Whilst doing some re-wiring of my music equipment the other day I put on a 12″ of the best of James Brown, and this track really stuck out to me, have a listen…
Whilst I’m not really into the rather un-PC sentiment of this song, it is undeniably a classic record. It is by a massive [...]
One of the things that I love about teaching is the fact that you are constantly learning, monitoring and improving your practice in response to the pupils you teach. However, I find the hectic pace of full time teaching can often make it quite difficult to make deep changes to pedagogy possible. When things are [...]
Let’s start with a question:
I had an interesting conversation last with NQT Tim Handley about use of Interactive White Boards. He was planning a unit of work for himself and another teacher to follow and asked if it was normal for people to create matching IWB slides for every lesson as part of this process. Talking to other [...]
This is the second of my articles from the free #pgcetips ebook for trainee teachers.
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
Anthony Robbins
When I was completing my PGCE we had a number of guest lectures from an expert on synthetic phonics. The University, quite rightly, deemed this to be very [...]
This is the first of two articles I have written for Tim Handley’s #pgcetips project. The project involved crowdsourcing a book providing tips and advice for PGCE students, and can be downloaded for free from his site. Lots of the book was straightforward, practical advice for trainees, so I opted to write articles that were [...]
A couple of weeks before the end of term I received the results of the optional QCA tests which my class took at the end of May. I thought I was the last person to take too much notice of data produced by testing, but I actually found it really interesting analysing the results, and [...]
Some time ago several of my colleagues visited South Africa as part of a project on school twinning. As part of this project they had planned to work with pupils in South Africa on filming and editing video using flip cameras. Unfortunately the computers available to them were not capable of video editing, so they [...]
At secondary school I was one of the unusual breed of students who loved doing exams. Certainly there was the nerves and the stress, which was not something I enjoyed, but I also got an immense amount of satisfaction from sitting down in a really focused place and exploring my ideas in an extended way. [...]
It has, without a doubt, been a whirlwind of a year. I have to come out and say that if I thought the PGCE was hard work, I hadn’t seen anything compared to what I have faced this year. Now, I wouldn’t claim that to be a typical NQT experience, but then I have never [...]
Google search is way more interesting that I thought
Lisa Thumann showed us some fantastic ways to refine, drill down, and present search results. I would recommend anyone to explore the ‘More search options’ on the left hand side of the screen after searching, as there are some very powerful tools there. Putting results on a [...]
