User:Wellfan

Here's a bit about me.

My name is Drew Buddie and my email address is drew@buddie.plus.com.

I am a Scot living in Exile in Rickmansworth, near London where I am Head of ICT at a private girls school.

I present at conferences – I have talked at the Flossie conference, the Bucks VLE pilot conference, the MoodleMoot, ‘04 and this year in Oxford. I have presented at several Independent ICT cluster group school events. I was a winner of the NESTA Design challenge in 2005. I was winner of the Teacher Poster competition at the CAL 2005 conference at Bristol University when my presentation was chosen from and by my peers as being the best on display. I have been asked to speak at several forthcoming (this coming academic year) conferences including ones in Bratislava and Brussels.

I am an evangelist for the use of ICT in education. I believe games and simulations as well as emerging technologies, such as podcasting and blogs and wikis, offer tremendous potential to the young generation to be creative and innovative. If we as teachers can see the possibilities, then I believe that pupils will take that encouragement to fly with the skills and tools they are given. Mark Prensky describes today’s generation of young people as being ‘twitchspeed’ – I believe that I can assist teachers in supporting this twitchspeed generation in my role as ICT Co-ordinator at my school.

I passionately believe that students should be allowed the opportunity to be creative. ICT can allow them to do this, through the use of traditional tools, or more innovatively, through the use of emerging tools such as Blogs, VLEs, Simulations and Games. I have carried out research work in these fields during the past year, using WIKIs for teamwork and collaboration, Forums for students with Aspergers Syndrome and Gifted and Talented pupils (a joint project with the British Library) and Blogs for student self-evaluation.