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From http://day.scratch.mit.edu/

Vital, a joint Open University / e-Skills project addressing teachers' CPD needs funded by the DCSF are inviting contributions of CPD resources for a new Open Course Movement initiative.

Built on open source platforms Moodle and Drupal, the Vital site provides a range of online CPD materials related to the use of technology in schools as well as acting as a hub for other training providers. Project director Peter Twining describes the Open Course Movement as being "to course materials what the Open Source Movement is to software." He says,

The OCM aims to enable ICT CPD providers (and others) to collaborate on the development of course materials which will be available on a Creative Commons licence. The benefits of this will be:

• reduced development costs for individual ICT CPD providers
• enhanced quality of course provision through the pooling of expertise and staff time in developing the materials
• greater consistency of ICT CPD provision across the country
• greater pool of high quality ICT CPD resources available for everyone to use (on a Creative Commons licence)

This sounds like a great opportunity for teachers and others in the open source community to work together to develop Moodle courses to share their insights and experiences of technology in education, either focussing on the use of particular applications to support or extend learning, or addressing broader issues.

Community members and visitors who are using Moodle in their schools or authoties might be interested in presenting a paper at April's UK Moodle Moot in London. The Moots are friendly gatherings with a stong culture of learning from and sharing with fellow delegates from all sectors of the UK Moodle community, and it would be great to have a strong representation from schools at this year's moot.

From imoot.org

Next year's Moodle Moot is to be hosted by University of London Computer Centre on 13th and 14th April. Here are the details...

“We are very excited at the opportunity to host MoodleMoot UK 2010” says Mick Kahn, Head of Application Services at ULCC. “Moodle is now the VLE of choice for the UK education sector and a triumph for the Open Source approach and this conference will bring together teachers, developers and administrators to learn from each other and advance the UK e-learning agenda."

We will be hard at work, putting together two days packed with thought provoking keynotes and engaging workshops whilst offering you the chance to meet fellow Moodlers.

Sean Keogh from pteppic.net, a member of the Programme Group for MoodleMoot UK 2010, who organised MoodleMoot UK since it started in 2004, says "I'm very pleased to be handing over the reins of MoodleMoot UK to ULCC. With their engagement of all sectors of the Moodle community, I am sure that they will organise an excellent conference and I look forward to working with them". The conference will be held on 13 & 14 April 2010, at Senate House, the University of London’s iconic Art Deco building, which has recently undergone major refurbishment.

Open Source Schools will be presenting a BETT seminar on 'Creative Computing with Open Source' at 15:45 on Wednesday 13th January. We will showcase a number of case studies about how school students are learning to program and contribute to the development of open source projects using a range of free, downloadable tools. Examples range from Scratch programming in primary schools, through Greenfoot in the secondary curriculum to the development of modules in PHP for web-based applications such as Moodle.

More from the Bletchley Park LA Seminar: this time Dale Jones, School Improvement Consultant for Shropshire County Council (and former teacher, and the genius behind ethink.org.uk WordPress MU Hosting...) on some of the barriers and enablers to open source in the classroom.

Video c/o Leon Cych at Learn 4 Life; other formats available at http://blip.tv/file/2796107

Jessica and Tracy talk about the process they used in an arduino workshop with young girls 8 - 11 earlier this year.

Arduino has its own development environment (based on Processing) - so effectively you code it in 'arduino'.  You can also talk to arduino indirectly via other programming languages such as processing, maxmsp, flash.

There  is a growing Arduino movement in the UK and workshops are growing out of the work done by the people at Tinker.it (which we will showcase in another video) and the University of East London as well as Toy Hacking workshops in London at places like Music Hackday.

A lot of this work is basd on the Lillypad Arduino kit  invented by Leah Buechley from the Hi-Low tech group at MIT a growing e-textiles movement.

(Video follows...)