The digital natives thing doesn’t hold much water for me. Kids may not have the fear of technology that their elders do, but their use of technology is often just superficial – they can Facebook like a pro, but when given a practical task to do they struggle when they can’t find a tutorial for that exact task on Youtube. I don’t think it was ever really intended to be treated as a theory, but...
One of the interesting things for me as a Yorkshireman who spends upwards of 90% of each year outside of England is that the culture I identify with varies on a kind of sliding scale. When I’m at home, with family or childhood friends, I’m not just a Yorkshireman – I’m from Batley. There are words that I would use in conversation with other people from Batley that someone from Dewsbury (3 miles...
If you’re anything like me, you like to use multimedia in the classroom. From tried & tested documentaries from the BBC, Discovery Channel, etc, to shorter clips and audio tracks, my students are well-supplied with a large range of supporting materials. Up until now, these have generally lived in one of three places: on a networked drive at the school, which allows me to keep control over...
A high-resolution collection of posters ready to download, share & print - all for free. Using selected quotes from TED talks, the posters feature thought-provoking ideas and links for further info.
Students often struggle with higher level thinking skills when introduced to them for the first time. In this post I talk about exceeding the expectations of exam boards by going beyond an A* through embedding deep, critical thinking throughout the curriculum.
A set of flashcards designed to cover all of the vocabulary for the databases unit of IGCSE and GCSE ICT courses. They would also be useful at A level & IB Diploma level.
It has been over a month since it was announced that the ICT curriculum faced review, and I still don’t feel like it is being done well. The overwhelming majority of press coverage, including articles where industry experts are being questioned, seems to offer only two options: keep the current curriculum, or replace it with computer science. Surely those aren't the only two choices...
For as long as I’ve been teaching content that requires more than a handful of notes, I have encouraged my students to use the Cornell method for note taking. Copying by rote doesn't work beyond remembering things. For comprehension & understanding we need a different approach - one I think is encouraged by this method.
There has been an understandably frenzied response to the initial findings of the National Curriculum Review expert panel report that was released earlier this month, particularly from ICT teachers who are facing the prospect of their subject being marginalised, or others who think it will be removed altogether. But are the report findings all bad news for ICT teachers?
Critical thinking was once the purview of classicists & philosophers, but with those subjects still being squeezed out of schools that view them as elitist or irrelevant in the modern world, where does critical thinking fit?