Category Archives: ideas

Forcing change

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 [...]

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Collaborating across continents with Google Docs

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 [...]

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Continuing thoughts on classroom space

Having had some interesting discussion on classroom space in my earlier post, I have been thinking about and discussing this subject a lot.
To me there is a real distinction between ‘forward thinking’ (for want of a better term ’21st Century’) environments, and what is simply non-standard use of classroom space.
To me, the thinking on innovative [...]

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Sentence level starters

I’m not sure if it’s the way I teach, or the way the PNS framework sets out areas of study, but I find most of my Literacy lessons end up based on text level objectives. APP assessments on my class before Christmas confirmed my gut feeling that the area they really needed to develop was [...]

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BETT & TeachMeet: Ideas not kit

BETT
I am just returning from a day at the BETT show and reflecting on a day of contrasts. I went to BETT last year as a student and found it a really valuable way to get an overview of the state of the field in educational technology.
This year I found it much less worthwhile. Everything [...]

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Using twitter on a school trip

I always think one of the most powerful uses of the social media that has grown around twitter is for reporting and reflecting on live events on location.  Some time ago a friend and I experimented with some ideas for a club night based around social media and, although we eventually shelved it, it made [...]

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Sentence writing with pictures

In the last few weeks I have been discussing IEP targets with children in my class (Year 4). A number of them have targets relating to writing simple sentences, and had been set targets last year to have regular practice writing sentences to go with pictures they were given. This struck me as a good [...]

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1:1- Using twitter to get a young class to the right resources

One of the fundamental issues in a 1:1 primary classroom is getting the children to the websites they are meant to be using as quickly and painlessly as possible. In a conventional classroom you can just hand out copies of worksheets and resources to different groups, but when working with web based tools this is [...]

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Some tools and tricks I swear by

People are often asking what tools and apps I am  using, and I usually struggle to remember. Therefore, I thought I would create a run down of a selection of tools that are essential to me. Rather than a simple list I have tried to add some value by way of some tips and tricks [...]

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