Bedford School Innovation Group

London School Introduces Experimental Trial of iPhones

The Gumley House Convent School -- a small, Christian School for girls ages 11 to 18 in London has laid out a plan to give an Apple Smartphone to each girl in a pilot group of 30 students. Although detailed plans are not clear it would seem that the School is planning to give free access to all the phone's features with the exception of the ability to make calls!

YouTube Edu

Launched earlier this year in March.  YouTube EDU  centralizes the content from over 100 universities and colleges  The collection gives access to lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders, new research and campus tours. At the moment, you can access over 200 full courses from leading universities, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale. Increasingly a number of universities in the UK are also posting content on the site - Nottingham University being a good example.

Another increasingly popular source of open educational resources is Academic Earth. The site has a very simple user interface along with a broad range of content.

Online University - the growth of iTunes U

Following on from the recent post about the use of iTunes U by universities in North America and in this country, a recent report in the Sunday Times highlights the rapid advancement being made in the development of open educational resources. With iTunes U at the very heart of the revolution many universities are starting to realise the potential of this new form of learning.

The article written by Richard Woods reflects on the increasing awareness by the public of the huge range of resources that universities are now making available for download. In this country the Open University through Open Learn along with Oxford University and Cambridge University are very much in the vanguard of this new and exciting development.

The statistics are impressive - In just a year of posting material on iTunes U, Oxford has seen well over 1m downloads of lectures or other academic works. While in little more than a year more than 845,000 people around the world have accessed Open Learn through iTunes U and downloaded nearly 8m items. In the past month downloads have averaged 400,000 a week.

Read the full article.