Extreme graphic violence – acceptable. Nudity – banned. Is this how you would expect Facebook to interpret its own Community Standards?
My Facebook wall recently contained a video which had been shared by one of my friends. “This is amazing!” my friend proclaimed and before I had even decided to watch it or not, the auto-play settings on my phone made the choice for me, and the video began. The opening scene shows an execution. This is followed by a brief moment of animal cruelty and then scene-upon-scene of violent deaths, blood-splattered corpses and trigger-happy shoot-outs. All this is played along to a music track happily entitled Motherf**ker. I felt strongly that this video would be breaching Facebook’s rules given it’s graphic content. I admit that I had never read Facebook’s rules carefully but I was sure that my reporting of the video would have it immediately removed. I was also partly expecting Facebook to be grateful to me for bringing this video to their attention. After all, by sharing a video it can automatically appear on the walls of unsuspecting Facebook friends. Much to my surprise, Facebook rejected my report saying that the video did not contravene its community standards. I was gobsmacked. How could more than 4 minutes of gratuitous graphic violence be considered acceptable by Facebook and thus available to anyone, including the youngest members, of their community?Read more…
Just a few weeks ago I was heading home, from school, much earlier than normal. As I do every day, I switched on 
There’s no denying that apps have transformed the way we work, learn, live and communicate. I use them, students use them and I strongly suspect that you use them. However, I’ve always been very wary of apps and consciously avoided tablets, like the iPad, that run nothing other than apps. While apps can be helpful, informative and even fun they’re pretty basic when compared to ‘real’ computer programs. I do, admittedly, have an iPhone which has plenty of apps, but I never use most. Those that I do use are very much collators of information such as Twitter, Facebook, BBC News, Weather forecasts etc. All of the information presented in these apps is easily available online rendering the need for an app pretty useless. If you’re worried about how these sites will look on a mobile screen without using the app, try it. They look virtually identical, they’ll even log you in automatically, just like the app. If I really think about it there are only three items on my iPhone that I couldn’t do without: the phone/text calling facility, the camera and my rather nerdy need for 
Just as YouTube is celebrating 10 years of existence another video app, Periscope, comes along and steals the limelight. While YouTube is now firmly bedded-in as the most used video sharing platform, Periscope has the potential to offer something that YouTube doesn’t do well; live video streaming. The Periscope app, only currently available on iTunes, burst into life in March/April 2015 and despite being the new kid on the block, it is managing to be one of the most talked about apps for quite some time. Allowing users to broadcast, live, anything they wish there is now a cornucopia of live video content available. But that’s part of the problem, a quick scan of the live broadcasts reveals a rather mundane list of everyday activities: ‘walking to work’, ‘the view from my window’, ‘making an omelette’ and so on. There is still a novelty of being able to broadcast anything to anyone and broadcasts seemingly happen randomly with no way to search for relevant content. Once the dust settles I see oodles of potential for this app both in the classroom and for budding journalists everywhere.
I know which I prefer. In fact I’ve always been unapologetic about my preference. If I ever stumble across a colleague using what I considered the inferior resource I immediately want to shake them vigorously and ask “why are you using that!?”. However, a recent Twitter exchange, which involved the CEO of Kahoot, made me question my choice. Until that point I had always thought that one of these two frequently used online resources was just fundamentally better than the other. How did I know? Experience. Having used both resources for my lessons it was, to me, obvious that one was fun but lacking educational value. Whereas the other was more suited to classroom learning and superior at improving my students knowledge of a particular topic.
If you don’t already know, the next ‘big’ apple product is the 
I recently gave an assembly on the rather boring sounding title of keyboard shortcuts (please don’t leave just yet!). Little did I realise that this topic would have such a huge impact on how the students use a computer.
Currently the Head of e‑Learning and a teacher of music at a large school in Sheffield, UK. Stephen Wiles is a front runner in the use of technology in the classroom. Alongside his popular 
