In my role as teacher of languages, I have sought to study and understand how the social aspect of Web 2.0 can be harnessed to strengthen the teaching and learning of MFL. Most interesting to me was…

"The hole in the wall: self organising systems in education" Keynote speech by Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University (Twitter track by agreement with Sugata) at "Into something rich and strange" - making sense of the sea change, the 2010 conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). Session given in Nottingham, UK, on Wednesday 8 September 2010, at 14.00. For information about ALT go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/. Made publicly available by ALT under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/2.0/uk/.

New tumblr post: Google Teacher Academy application video will appear here...
Google Teacher Academy application video will appear here shortly. For more information on 20% time in my classroom please visit this blog post, our class blog and Adeel’s Rubik’s blog.

New tumblr post: 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 favour” of extending the school day and potentially also cutting short the summer holidays.

Asked about how this would impact on teachers, he told ITV’s Daybreak programme: “If you love your job then there is, I think, absolutely nothing to complain about in making sure you have more of a chance to do it well.”

Really Mr Gove?

Let’s take a look at my last week in teaching:

Saturday (Xmas Hols) - 3 hours (mainly planning lessons)

Sunday (Xmas Hols) - 5 hours (mainly whole school data analysis to make sure we’re on track to do well in the league tables)

Monday (07.30-22.00) - 14 hours (teaching, meetings, planning, supervising break, research)

Tuesday (07.30-18.00) - 10.5 hours (teaching, leading) + (19.00-22.30) 3.5 hours (learning & sharing)

Wednesday (07.30-21.00) - 13 hours (teaching, marking, supervising lunch, meeting, leading, reflecting on your policy decisions)

Thursday (07.30-20.00) - 12.5 hours (teaching, planning, supervising lunch, analysing data, meeting, parents evening)

Friday (07.30-15.00) - 7.5 hours (teaching, more data, more meetings, more duties)

That’s 69 hours.

And that’s an average week.

Where appropriate I’ve removed 30 mins for eating dinner at home. I’ve not had a lunch break, nor a ‘break of reasonable length’ during the day. We work these hours, for 5-8 weeks at a time, and then we collapse, speak to our loved ones and sleep for about half of our holidays, before spending the second half preparing work for the next term.

If you want people like me to run your schools, to innovate new ICT curricula and share them across the country, to make sure my school does well in it’s league tables and receives another Outstanding in it’s next, no-notice, Ofsted inspection, oh yes - and to teach, what exactly should I stop doing?

And all this whilst paying me less? I don’t think so. According to the NUT’s pension calculator, if your proposed changes go through, and if I were to make it to 60 years old, doing my bit to fill the upcoming Headteacher shortage, and then decided to retire at that age. I would be £750,000 worse off. Three quarters of a million pounds worse off.

This does not compute.

I do love my job. But I couldn’t do any more of it. If you asked me to, I’d leave the classroom immediately, and that would be a shame.

New tumblr post: 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 statements.

It’s an interesting learning model, there are hints at each stage and I didn’t find myself stuck on too many occasions. If you teach ICT or Maths then I’d thoroughly recommend you take a look at it. It was quite a challenge and I’ll be interested to see how far students could get without a teacher to help them. If they do get stuck, some good Googling skills would help them find a way forward pretty quickly. It’s not a replacement for a skilled teacher thought, but that’s a conversation for another post!

The final bonus challenge is to write a FizzBuzz program that writes out a set of consecutive numbers, but replaces multiples of 3 with “Fizz” and multiple of 5 with “Buzz” and of course, multiples of both with “FizzBuzz”. It’s a great little challenge that the Maths teacher in me loved!

I’ve been encouraging staff and students at school to join me on this journey so it’ll be interesting to see how many are up for the challenge.

Here’s my final FizzBuzz code in case you’re interested or stuck:

// Ask user how far we should Fizz Buzz for
var Total = prompt("How far shall we fizz buzz?");

// for the numbers 1 through to Total,
for (i=1; i<=Total; i++) {

// if the number is divisible by 3, write "Fizz"
if ( i % 3 === 0 ) {
// unless the number is also divisible by 5, then write "FizzBuzz"
if ( i % 5 === 0 ) {
console.log("FizzBuzz");
}
else
console.log("Fizz");
}

// if the number is divisible by 5, write "Buzz"
else if (i % 5 === 0 ){
console.log("Buzz");
}

// otherwise, write just the number
else {
console.log(i);
}
}

Has anyone written this in a neater, purer way? I’d love to see it if you have.

New tumblr post: #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 currently source products from.

Seeing the personal friends who I stay with when visiting.

Things I won’t miss:

Being harassed at every turn by a salesman.

Walking round and round and round and round.

Queuing to put my coat in.

