Laurie O'Donnell

I was very fortunate to be invited back to LTS in Glasgow yesterday to join a delegation from Australia who were across to have a look at our national schools intranet  Glow. The delegation was led by Greg Whitby, CEO of the 80 schools in the Parramatta Diocese of Sydney.
This was a really inspirational session [...]

Another really great SLF. It felt  really strange just walking around meeting people and enjoying the event without having any responsibilities.
I ended up spending a lot of time catching-up with old friends and former colleagues and for a change was not dashing off to chair a session or attend a launch.
Apart from the very important [...]

I’ve been blogging about Glow for quite a few years now and have celebrated small each step along the way as the world’s first national schools intranet slowly became a reality.
This evening I was delighted to see my 13 year old daughter log onto Glow to do her maths homework. Although she decided to write [...]

I have been doing some work with Bristol based Futurelab and one of my roles involves exploring work undertaken by the Lumiar Institute of São Paulo in Brazil.
I attended the Learning and Technology World Forum in London in January and really enjoyed listening to Ricardo Semler the Chief Executive of SEMCO talking about the the [...]

Just back from an event in Glasgow’s Oran Mor organised by Scotland’s Centre for Confidence & Wellbeing. The speaker was Professor Barry Schwartz.
I have tweeted some of his quotes (@laurieod) and this post is my notes of what he said.
The ‘Paradox of Choice’  – too much choice in certain aspects of our lives (commodities/products etc) [...]

 
Not been keeping my blog up to date recently – sign of being too busy.
I spent the week before last in London attending two events. The first was a Becta organised conference which was attended by 60 ministers of education including our own Maureen Watt, MSP, Minister for Schools and Skills.
Some great speakers including:

Sir Tim [...]

 
Sitting at home listening to BBC Radio Scotland’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth – Auld Lang Sang.
We have just published some new Burns resources for schools (and others) to use on the LTS Online Service. The highlight for me is the Burns songs performed by “The Cast” ( one of Scotland’s finest [...]

I usually get stir crazy after a couple of days at a conference but yesterday afternoon’s plenary session really was inspirational.
First up was Jorge Sampaio, this former president of Portugal and now elder statesman, who reminded us that we can’t take democracy for granted. As a student he struggled against the dictatorship in his country [...]

Having a very interesting second day at this event which has 450 delegates drawn from 45 countries.
Some of the highlights for me were:
Deputy Mayor of Stockholm
Capital of Sweden is made up of 14 islands.
There are 1.9m inhabitants in the region and 800k in the city itself (similar to greater Glasgow and the city itself?).
Stockholm has [...]

I am in Stockholm and Oslo this week attending a ‘Public Sector Summit’ organised by CISCO.
Apart from having to get up before 0500 to catch a flight to London on the way to Stockholm this is a pretty good way to earn a living.
The event starts this evening in Stockholm and finishes on Thursday evening [...]