Author: Drew Thomson-Jones
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What will pay competition mean to teaching?
Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Chief Inspector of Schools at Ofsted, recently suggested teachers needed to work past 3pm to earn any kind of promotion. Alongside this he also told his Ofsted inspectors that schools should be considered for a lower grade if teachers are moved up the teacher pay scales without justification. Provided there’s a…
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Learning Through Projects – PBL,…PBL, DT, UbD?!
To clarify, the title of the blog post indicates a variety of pedagogy related to learning in some way by using projects. These could be Project-based Learning (PBL), Problem-based Learning (…PBL), Design Thinking (DT) and Understanding by Design (UbD) to name but a few. My blog post is inspired by reading through Bianca Hewes post ‘Just…
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Using Bambuser in the Classroom
For those of you that don’t know, Bambuser (www.bambuser.com) is a fantastic resource that allows live streaming of video from a mobile device to a weblink associated with your own account. My account is here and stores all of my videos – some of which are public, some private. It’s available to use on Android, iPhone/iPad/iPod…
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Creating and Embedding a Customisable Progress Tracker
I think it’s worth talking about this on an educational blog, because aside from using a progress tracker as a fundraising tracker it has plenty of uses within education for tracking progress in projects, and other goal tracking for staff or students. A colleague asked if I would be able to assist in getting a progress…
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Producing good ideas
Having a couple of hours to myself this morning, I was essentially lazing around and I had a little look at Twitter to catch up on some recent posts. I stumbled upon Ewan McIntosh‘s (http://edu.blogs.com/) tweet asking his followers for any good ideas of TED / TEDx talks questioning what we mean about ‘good’ (and ‘mistake’,…
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Taking students beyond our e-learning boundaries
One thing I love about teaching Key Stage 3 Science is the flexibility in the curriculum – anyone who claims that there is a lack of flexibility is, simply, wrong (an argument for another day). As long as you cover the right stuff – ish – throughout a year, everything will be okay. My Year 9…
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Rickypedia – our school’s VLE.
I thought I’d share a Prezi I’ve made to present to the School Governing Body about how our school’s VLE is going. VLE: the present and the future on Prezi Enjoy!
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Google Apps for Education; Using Google Docs
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. New starts to the year are hectic; particularly so when your school wants to become an Academy and when there is all the financial chaos of the new government. Anyway… I love Google Apps. Before I became e-Learning Co-ordinator at the school my colleague Daniel Needlestone set…
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Where do you go for your educational tools?
There is such a wealth of educational resources out there; an overwhelmingly large amount. I was gathering my thoughts on how I gather information about exciting resources, Web 2.0 tools and suchlike. Then I began to consider how to get the teachers in my school using them. From September, I will be the e-Learning Co-ordinator…
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Instant feedback and enhanced learning through live video and photography
I am going to give a specific example of an activity I completed today, but I feel live video can be greatly beneficial in a number of subjects which I’ll briefly outline later in the post. Today with my Year 10s we were starting the topic of Motion from the Additional Science syllabus, with a…
Cup of Teaching 