InvolverJust found this on Twitter (you need to read it from the bottom to the top):
It’s great to use technology for your school council, but I guess you’ve got to understand it to understand the risks!
Here are my quick tips for running elections (I wrote these when I was working for School Councils UK):
It’s called Exploratree and it’s made by Futurelab:
I’ll be trying it out with school councils next time I’m running training.
Came across it through Twitter: http://twitter.com/parslad
If it seems useful it’s something we could suggest to people in our e-newsletter.
Asher
Get it in your school diary NOW! February 2009
http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/teachers/sid09.aspx
Melodie
By Richard Hillesley, writes (12 Jun 2008 at 03:13):
Inertia, fear of the unknown and agreements with vendors have lead to slow adoption of open source and free software in UK schools.
Back in 2005, Becta – the body that advises the UK government on IT policy in education – issued a report which concluded that free and open source software could reduce the cost of deploying, supporting and maintaining computer systems in primary schools by between 20 and 50 per cent.
Becta’s report was the conclusion of a study of 48 schools over a period of three years, which compared 33 schools running traditional proprietary systems, against 15 that were running open source solutions. Link here
Mark
At my meeting with Futurelab one of the other people there was from synergy.tv. One of their big projects is www.radiowaves.co.uk which allows schools to create their own radio stations for free. This could be a great tool for school councils. An offshoot of this is Voice It! which is particularly about using those tools for campaigning.
I’m going to be facilitating this seminar, it looks pretty interesting:
The Learner Voice and Technology workshop will be held on Tuesday 26th February at the Futurelab Offices in Bristol. http://www.futurelab.org.uk/about_us/contact_location
The workshop aims to explore the potential of technology to engage learner voice in the primary, secondary and FE/HE sectors.
We will take as our starting point the methods already being used across these sectors with and without technology.
To help get a feel for this event I would read our Handbook on Learner Voice that we completed 2 years ago… http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/handbooks/learner_voice.pdf