April 2012
1 post
Just testing out Spotify integration into Tumblr -...
March 2012
1 post
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Digital Literacies - What Does #StopKONY Mean For...
You’ve probably heard about the viral campaign to stop Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The video has been watched approximately 40 million times since it’s release on Monday. If not it’s here:
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
This swept through our school today, all the pupils were talking about it, most had watched it....
February 2012
6 posts
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Why The iPad Is Currently The Best 1:1 Solution
Yesterday I posted an article looking at the teaching and learning features and requirements that IT provision supports in schools. I concluded that if funding can be made to work (and with creative budgeting it’s not as hard as you’d think) that 1:1 is the ideal model.
So that begs the question: What device?
We’ve looked at this in detail at my school, tested devices, read...
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Why 1:1 IT Provision Is The Answer, And BYOD Is...
There’s been much talk and excitement of late about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as the cure to all IT provision ills in schools. Whilst it certainly has a place and should be encouraged it’s not a replacement for other models at the present time. This post owes a lot to Ryan Bretag’s recent writing, a large chunk of it comes from work that has been ongoing in our school for the...
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Potential of mobile devices to improve education
This was originally written as a think piece for the DfE for the http://schoolstech.org.uk/ site, think pieces weren’t used in the end so here it is!
Our young learners inhabit a world where communication and access to knowledge is being transformed by mobile devices. A world in which we as adults would be lost and frustrated without our own mobile devices. There are 81 million mobile...
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BBC Micro 2.0 #ictcurric
I attended Alan O’Donohoe’s excellent Hack To The Future event at Our Lady’s High School in Preston on Saturday with 13 of our students, many of whom are on our GCSE Computing course.
There were many highlights, in particular I should mention Freaky Clown and his tales of a hacker turned good. I won’t repeat his story of hacking a whole country in 7 seconds as that would...
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WCYDWT? Pinterest Style
Sometimes a couple of ideas come together to form a little flash of inspiration. I’ve had a Pinterest account for a while but not really used it personally or thought of using it in education. A blog post from Mark Warner got me thinking though. Pinterest is a social site that encourages users to create a virtual pinboard of images and videos taken from across the web.
I’ve been a...
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January 2012
10 posts
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BYOD and 1:1 are not the same →
Ryan Bretag nails some thoughts I’ve had recently on Bring Your Own Device as an IT provision in schools. It’s nice to have, and common sense in this day and age to allow learners to use their own devices in your classrooms and on your networks. But it’s no replacement or real alternative to running a 1:1 environment.
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Desmos For All
I was most impressed with the Desmos Graphing Calculator last year. It’s a powerful and user friendly graphical calculator.
It’s just been re-written from the ground up in HTLM5 which means it will work perfectly on an iPad or other tablet. It’s genuinely impressive and exciting to see what magic coders are starting to weave with HTML5.
Head over to...
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Oh No Mr Gove!
And just like that, world order is restored. I felt a little uncomfortable praising Mr Gove for his radical move to remove the ICT Programme of Study.
But all is back in balance now.
As MSN reports:
“The Education Secretary has called for longer school days and suggested that teachers should also be happy with longer terms.
Michael Gove said “we’re all in...
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Bravo Mr Gove #schoolstech #ictcurric
Unless you’ve been living under a rock today I’m assuming you’ll have seen some excitable headlines followed by a more detailed speech about the future of technology in education in the UK and in particular the future of the subject of ICT.
In a nutshell Mr Gove has scrapped the ICT curriculum, whilst keeping ICT in the curriculum. Confused? Don’t be. We can now...
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FizzBuzz CodeYear Fun #schoolstech
With todays announcement from Mr Gove it seems a good point to reflect on my first steps on a year long coding journey. I spent my Tuesday evening completing the first week of lessons on the brilliant CodeYear. It took me about an hour and a half and was a great little introduction to Javascript. First week covers defining variables, basic arithmetic, and moves on to if/then/else/while...