Searching for some phone/wifi signal.

Buying over priced snacks.

Seeing the latest 3D screen / projector / TV.

Seeing the latest amazing developments in the world of Interactive Whiteboards.

Seeing the latest and greatest VLE.

Seeing the latest….. oh you get the idea!

Sleeping on a sofa-bed to save money for school (although see point 4 in the positives).

A bag full of useless freebies - seriously I got some 64Mb USB sticks last year - who knew they even made them so small still?!?

Things I’ll do instead:

Keep up on anything valuable I’ve missed via Twitter hastags and people’s blogs.

Ask companies to come and see me personally at school if we think we want to work with them.

Teach my Year 11s on the run up to their exams.

Save school a chunk of money.

Look to visit some schools that are leading on areas that we are planning to develop.

In this day and age, unless you have a bunch of projects on the go and products to buy then it’s hard to justify attending BETT. I’m speaking from the viewpoint of a teacher / school leaders / IT coordinator here, I know if you’re working in the industry it’s useful to have everyone under one roof. But as educators, in this day and age, you should be able to see and hear all about the latest and greatest tools for learning online as and when they appear on the market. And you should be able to hear this from real teachers who are really using the products with real children - that beats sales patter any day of the year!

Will you be attending BETT? What do you hope to get out of the show?

New tumblr post: "Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in..." ““Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.””
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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 this. Does anyone have any good exemplars? I’d like to keep it simple as we did with our Learner’s AUP.

Top tips for showing pupil progress in an Ofsted (style) observation

Simulation As A Practical Tool

Research and case studies collated on one site

In keeping with the spirit of hacking, the book will itself be an exercise in reimagining the edited volume. Any blog post, video response, or other media created for the volume and tweeted (or tagged) with the hashtag #hackacad will be aggregated at hackingtheacademy.org (submissions should use a secondary tag — #class #society #conf #journal #book #tenure #cv #dept #edtech #library — to designate chapters). The best pieces will go into the published volume. The volume will also include responses such as blog comments and tweets to individual pieces. If you’ve already written something that you would like included, that’s fine too, just be sure to tweet or tag it (or email us the link to where it’s posted).

With profound simplicity, Coach John Wooden redefines success and urges us all to pursue the best in ourselves. In this inspiring talk he shares the advice he gave his players at UCLA, quotes poetry and remembers his father's wisdom.

About John Wooden

John Wooden, affectionately known as Coach, led UCLA to record wins that are still unmatched in the world of basketball. Today, he continues to share the values and life lessons he passed to… Full bio and more links

Search BBC archive clips by Subject & Topic

What we do
Working across a diverse community of players, the Institute of Play leverages games and play as critical contexts for learning, innovation, and change in the 21st century. We bring non-traditional audiences into innovative spaces of production and learning through partnerships with the game industry, academia, government, science, technology, and the arts.

Our goals are to:

I went out and taped ten events. They were simple. I walked down two flights of stairs. I ran up a hill. I drove my car. Each event was exactly fifteen seconds long.
I put a handout on every student's desk with a graph ready for each event.
I played each event and then paused the video. I asked questions like, "When the clock started, was I up high or down low?"

Edmodo rival

RT @simonhaughton: @markw29 @zemote Wow - no similarities here at all! --- that's a bit of a joke!

Includes discussion of Spaced Learning

Marzano, Pickering and Pollock examined decades of research to find the teaching strategies that have the most impact on student learning. They identified nine strategies that have the "highest probability of enhancing student achievement for all students in all subject areas at all grade levels." Below is a chart showing those nine strategies with their corresponding average percentile point gains on student achievement tests.
Many teachers are asking how technology can be integrated with these strategies to improve student learning. Click on the links (each bar of the graph below) to review those strategies and see examples and templates to support technology integration.

Disruption is not usually a welcomed term for our classrooms. However disruption is exactly what our classrooms need. This is challenging stuff for education but one that needs to be explored in order to create classrooms that are relevant in the 21st Century. This session will explore what some of these disruptions are, classrooms that are using them, how they might impact your classroom and where you can go to find out more.

Next Generation Learning is a government initiative to inspire learning with technology and help children make the most of their school work.

Maths lessons based around Google Earth

Kids teaching kids Maths via screencasts

A series of tutorials for WEb2.0 resources

Defence Dynamics is a free online teaching resource from the Ministry of Defence (MOD). A range of Maths, Science, English, Geography and PSHE/PSD materials are offered to support teachers in the delivery of lessons to 14-16 year olds.

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Teach Collaborative Revision with Google Docs

A wiki containing the blogs of my Maths classes.

Quiz-Busters is an interactive plenary quiz for two teams based on the popular television quiz program Blockbusters.