This morning I saw this tweet from John Sutton pop up as my year 7 SMART class were sitting down for their register Now, I have a huge amount of respect for Stephen Heppell, but I suspect he may have overstated his case here. So I checked! I asked both my year 7 class, and […]
The role of mentoring / coaching
Our year 7 SMART classes have just finished their very successful SMARTprentice project in which each form was split into two groups, and each of the 22 groups ran a small business for two weeks. All the profits will be donated to a charity of the groups choosing. I’ll come back and fill in some […]
You Tube help
A quick question for you. We’ve been making growing use of videos posted to You Tube in classrooms, and many I’d like to share with students via our VLE (there’s far more good stuff out there than we’ve got time for). I’m wondering what the best way of going about this is… I don’t particularly […]
Handing it over : Part 2 (not quite so sucessful!)
Yesterday I wrote about my plans for handing some control of the curriculum in my year 9 History classes to the students and the first of three activities, the personal project on any 20th century topic. Today, I’m going to look at the second activity which didn’t work quite as well! In our revised schemes […]
Handing it over – Part 1 (success)
In this and the next blog post I’m going to be looking at the first two of my three attempts this year to hand over some control of the curriculum to my students. Why? One of the things that seem to be increasingly important both with a skills focussed curriculum and with the massive growth […]
April Fools
Nick and I were approached by our Assistant Head for some kind of ICT / E-learning tip that he could send out this morning. In the course of one car journey we managed to come up with the following four ideas: 1. To address the issue of students at KS4 and 5 missing lessons due […]
What do you want to learn today – World War 1 Treasure Hunt
Given that we spend half as much time on some topics than we used to in History, we need new ways of teaching some old topics. One example is WW1. In the ‘Old Model’, the teacher would work their way through a series of topics. The ‘old model’ reaction to less time is to teach […]
Why use Google Apps in schools?
I’ve had an email this morning from a school considering using Google Apps for Education in their school, and asking for some feedback on our experience. Having written the email, I thought it might be useful to share here… ———– We went for Google Apps for similar reasons, we didn’t even have a working email […]
e-safety and e-learning advice in planners.
Back in this post from last year Ollie Bray talked about the pages he had arranged to have added to Musselburgh school’s planners on effective searching and online safety. I’ve been reviewing our planners for next year, and as well as updating some pages on SMART, I’ve also used the opporuntity to adapt Ollie’s stuff […]
Shaking up post 16 in Swansea
Swansea council have announced some ideas as the basis for discussion about the future of secondary education in Swansea. Once again this includes the proposed closure of one secondary school (Daniel James this time), but now also a proposal to shake up post 16 in the county. At first glance, Olchfa should do quite well […]