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…
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….
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…
Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general. 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…
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…
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…
Digital game based learning: Minecraft maths Why didn’t I think of this? Exploring 3D shapes in Maths using Minecraft. Brilliant.
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….
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.
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…