Recently the OECD published their OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) results. A key product of the PIACC was the Survey of Adult Skills and it was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of the key skills in society and how they are used at work and at […]
Learning doesn’t stop when school finishes Read More »
I have just enrolled in a MOOC in the past week and I am excited about engaging with the content and the learners on the course. I hear you ask what is a MOOC? Well a MOOC is short for a Massive Open Online Course and they are now becoming very common ways for people
Socrative (http://www.socrative.com) is a real-time response system that allows students to respond to questions seconds after they are posted by the teacher and will display the results for the teacher with the same rapidity. There are a number of points which make this an attractive piece of technology for education. Firstly, there is no need
Learning to code can be quite intimidating, especially for children, but visual tools can keep them engaged and learning. It’s for this reason that MIT Media Lab created and released Scratch back in 2006. It doesn’t require any lines of code to be written, and can be used by children as young as 8.
I love technology. It is constantly evolving and offering all of us new opportunities for learning and teaching. I admit that it’s sometimes very difficult to switch off my tech lust button but where possible I try to take a more pragmatic approach, my limited purchasing power dictating. Gadgets, despite their often seductive beauty, are
Our school is very lucky, in that it has been very well resourced throughout the last few years. We have Interactive Whiteboards in every classroom, visualisers, a set of laptops and pride of place, our shiny new set of 12 iPads. We have received whole school training through NCTE, as well as in-house training delivered
Encouraging Use of IT Across the Whole School Read More »
Throughout this year I have spent many hours and days being told by teachers that their computer is slowing down and that the computer wouldn’t play CDs or DVDs and a hundred other things. As a full time teacher all of these IT problems eat away into my lunch breaks, early mornings and after school
The slowing computer and what to do? Read More »
Last week saw the publication of the OFSTED report “The most able students: are they doing as well as they should in our non-selective secondary schools?” . It concluded that bright students in the UK were being failed by those secondary schools who chose not to stream students early according to ability. The report showed
Great Expectations Read More »
This booklet was released at the recent Microsoft Educational Summit in the Aviva Stadium. The document explores the literature around how children learn today before going on to explore the changing workplace that they will enter in the coming years. Having established that the workplaces of today and tomorrow require a unique set of skills
Redesigning Education: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century Read More »
As more and more of my own reading material moves from traditional hardback and paperback texts to electronic format, one application that I make increasing use of is that of Calibre. Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) is a free, cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) application that allows you to view, convert, create and manage e-books. The software supports e-book
E-book Management, Conversion and Creation with Calibre Read More »
