This week, on Friday 25th May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force and replace the current Data Protection Act 1998. Although GDPR derives from EU law, it will be UK law even after brexit. Basically, every EU country is adopting the same set of regulations, which will make doing business across the EU much simpler with just one set of rules. While the main principles of data protection remain largely the same, GDPR is much stricter than the current Act. It is more prescriptive in terms of how we must comply and the penalties for non-compliance are more seve ..read more

We recently ran a workshop at Charles Read Academy in Corby Glen, centred around the iPad, and the ways in which it can be used as a powerful teacher’s tool. Included in the workshop was annotation, marking up, mirroring, Google Drive and Drive File Stream. The Markup tool on iPads is great for classroom use It was wonderful to receive an email a week or so later from a college at Charles Read, Mrs. Smith, who had joined us for the workshop. Mrs. Smith’s email detailed the fact that she had used the iPad in every lesson that day, and what an impact it had had on the teaching ..read more

We recently started a new Spring cohort of our Challenge for eLearning CPD course with colleagues from the Corby area, including the author of Pixi Maths, Danielle Moosajee. As a plenary activity for the first session, we used and demo'd Plickers - 'a simple tool that lets teachers collect real-time formative assessment data without the need for student devices.' It's a great tool which we've blogged about before, and here are Danielle's thoughts on it after using it class post-training: I left the first Challenge 4 eLearning session full of biscuits and inspired! In a way, it was a ..read more

Muse's Revolt video in 360 is spectacular I remember a few years ago being blown away by virtual reality. I had just spent 4 minutes or so in a dystopian future watching protestors clash with robotic riot officers, drones hovering overhead, the chaos of permanent night and a brilliant soundtrack to match. This 360 music video by Muse that I was immersed in whilst wearing a Google Cardboard headset was the future of everything I had decided. Via the VRSE app (now Within) I could also take walking tours of NYC or fly through an asteroid field. "The future is here!" I proclaim ..read more

For a long time I've had a recurring problem. Every time I show a tool to use on the "teaching wall" at the end someone always asks "yes, but can I play my SMART Notebook files on it?" or "yes, but what about Powerpoint?" Ben in action, using OneNote in Challenge for eLearning I must admit to having a soft spot for Powerpoint, particularly when combined with Office Mix but for my own work have pretty much gone over to Google Slides just because I can access them anywhere and they have all the features I need, plus sharing tools. SMART Notebook though has always bothered me, partly b ..read more

Jamboard has been around for a while as a high-end piece of digital office furniture from Google but the software is now part of G-Suite and therefore available to all dret.cloud users. Staff or students can either go to jamboard.google.com for the web version (which is really only useful for viewing and sharing boards) or use the iOS app available on the Self-Service store. What Jamboard provides is a lovely app to pull different kinds of documents from Google Drive or web pages, move and resize them and annotate over the top with different pen tools or a number of icons. I plan to do a c ..read more

For a long time I have been a huge fan of SWGFL's Digital Literacy Curriculum resources and continue to be so. From a primary school viewpoint, they are a great starting point for ensuring whole school coverage of digital literacy and citizenship in age-appropriate ways, and staff generally like the out of the box resources and lesson plans which can be adapted accordingly. I was recently introduced to Google's new 'Be Internet Legends' scheme of work. Aimed primarily at Key Stage 2 (but looks like it can be adapted down or up pretty easily), the scheme of work has been developed by ..read more

The thing we love the most about the best digital tools is that they are easy to pick up and use for the novice, but allow more experienced users to find ways of using them to a greater depth, either for teaching and learning purposes, classroom impact, or to aid workflow. A workshop we have been offering recently to EAL teachers and departments uses a tool that does just that. More specifically, Google Docs. Using the built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in Google Docs, you can turn images with text into text documents, and then using the translate tool, convert that text in ..read more

Google Sites is a tool in G Suite to create websites - no programming required. You can build multi-page websites or platforms from scratch in no time at all - just by dragging content onto a page. Once finished, you can share the websites link with other staff, students and parents. It's a great way to collate material together to send out in one go, and easy to keep updated with new resources and information where required. It's also compatible with other Google products like Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms etc which you can embed into a page - you can also add anything you have stored in y ..read more

It’s been around for a while, but it’s a tool that I use all the time, especially when creating a new presentation from scratch. The Design feature in PowerPoint works in the background to match your content to professionally designed layouts, as you are putting your ideas onto a slide. As you start adding content such as pictures and charts, the designer will pop up to the right of the screen and show you different designs, that change as you start adding more. If you don’t see design ideas you may need to turn it on.  1. To turn on Designer go to the File menu, click Options. 2. In the ..read more