There can be, on the part of western-educated teachers teaching in Taiwan, a dismissive attitude towards traditional methods of instruction that causes tension. Because these teachers are looking – from their point in history – at pedagogies that have not been used in their countries for 30 to 40 years, the assumption is that what they do is better. “It’s very old hat”, or “it’s the...
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.
March's pick of the top links for ICT teachers.
In the second leg of my plan to come up for air after a manic few months, I’m hoping to kickstart the blog back into action, after my recent return to Twitter. I now have the time to focus on the things I’ve had to neglect for a few months, so here’s a brief taster of what’s incoming: A major update to the content of Some Rights Reserved is incoming over Easter, now...
September's top links for ICT teachers.
When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled "vocab". At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan - the kids know the vocab, right?
The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.” Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now? For decades, gadgets...
Last week, in all the excitement of being a brand new blog owner, I started having a look through my old waste books; a stunning variety of notebooks, few with anything interesting inside, even fewer anywhere near full... nothing at all like Lichtenberg's, despite having stolen the name from his wonderful pocket idea machine.
I’m a pretty technologically savvy guy. I teach ICT (which is no measure in itself, though in fairness I only qualified last year), I’m reasonably good at using well over half of the Adobe Creative Suite products, have been able to HTML code since that’s all there was, can get by with PHP, and have been known to play World of Warcraft. I don’t really know why I’m...
I suppose I’ve tried it two or three times since blogging became a craze a few years ago, but always with very little idea of why, and even less conviction to do a decent job of it. Recently, though, my involvement with Twitter has introduced me to a growing community of professionals interested in technology & education, and I’ve become acutely aware of how beneficial sharing...