Tag Archives: learning

ICT Innovator AUPs for teachers

  March 31, 2013 - 14:58 | , ,
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Acceptable Use Policies are a necessary and important document – contract – for teachers in any school because it is imperative that we are protected from the potential danger working online can bring. Following an intense scrutiny of safeguarding and child protection at our school, we published a strict and comprehensive Staff ICT AUP. For example, staff should not connect with any pupil on facebook until one year after they are of school leaving age, and only then with caution as through siblings and friends it can connect you to current pupils. However, two years on we have included in the new ICT strategy a review of this policy to incorporate a section for innovative teachers who want to employ … Continue reading →

ICT in Subjects at #TLAB13

  March 18, 2013 - 20:01 |
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My notes for #TLAB13 presentation followed by the slides; all images from Google’s Stock Collection in Drive. NB: I have not edited the notes for this post. Setting the scene: SMT made decision to teach ICT through other subjects. No more discrete timetabled ICT lessons. Moving to a two-week timetable and 30*50 minute lessons instead of 40*40 minutes per week. ICT teacher would manage which departments and when. Units of work would be decided upon collaboratively. A lot of work. Hard to choose a department. English were restricted by having two class sets of set texts. Maths by streamlining and classes following different POS. Science taught two units at the same time to half a year group each. ADT operate a … Continue reading →

Touch Typing in my school

  February 18, 2013 - 11:32 |
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When should people learn how to touch type? Should it be compulsory in schools? Should it take precedence over handwriting? These questions can raise some interesting conversations, but as a secondary school teacher I have never managed to do much more than introduce pupils to touch typing, always in the knowledge that it was not enough to get them interacting with the keyboard through muscle memory. They would practice daily for a week or two but only some of them would actually improve their speeds to a beneficial level. But now, I can offer something more… “Learning to touch type was the best one thing I ever did at school” A Colleague It’s half term. A week off the usual … Continue reading →

The Lazy Teacher comes to my school

  November 5, 2012 - 19:56 |
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Jim Smith was booked into our school by a Senior Teacher, Natalie Shaw. Another colleague (@cgasiorek) enjoyed participating in one of Jim Smith’s lazy teaching sessions last year. I read his book The Lazy Teacher over the summer. Packed full of good tips to lighten your workflow by engaging your teaching mind. Jim brings lots of classroom tricks to the table, not all new whizz-bangers, but all focused on putting pupil energy at the centre of learning. The tricks are clever ways of awakening the minds in the room. Find the pedagogy – the methods – that suit a particular bunch of learners and use them. I do not have his slides to reference from the whistle-stop tour of his … Continue reading →

Northern Grid Conference 2012: I’m coming Home

  June 18, 2012 - 17:53 | ,
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I am delighted to have been invited to present at the Northern Grid Conference for Learning and Technology 2012 in Newcastle. Twitter feed for the conference is here. There will be lots of excellent teachers and educators presenting and sharing classroom practice. I will be talking about – and showing examples of – peer review. It is very important to help prepare young people for online life as well as offline. My focus is going to be on using peer review as a good starting point for replying to online posts – blogposts, tweets, facebook statuses, videos, animations – by encouraging pupils to be purposeful in their approach to their peers when reviewing their work. By using online tools to … Continue reading →