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Assessing Without Levels – Milestones

Assessing without levels – Milestones At our school we took the decision last Summer to embrace the opportunities available to move away from National Curriculum levels. Our approach isn’t revolutionary, but I think it’s worth sharing. Background I personally felt that there were numerous issues with the old NC levels. They were not as well…

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Diagnostic questioning #Computing style

Back in September I was keen to get the Computing teaching community to work together to write a bank of high quality multiple choice questions. In fact, rather poorly, it was the last thing I wrote on this blog! Head back to see why I think that good quality MCQs can be an invaluable part…

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Crowd-Sourcing Multiple Choice GCSE Computing Questions

A plea to teachers of Computing GCSE, please join an effort to write a bank of high quality multiple choice questions to support the teaching of this course. Why multiple choice questions? There is an increasing body of research and writing showing that skilfully written multiple choice questions are an effective means of developing retention….

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Editorial (iOS App) Tags

I’ve been using the excellent Editorial app on my iPad increasingly for all my writing and note taking needs. Editorial is a geeky combination of text editor and Python programming playground. You can create or install workflows that do everything from basic text formatting to highlighting verbs to sharing the text with other services like…

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Why predicting attainment fails – Confidence Intervals

How accurately can we set targets and predict performance of pupil’s exam attainment? At this time of year the pressure is on teachers and leaders in school to know exactly how their young people will perform in the GCSE exams that they are currently sitting. There is an expectation from leaders, governors and of course…

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5 minute lesson plan – iPad Edition

5 Minute Lesson Plan – iPad Edition I love the 5 Minute Lesson Plan, the wonderful TeacherToolkit should be very proud of it. It’s all but superseded our school lesson plan proforma for most staff and I can understand why. The best medium I’ve found to date for using it is the good old fashioned…

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GCSE English Fiasco, seconds out, Round 2!

It’s hard to believe it’s a year since Round 1 of the English GCSE fiasco. Is Round 2 about to kick off? Don’t be surprised if it does! Will teachers and students be knocked out again? Just to recap: The impact of this is still being felt across the Secondary sector. Schools dropped below floor…

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Draft National Curriculum Programmes of Study – My Response

April the 16th is the deadline for responses to the Draft National Curriculum Programmes of Study. Much has been written and said about the creation of the Computing nee ICT programme of study and it’s creation process. I’ve written myself around the topic a number of times over it’s journey from the Nesta report to…