Image: Photo from Ewan McIntosh’s session on questioning and feedback. More info / links below — A slightly less rushed reflection of day two, written in the airport after a lovely day strolling around Toulouse, but only posted now as the airport wifi didn’t seem too willing to load my blog! — Following an […]
Giant mindmaps!
I’ve come to the end of the A Level course with my yr 13s, and we were discussing last week how they wanted to spend our last few lessons. We agreed that we needed to recap the main ideas of the course, but rather than me rattle through it, I revived an idea from a […]
Collaborative revision using Google Docs
Last June I was both honoured and amazed to be awarded with the first ‘National Digital Learning Award’ in the post-16 category for the work my year 13 class had done with online collaborative revision. This year I’ve repeated the work, but also offered it as a tool to my year 11 students, many of […]
… And we’re back
Happy New Year! After two days of complete and utter shell shock I think I found my teaching feet today. So I thought I’d put a quick blog post together highlighting a couple of things from the week in the vague hope that it might become a habit 1. In ICT we’ve introduced a […]
Making Marking More Manageable
“I’ve just spent a cheerful hours of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on […]
Revision rebooted
When I started teaching, some of the lessons I put the most time into were revision lessons. Cards, podcasts, notes, I wrote them all. While I’m aware that there a few places (particularly in the sixth form) that perhaps I still need to provide better quality revision notes, these days revision lessons are both far […]
Ten things #10 – Embrace Failure
This is the final of ten posts that develop some of the ideas I mentioned in my presentation at TMClevedon — This still sounds wrong somehow, doesn’t it – surely we should be encouraging success in our schools, not failure? Well, yes…. But, if we praise success above all else we can help develop a […]
Throwing a History party
I mentioned in the last post about building in a longer and deeper immersion phase at the start of my Yr 12 History course. As part of that, last week, my classes came to a History Party The activity is modelled on this Ian Dawson one, which he suggests can be used at the end […]
Power of the personal – a good management lesson
One of the things I love about Twitter is that you get to see how other professional work. Recently I had a valuable management lesson from John Putt. I’d been struggling to get moderators for #addcym for a few weeks and we’d struggled through to Easter. I’d been putting out general appeals to people and […]
Rebooting in practice #1 – Yr 8: Problems of monarchy
I’m conscious that I’ve been talking in the abstract in many of my ‘rebooting’ posts, so I wanted to try and be a little clearer about what I mean and how some of the things I teach have changed this year. This is the first of several posts that will hopefully outline how I’ve changed […]