Nik Peachey Nik Peachey Updated May 2013 Learning Technology Consultant I have been involved in ELT since 1992. I can create custom made face to face and online training courses for teachers and have been involved in a number of major training consultancies for ELT schools, organisations, publishers and education ministries around the world. In May 2012 I won a British Council ELTon for Excellence in Course Innovation for the Blended Learning in ELT course I designed for Bell Educational Services . I am an experienced virtual and physical conference presenter and have delivered educational technology related talks and workshops at major conferences all over the world. I also deliver the Media & Technology module on the University of Westminster MA TESOL. Among teachers I am best known for my free blogs, these include 'QuickShout' and his 'Learning Technology' blog. Get in contact to find out more about how we can work together.
Massive open online courses: Mooc's, Issues with moocs, ESP and Mooc's, Pedagogical Implications | Aysha Sharif ,eedbac8 an essential part in lanuae teachin and learnin$ has become one o* the most controversial issues and potential challenes in MOOCs <eer to peer assessment seems to be the s#stem most plat*orms rel# on 1one o* the ma"or MOOC providers have hired an#one trained in instructional desin$ the learnin sciences$ educational technolo#$ course desin$ or other educational specialties to help with the desin o* their courses In reard to the courses$ all the @students! The# have sinle and unchanin instructor which ma8es the course borin and uninterestin sometimes The courses are dened which have a nite beinnin and an end which restricts the thin8in o* the students and leaves no scope *or the students to ponder on the topic B research on
s Learning Technology Blog The Parent's Guide To Installing Minecraft Mods • MineMum Are your kids desperate to get into mods but you don't know where to start? Well this is the guide for you. Installing mods can be tricky and frustrating, but hopefully this will make it a little easier to understand. Important safety tips! Before you get started, make sure you understand what mods are and you've read the safety tips for downloading them. And most importantly of all, make a backup copy of any worlds that you already have that you want to keep. How do you install a mod? There's really no standard way to install a Minecraft mod because each is created by a different person using different methods. The easiest way to do all this is by using a mod called Minecraft Forge, but sometimes for whatever reason Forge doesn't load properly or the mods you want to run aren't compatible with it. OPTION A: Installing mods with Forge Mods can often be really difficult to get up and running. Step 1: Download Forge Step 2: Install Forge Step 3: Launch Minecraft Step 4: Download compatible mods
Author of the month: Nik Peachey Nik Peachey, digital guru and author of our Tech Tools for Teachers series, talks about the highs and lows of his personal experiences of education and explains how a lazy workaholic (his own words) came to get so interested in learning technologies. He also imparts some valuable advice on becoming a materials writer and gives tips on the wonders of self publishing online through blogs and e-books. Tell us a little bit about yourself … Teaching is a bit of a mysterious career choice for me as I really didn’t like school and didn’t do very well at school, so I’m still amazed sometimes at how I ended up lecturing on an MA course at a British University. My teachers didn’t think I was intelligent enough to sit my O-levels (the necessary requirement to progress in education past 16 in the UK; replaced by GCSEs in 1988) and I had to stay on an extra year to finish them, after which I left school and got a job. In five words, how would you describe yourself? That’s a tricky question to answer.
Building a Raspberry Pi Robot and Controlling it with Scratch Happy New Year everyone! Things have been a bit quiet on this blog due to the Christmas rush, and the fact that we’ve been spending time on product development (more on that in a future post). But here at last is the 3rd and final post in our series on the Raspberry Pi robot we […] Welcome to the second part of our series of posts, describing the workshop we ran at the recent Digimakers event at @Bristol. In the last post we described the outline of the workshop and looked at the hardware of the Raspberry Pi robot that we built for the event. Last weekend we ran a workshop at the Digimakers event at @Bristol where we taught people how to program a Raspberry Pi robot with the Scratch programming language. We had a great response to a recent blog post we wrote, describing how to build a Raspberry Pi robot that you can drive around using a tablet, smartphone or PC. A Raspberry Pi with a camera, gives you a small, low cost, embedded vision system, but it’s not very mobile.
The New Methodology In the past few years there's been a blossoming of a new style of software methodology - referred to as agile methods. Alternatively characterized as an antidote to bureaucracy or a license to hack they've stirred up interest all over the software landscape. In this essay I explore the reasons for agile methods, focusing not so much on their weight but on their adaptive nature and their people-first orientation. Probably the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last few years has been the appearance of the word 'agile'. We talk of agile software methods, of how to introduce agility into a development team, or of how to resist the impending storm of agilists determined to change well-established practices. This new movement grew out of the efforts of various people who dealt with software process in the 1990s, found them wanting, and looked for a new approach to software process. This essay was originally part of this movement. From Nothing, to Monumental, to Agile .
The evolution of the book - Julie Dreyfuss Prior to the release of the Amazon Kindle in November 2007, Stephen Levy commented in his Newsweek article, “Amazon: Reinventing the Book,” on the concept of the book as an invention. Quoting Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos directly, Levy writes that “‘books are the last bastion of analog.” This phrasing suggests the book as a set of definable qualities that can be manipulated, redefined, and commodified. But Levy also issues a warning that eventually “the surge of technology will engulf all media.” In an ever-increasing mass market of iPads, computers, and eBooks, 21st-century technology will redefine the codex of literature and the reading experience in the same way that the codex once revolutionized reading by moving away from the scroll. Watch this comic video, which comments on this anxiety. The idea of a book as a physical object may prove obsolete. If you have an interest in the history of the book and the study of the object itself, then methodology may help to guide your investigation.