Well the cold snap in the UK has given me the first two days of 2010 school year sat at home in front of the fire. I’ve been really busy of late so it’s been good to get some time to concentrate on my E-Learning role. I have been meaning to write an E-Learning newsletter…
Well you can’t have missed the fact that Google has finally unleashed Google Wave to 100,000 lucky testers, and with it a tsunami of hype. I was lucky enough to be one of the 100,000 first wave. Enough of the puns, if you want a bytesize explanation of what Wave is then this video is…
I will post my first impressions of Google Wave soon, in the meantime we have started building a directory of educators who are using Wave at the moment. This can be found here.
I’m doing a quick presentation at Teach Meet North West tomorrow night in Manchester. If you haven’t been to a Teachmeet before it’s an ‘unconference’ where enthusaistic teachers get together to share ideas, usually with an E-Learning theme. I’m doing a 2 minute nano-presentation on Google Forms, based on my interview / blog post from…
I have been in post at my new school as Director of E-Learning for 4 weeks now, and it’s been a heck of a ride! A completely new IT Support team for the school has meant that it has been a trying start to the year for all concerned. The new team has pulled together…
First up a disclaimer: The lovely people at BrainPop UK offered me & my school a free 3 month subscription to their site in return for a post on their new Maths videos, this is said post. With that out of the way, what’s BrainPop? The website has videos for many subjects, all starring Tim…
Kodu is a new game programming language / tool from Microsoft. It has had a very low-key launch, I came across it as it was featured in the excellent Edge Magazine last month. Kodu is initially available to the public on X-Box Live Marketplace for about £3.50. I have been fortunate enough to be allowed…
All schools I have been to have a rewards system in place, the yin, to the sanctions system’s yang. I think it’s about time school rewards were dragged into the 21st Century, and I have a few thoughts…
Well today the sun shone down on me and I got a chance to experiment with ‘spaced learning‘ as planned. photo credit: tamakisono Initial gut instinct is that it was a success. Pupils were engaged in the entire process, made clear progress throughout the lesson and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. At this late stage in their…
It’s exam time again already, and with it came the usual request from my Head of Department for any innovative ideas of how we could approach revision / lay on extra things for the Year 10 & 11s before there first exam next month. This prompted a memory of a newspaper article about a school…