of the Insafe project, and interactive white boards, with Laurent Odic from Interwrite Learning.
People all round the world have been playing Free Rice, a simple but strangely addictive game where you have to identify the correct definition of various English words. It's available from the Free Rice site, as well as via a Facebook app.
Did you ever wonder how they distribute all that Free Rice? Take a look at the video!
The UK's channel four has launched a campaign to promote interest in learning modern languages. Together with an ad agency, they produced this great video with the French hiphop MC, Disiz la Peste. It's cool enough to be intriguing for young people, while also having a great educational message!
"Following the success of eTwinning’s first two handbooks for teachers in 2006 and 2007, this latest publication focuses more concretely on the value and use of language and culture in any cross-border collaborative project. In addition, the book brings together a wealth of successful, award-winning project examples from the past school year which have all used language and culture to create bonds and share knowledge."
It's always exciting when you see an idea move from thought to reality. The ICT in education team over at UNESCO Bangkok have done just that when they started this award project, to identify teachers and educational planners doing amazing work in ICT in education in the region. The Innovative ICT in Education Prizes These kinds of events are great for inspiring others, and stimulating colleagues to become more innovative themselves. Interestingly, India was far and away the most represented country, despite the quite patchy use of ICT in schools.
I particularly liked the winning example of 'E-tools for Teaching and Learning Geography', from Suryaveer Singh, S.D. Public School, New Delhi, India, which is comparable in standard to projects taking place in Europe that I've evaluated in the eTwinning prizes and eLearning awards. Mr. Singh set up a blog full of quizzes, animations and puzzles, plus kept his class up to date about key dates and events. He also opened a wiki where students could work on their projects together, upload their work, share videos and games, and ask each other questions. He structured their use of the wiki so that they used it as a useful tool in reaching their learning goals. See full details of his project here.
One of the participants in the award ceremony, Rogelio Colting, president of Benguet State University in the Philippines remarked: "We will set up an IT centre in the university to showcase all the innovative ideas applicable in our region. The IT centre will serve as a learning and training centre on ICT applications, particularly to improve teaching at all levels."
A great initiative from the UN World Food Programme, the Food Force game helps teach kids about how hunger can affect communities, and how food aid is handled by international agencies.
"Food Force is a free educational video game telling the story of a hunger crisis on the fictitious island of Sheylan. Comprised of 6 mini-games or “missions”, the game takes young players from an initial crisis assessment through to delivery and distribution of food aid, with each sequential mission addressing a particular aspect of this challenging process."
They've also added a special section explaining about food distribution in Myanmar following the typhoon, Nargis.
A while back I had the chance to meet Ramon Molina from the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF). He introduced me to an interesting initiative run by ASEF, the Asia-Europe Classroom. It's still relatively small scale, but shows just what can be done when students and teachers from two continents work together.
The latest new project is 'Citizens of the World', "an interdisciplinary project which encompasses Culture, Science, History, and Sports." Students from the schools involved are asked to pick the most important citizen from their own country, and present them to their partners in other countries. It's a wonderfully simple but effective way to help young people understand and value both their own heritage, as well as their partners' heritage.
A conference for teachers involved in the project is taking place in December, in Malaysia.
Thailand has been active in ICT in education for many years now, and some schools are already very well equipped. One school I remember particularly well from my visit is Suankularb school in Nonthaburi, just outside Bangkok. They have a great deal of computers, and the students there have used them in a variety of contexts (language and science lessons), as well as developing their skills in computer graphics. They also take part in numerous UNESCO projects such as the Schoolnet project.
Schoolnet Thailand (English version) is the national gateway for schools. It includes blogs, recent articles on different topics, a library of teaching resources and more. It's provided by the Thai Bureau of ICT, part of the Ministry of Education.
Intel's Thai Skoool site is an online classroom for maths and science. It provides study notes and services for maths, biology, chemistry, physics and earth science. It's a collaborative project with the Thai Ministry of Education and Microsoft.
