Libraries are the new Old Spice

The Old Spice guy, and even his excellent video responses to members of the public on Twitter (see below), are old news. How do we know that? Because a library has taken the ad and made it its own. You know, one of those houses where they keep old books that no one ever reads because of the Internet. So, if dorky libraries are going for the image revamp that tired old Old Spice has had, anything is possible. That's because we're all on the Internet, which is bad if you are a library.

Collaborative writing goes back to primary school

 

One of the main criticisms of Google Wave (and why it never got off the ground) is that no one understands what it is, how it works and what the point is. Enter typewith.me, a simple, instant and free service that lets you write a document collaboratively - this kind of software is apparently all the rage in schools.

No sign in, no problem - try it now.

Blogs are useful, even for teaching

11 advantages of using a blog for teaching

View more presentations from Frank Calberg Services.

The secret to using all this new media at our fingertips is to choose the tool for your purpose. The much-maligned blog is good for many things, and even has advocates among teachers. It's certainly a good way to get the class involved and prepare them for the real world.

I even learned a new word: Unsatisfaction

Mozart: The ultimate deterrent

This is the man striking fear into kids at West Park School in Derby - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. According to the BBC, Headmaster Brian Walker plays unruly pupils Mozart, Elgar, Verdi and Bach during detention on Fridays and the results have been impressive. But not because the brats are getting into WAM:

Hopefully, I open their ears to an experience they don't normally have and it seems many of them don't want to have it again, so it's both educational and acts as a deterrent.

Sounds good, but where's the Beethoven?

Interactive whiteboards: In case you haven't been to school recently

Most classrooms in the UK now have Interactive Whiteboards (IWB). Obviously, this may not be big news for teachers or anyone with children, but it still raises a whole load of interesting issues about the challenges faced by educators in the digital decades to come. Will teachers just use Wikipedia and YouTube all day? And will the kids be sent home when Windows crashes or someone in the class uploads a virus?

The shape of school projects to come?

The video above, "The Crisis of Credit Visualized" is not only a great explanation of the credit crunch in visual terms, it is also part of a thesis in media design by a student called Jonathan Jarvis. So it's not quite a school project, but with the array of media at our kids' fingertips, it can't be long before they refuse to write essays for school and just submit a link to their blog, a YouTube video, a Twitter feed, or whatever else they might have floating around the cloud. Good luck marking that, Mrs. Smith.

Of course, that is the next step, first marketing companies need to learn to harness media better to communicate more effectively with more people. And as this run-down of the finest media visualisations of the year shows (from another student who is one step ahead of the class), the sky's the limit.

School offers children financial advice

As someone with a small child constantly asking what skills the next generation will need, this appears to be a very good idea. After all, almost everything else we learn in school  is little more than a Wikipedia search away.