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20% Time in School - Leaving them to it...
Stretford High School has five core values, one of these is creativity, one is independence and one is drive. I have been trying to instill these core skills into my Year 8 Maths class this year by giving them an hour a week to do whatever they choose.
Motivation:
I was inspired at the SSAT National Conference in 2010 by Dan Pink’s talk about drive, in particular his discussions of...
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#BETT2012 In Lists
For the first time in about four years I won’t be visiting BETT this year in London. For the un-initiated BETT is an enormous educational technology trade show / conference held at Olympia in London each January.
Things I’ll miss:
Bumping into other educators I know from Twitter etc.
Attending some of the fringe events e.g. Teachmeets.
Seeing some of our existing partners who we...
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Learn To Code →
Code Academy have set up Code Year. A lesson a week that over the course of the year will teach you how to code.
Slate suggest each lesson will run to about 5 hours. Which is a hefty commitment. But I’ve signed up and will be encouraging learners at school to do the same. With our big push on Computing and the future ICT curriculum changes on the horizon, it’s about time I can walk...
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“Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about...”
– Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, getting it all wrong.
Please don’t listen to him. Speak your mind, share your ideas. And like I always tell my pupils, think before you post. Common sense not scare-mongering.
Which reminds me I have a policy to write for staff to include...
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A Gift
“It was a gift to us,” she said. “And for him to be so confident and unafraid of death and to share it with other people was so touching.”
Ben Breedlove’s Mum. Ben passed away shortly after making these videos.
Is this classed as educational? Why are we still discussing filtering YouTube? An amazing resource.
December 2011
8 posts
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“I often refer to Animoto as a gateway to “real” video projects....”
– Richard Byrne on Animoto for iOS.
Good point, great product, good app. Our Humanities department in particular are using this to create fantastic, engaging videos for topics and even for types of lessons - almost using them to brand the lesson.
Animoto.
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Outstanding Design Pt.1 - Typerighter.com
Typerighter is one of the best designed web apps I’ve ever come across. You can try it out here. You’ll be presented with a completely blank web page. In which you can type. And that’s it! The user interface is non-existent, the options appear non-existent, it’s just a blank page that gradually fills with text as you type, and it’s so simple it works identically on...
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Youtube For Schools? Solving a problem that...
So Google have released Youtube For Schools? http://www.youtube.com/schools. This gives access to all the videos on Youtube Edu, and also others curated by your teachers, specific to your school Google Apps account.
Well that’s lovely. But really. Isn’t it time your school just used the other Youtube For Schools over at http://youtube.com? We’ve been using it freely for years....
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ReBlog: Don't Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog) →
minimalmac:
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
So, today I recorded a future episode of the...
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Graphing Google →
Now you can plot mathematical functions right on the search result page. Just type in a function and you’ll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page.
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Ban Calculators? →
Just catching up on last week’s reading and found the Conservative’s latest idea from the NC Review. Banning calculators in early years of Primary school.
As someone planning a one device per child school you’d think I’d be up in arms. But I teach maths. And most pupils arrive at our school aged 11 and don’t know their times tables. And it genuinely does hold them...
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November 2011
2 posts
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Pre-Digital
Succinct and thought provoking piece by Seth Godin:
Is your school pre-digital? I’ve spent much of the first 3 months of the school year setting up a new installation of SIMs. Much of our knowledge of our learners is digitised, but we really need some better software to make the most of this data. SIMs Discover is a start in the right direction.
But what about everything else we do, how...
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Return to Granny's Garden?
The BBC along with Keri Facer at Manchester Metropolitan University are investigating the idea of a BBC Micro Mk2.0.
For those of you who didn’t grow up in 80’s Britain, the BBC Micro was an Acorn computer, build for the BBC Computer Literacy Project and became the mainstay of early IT in almost every British school. An army of young learners were either taught, or taught...
