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ZDNet Education news has education-related tech news, or tech-related education news, depending on your point of view! I couldn’t find an RSS feed for it, which is strange given that it uses feeds from other sites. Perhaps I should create one with Dapper? (thanks to Andrew Field at the EffectiveICT Forum for the link)

I’m loving my new job. The school I’m in is about a thousand times more organized than any one I’ve been in previously. Everyone knows what they’re doing and supposed to be aiming towards. This means that the lessons I need to deliver are already there for me; whilst I need to prepare for them and put my own ’spin’ on them, I’ve nowhere near the amount of work I used to have. This is great: it means I can spend more time with and doing things for my pregnant wife – but also, dear reader, spend more time reading and getting involved in the edublogosphere… :D

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Miguel Guhlin has posted Creating the Walled Garden in which he reports on a listserv discussion about using Web 2.0 within a school intranet, rather than on the Internet proper. The categories he considers include blogging tools, wikis, content management systems, discussion boards, calendars, and social bookmarking. If, like me, you’re trying to find new ways to engage your students but need to gain the approval of your superiors, it’s well worth a look!

I’ve just submitted my Ed.D. thesis proposal outline to the education department at the University of Durham. At the moment I’m thinking that I’ll be focusing on the changing nature (or at least conceptions) of knowledge in the 21st century and the impacts upon (especially secondary) education. You can read it in full (it’s very brief) along with my preliminary bibliography over at my Ed.D. blog, along with some great quotations I came across!

If you’re looking for a guide to start podcasting you should begin with the guide I produced. If this doesn’t quite hit the spot, however, there’s a collection of links to guides at this website. Check it out!

I can still remember the excitement I felt after persuading my parents to buy a then-almost-top-of-the-range Pentium computer with its speedy 75mhz processor. Eleven years later, of course, my mobile phone has a processor at least three times as fast as that. One thing you can almost guarantee is that pretty much every student you come across will have a mobile phone. In my school they’re not even supposed to be in school but – as you can imagine – they are used surreptitiously in between lessons. In what follows I’m going to try to outline a few ways in which we can use the technology students already have to motivate them, make life easier, and enhance their learning! :D

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I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s tried to convince others (including my lovely wife) to use RSS feeds. However sometimes it’s difficult to explain things which others see as ‘a bit technical’ but which you see as simple and a bit life-transforming (in an information kind-of-way). That’s where How to explain RSS the Oprah way comes in. Read it, digest it and tell others!

GeoPress is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to embed maps quickly and easily in your blog. Geography teachers (especially Noel Jenkins, I should imagine) will love this…

WhatsaWiki is a wiki page about wikis. It’s on Chris Sessums’ onewisdom wiki and worth a look if you’re unclear about what wikis are or do, or if you need to ’sell’ one to a sceptical colleague. There’s more about it on Chris’ blog here…

Is it just a coincidence that children who play musical instruments tend to be the gifted and talented ones? Is it because they tend to be middle-class? Not according to a Canadian study reported by Yahoo! News. They say that ‘if you take music lessons your brain is getting wired up differently than if you don’t take music lessons’. I’ll continue using music in my lessons, then!