We’d got our schools funding and our pay to a good point. It wasn’t perfect but I think everyone was fairly happy with what they earnt and recognised that money was going into rebuilding schools so they would be fit to learn and work in for the coming generation. Then there was a financial meltdown.… Read More Reasonable Mistake
If you are on Twitter you’ll know that at the moment the only two topics of conversation are “Is Elon Musk a big man-baby?” and “Is ChatGPT evidence that artificial intelligence (more properly ‘machine learning’) is ready to become mainstream?”. Now, obviously, I have no opinion of the former question but as a teacher I’m… Read More Shall we play a game…
The other day @miss_mcinerney posted the following quote: I’ll come back to this later. I’m also going to be fashionable and quote Barak Rosenshine:- “The research also suggests that the optimal success rate for fostering student achievement appears to be about 80 percent. A success rate of 80 percent shows that students are learning the… Read More Levelling up
Those who know me will be aware that I’m a bit of a technology geek. I’m an early adopter. For those who haven’t heard the term it means someone who’s prepared to spend, say, four times as much on a piece of kit in order to get it today instead of next year like the… Read More Voice control to teacher Tom…
At the end of the day the thing I keep coming back to is the binary nature of it all. And my problem with that is life isn’t binary. I’ve been stopped twice for speeding. Both times I was speeding, there’s no doubt about that. Both times on motorways. Once I was driving under 90mph… Read More Tyre Tracks and Binary Hearts
So, we have a year group off school isolating which means their lessons have to be provided remotely. School policy is that we do that from our classrooms using Teams (don’t get me started – if I never see the colour purple again it’ll be too soon). This isn’t a blog about the rights and… Read More Online words that drape and fall on empty chairs
This post started out as a series of tweets but it got to the stage where it was starting to look like a “23/296” thread, and I didn’t want to be that guy. So now it’s a blog post. But structurally and stylistically it’s a series of tweets. Basically, don’t expect grammar. Like a good… Read More Behind the mask
Before I leap into planning for next year I’m taking a little time to look back at some of those things that I wasn’t happy with last year. The topic that’s stuck in my mind more than any other is that of Surds. This is one of the areas where I was simply unable to… Read More Theatre of the surd
I’ve been thinking what is needed in a classroom in the way of technology to tide us over the coming months. This is a secondary based view, based on how I teach and what I’d like students to be able to see. So others may have a different view. My usual tech use in the… Read More Wire less
In 1996, Thomas Hamilton shot 16 children and one teacher dead and injured 15 others in Dunblane. Subsequently the UK government took the radical step and introduced legislation banning all cartridge ammunition handguns. This was not universally popular. However, there hasn’t been a subsequent schools shooting. The response to extreme events sometimes has to be extreme,… Read More Remote Learning – the wasted years
Distant Ramblings on the Horizon 