October 2011
10 posts
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Arrington invests in Code Academy →
I spotted the excellent Code Academy a few weeks ago. And it looks like I wasn’t alone. It’s received a huge round of funding including from Michael Arrington:
What really excites me about Codecademy is that you can learn almost anything this way.
All I can think of is how if this was around when I was in college I may have actually learned calculus this way. I got a B in that...
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Digital game based learning: Minecraft maths →
Why didn’t I think of this?
Exploring 3D shapes in Maths using Minecraft.
Brilliant.
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Respect, Independence, Creativity & Drive
What videos or other resources would you use to share these values in a school?
These are the four key values that we share as a school. We’ve spent a great deal of effort working as a school to develop and agree upon our core values and aims and from them a school improvement plan.
I’d like to collate a bank of videos and other talking points on these four key areas.
Have you got...
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Programming Principles →
I like these analogies and principles for programming basics, nice talking points for teachers using Code Academy as a starting point for teaching programming.
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Facebook: Hard-Hitting Safety & Privacy Assembly
I’ve been giving an assembly to every House in our school this week, with a focus on Safety & Privacy in Facebook. It’s gone down incredibly well with staff and more importantly students, so I figured it worth sharing. I’ve hit on some top tips to get pupils to listen on a subject that it’s oh so easy to patronise upon.
Let them use it
This began with a lesson with my Year 8 ICT class. We...
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Visual.ly Infographics →
Visual.ly is at present a nice collection of infographics, those big data visualisations that are making statistics cool again. They can be a great source of information and discussion for the classroom (and also a great source of revenue / traffic for their creators).
What’s more exciting is the promise that you’ll soon be able to create your own on the site, I’ll be checking...
5 tags
Code Academy →
Love this website that teaches you the basics of how to code. Have passed on to our new Computing GCSE class.
August 2011
4 posts
8 tags
Using Mozilla's Open Badge project in secondary...
I’ve been interested by the possibilities of Mozilla’s Open Badges project over the past week or so. Doug Belshaw brought it to my attention and I’ve been engaged with him and a group of educators discussing the possible uses of the badges in schools over at the ‘Peer to Peer University P2PU. Open Badges in a nutshell:
I can think of three obvious places where these...
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High Street Piracy
Could some of last weeks looting in England be put down to the pirate culture that the majority of 10-30 year olds have grown up with in the UK? This continues my thoughts from my previous post about the riots.
Much has been written about the volume of online piracy over the past 14 years since the early days of Napster and the reported damages to the music, film, games & software industries....
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Inside the mind of a young rioter #manchesterriots...
Like most of the UK (and beyond), I’ve spent the last 5 days watching with dismay as England has descended into widespread looting, arson & violence. It’s been a shocking example of just how thin the bubble of civilised society is and just how close we live to something akin to Lord Of The Flies.
After the initial shock (and anger as the criminality hit my home town on Tuesday...
July 2011
9 posts
4 tags
School colour-codes pupils by ability →
I’m trying to work out just how wrong this is? I know it’s not right because it just feels terribly wrong. But. I do support setting, we do it in Maths in every secondary school I’ve ever worked in because it just works. Pupils do need to work at different paces and ability levels. But taking that one step further to have school ‘houses’ based on ability just feels,...
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Maths & Science in action! - 17 people in a Korean... →
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iPads For All?
Back in May I wrote a fairly lengthy piece looking at IT Provision In Secondary Schools in 2011. Go read it if you haven’t, it’s quite comprehensive and sparked a good debate. I’ll be here when you get back ready to talk a bit more about iPads….
More than just Angry Birds!
…Read it? Good. As you read I strongly believe the iPad offers an incredible solution for...
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Does Gove Get Games? →
A strangely positive sounding report from the great Edge Magazine quotes Gove speaking at The Royal Society, in particular referring to the excellent www.mangahigh.com that Marcus du Sautoy has had some input in.
“I am sure that this field of educational games has huge potential for maths and science teaching and I know that Marcus has been thinking about how he might be able to create...
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