Tag Archives: teaching

This Is How I Work for Teachers

  April 8, 2013 - 11:48 |
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Inspired by a similar category of posts on LifeHacker (re-posted on Doug Belshaw’s excellent What I Learned This Week) and What’s In Your Bag on The Verge, I thought it might be an interesting idea to do a version of this for teachers. So, I started off with questions asked by LifeHacker and added a few more teaching specific questions that might interest readers. There is an emphasis on technology but all tips and tricks learned are welcome to share with whomever might sign up for a weekly update. For now, these posts will be a category on my blog which you can subscribe to without my other posts should you wish to. If the posts are well received it may be moved … Continue reading →

Marking work electronically in Frog

  January 13, 2013 - 15:14 | ,
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As part of ICT in Subjects, my department is working with the Music department to create scratch games and/or animations with music and sound effects composed in CuBase. First lesson is to recreate the famous pong game in scratch. So, I set a Frog assignment (Quick Issue Work) to all five classes so 125 pupils could hand in their file to be scored out of 3 [0 = no file; 1 = struggled; 2 = complete with errors; 3 = complete] plus a comment. Below is a video of the marking process of one file. Frog is not very good at this yet. I wonder if Frog4OS will be any better at this. Frog4 runs on any device because it … 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 →

FREE Google Play Books! But your Wallet is Required

  May 1, 2012 - 20:21 |
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Popped over to Google+ for a quick hello to that stream. Saw this cool little share from Danny Silva who works for CUE and was one of the lead learners at GTAUK10 where I earned my Google stripes. I wondered what CK-12 was so clicked through – looked legit (which it is). So, I re-shared his post. I tweeted it. All good… And then I actually clicked all the way through to get a copy of one of the free titles. They were free because CK-12 is a non-profit shared under creative commons licence. But to get here, I had to make sure my Google Wallet is active. It didn’t cost me anything but my bank details had to be … Continue reading →

ICT in Subjects: Lesson Planning and Learning Objectives

  April 6, 2012 - 13:35 |
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The idea of team teaching with lots of my colleagues is intimidating. Daunting. Exciting (we have a lovely staff at Bennies). Sometimes there will be natural friendly banter and repartie, but at other times this won’t come so easily and the potential to offend someone is a risk. Some will be vulnerable, shy, nervous and maybe even unhappy to participate. To minimise this potential, the lesson planning has to be clear and simple and awesome. So, I have started to address this on the planning site. An extract from the site: What I like so far I found on James Michie’s blogpost on learning objectives. This engages in conversation with David Didau, the Learning Spy, who has written posts on … Continue reading →