Angela Gerrard - Educational Technologies Specialist, European Project Manager for Pontydysgu.

Open Access Preprints, Open Education Resources, Chapters, Handbooks and other free stuff.

Our Town - Towards Creative Mobile Learning in Community Focused Place-Based Education

Our Town is an attempt to utilize mobile learning in combination with place-based learning to either augment the existing educational features within a town or to create new geographically linked learning resources by adding challenges and showcases of content accessed via mobile devices.

However, far from being an academically driven project with standard text multiple choice questions written by education professionals, the project obtains its challenges and content from sources such as local schools, local community groups, arts projects, a ramblers’ association and a handful of independent businesses. Inevitably some of these engagements have not always gone to plan and the following chapter details both the successes and the pitfalls of the work so far.

Taccle Handbook for teachers of STEM

This book is targeted specifically at secondary school STEM teachers. We believe it is one of the first that addresses the specific needs of those teachers wanting some practical ideas on how to introduce and use information and communication technologies in the 11-16 classroom. It is not a text book, academic reader or a book which addresses the ICT skills curriculum. It is designed to help you get started on using e-learning methods and techniques in your subject area to make your lessons more fun, more creative and easier to prepare. Nor are we going to cover techy science-equipment like data loggers, digital microscopes, digital cameras and videos as most maths and science teachers are already pretty good at using those. The focus is on using freely available web 2.0 tools rather than dedicated maths or science programmes. We also focus on using social media to create and share pupil generated content rather than simply using the web for research. We have also a short section on using mobile devices.
(This is just another way of saying we just wanted to share some subject-related, practical teaching ideas we have used – things you can actually do with your class tomorrow morning!)