Ideas, Practices & Personal Insights

How to ensure your school’s ICT is sustainable

For today’s schools, sustainability should entail far more than being green.

Learning with word clouds

Word banks have long been part of lessons right across the curriculum, provided to pupils to extend their vocabulary, support their writing or expand their understanding of a subject. They can be a simple but very powerful tool for learners of all ages. When I was at school, I remember that my word banks were contained in small notebooks that we kept on our desks for easy access, in which ...

Marketing your school’s image and getting the right message across

With the advent of Marketing Awareness and the increase in the number of schools who now have Marketing Managers or Marketing Departments, Headteachers are becoming increasingly aware of the power of marketing at many levels: how good marketing can effect how a school is perceived and, in many cases, how this affects pupil numbers.

3 ways to make your school funds grow

Setting up an after-school club, purchasing new books for the school library, updating computer equipment, and installing specialised playground equipment – these are all important projects for the creation of a diverse learning and social environment at school but they are often the first things to go when budgets are tightened. Taking matters into their own hands, more schools and colleges are looking for new and inventive ways to boost their ...

6 ideas for teachers when launching an iPad deployment

Here are six pieces of advice I would pass on to anyone leading the teaching and learning side of an iPad deployment. I’ve learned as much from our successes as our shortcomings and hope you find this helpful. 1. Start with the learning Bringing new technology into your classrooms will evoke change, but it won’t improve poor pedagogy. It may provoke new reflection as the old routines and engrained ...

Unqualified teachers in schools

I was recently asked to comment upon the Department for Education’s consultation regarding proposed changes to allow schools to employ industry experts to work as instructors in schools more easily. This consultation is geared towards secondary schools and is designed to address the current quality of vocational training, as recommended in the Wolf Report. This proposal follows recent moves to elevate the status of QTLS and allow qualified teachers ...

The ‘flipped class’ report

Ah the ‘Flipped’ Class. Yet another educational concept based on previous practice and rebranded to suit modern vernacular? ‘Can you get the lesson recorded a bit earlier sir so we can see it?’ (student A) ‘Not sure about that but it seems you are happier about this way of learning now’ (teacher) ‘It’s alright’ (student A) I think that’s progress and certainly a step ahead of where we ...

How to convert old school netbooks into Google Chromebooks

For the price of a 4GB memory stick you can turn most old netbooks and laptops into a Google Chromebook! Just download Vanilla - a portable Google Chrome operating system called Chromium OS. Most schools I know have many old laptops and netbooks that are not used because they are too slow or clogged up with old programs. This fantastic program will revitalise that old hardware and upcycle them into ...

iPad and the lesson observation

With the spectre of OFSTED hanging over schools and the new framework unsettling leadership teams across the land, it seems pertinent to link the ‘Quality of Teaching’ grid to my technology filled ‘flipped’ lessons. The ‘flipped class’ is best summed up by Jon Bergmann, Jerry Overmyer and Brett Wilie in The Flipped Class: Myths vs. Reality (2012).

Using generators to inspire learning

Online generators have been on the web for donkey's years - often infringing copyright rules but always giving the ordinary online mortal a chance to imagine. To pretend that their name is up in lights on a movie billboard, that their own band is playing on their iPod or that they can have a snazzy animated logo without a sniff of programming knowledge. Having explored and used them in the ...

5 ways/tools to engage your children with times tables

There’s no way of avoiding them. The times tables are a necessity if one is to progress along the mathematics learning journey. So, like them or not, knowing your times tables is important. They are the building blocks for further maths study later on – division, long division (urgh!), long multiplication, fractions, calculating area and so on. Not only that, but knowing the times tables is important for tasks in ...

Using Moodle in KS2 - a cheap alternative to a VLE?

Is Moodle a 'doable' alternative to expensive primary VLEs? Yes, in my opinion. Moodle is a free source e-learning platform, which allows users to access all kinds of resources (courses), interact with each other, complete tasks that have been set for them and feedback to tutors. In principle is sounds very good.