teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

I’ve been posting more and more not-quite-teaching-related stuff in the microblog recently and have wanted to post on non-teaching stories, etc. in the main section of this blog. Consequently, whilst I’m still committed to this blog, I’ve set up a new one at dougbelshaw.com. Those who know me might find it interesting. Others might want to stay well clear! :p

Marcus P. Zillman has alerted my attention to PowerFolder, a peer-to-peer file sharing application which automatically synchronizes local and remote folders. It’s cross-platform, free and open-source. What does this mean for teachers? Well, a group could have a central repository where they put resources. Each member would then automatically receive it next time synchronization took place!

Over at contribute.mrbelshaw.co.uk I’m asking for your help in putting together guidance for creating schemes of work that focus on skills rather than content. The ‘contribute’ subdomain is a bliki (blog + wiki)which means that anyone can register and edit what I’ve written so far. Hopefully someone else will have some ideas or some links to others who do! :D

This week I’ve been using Google Notebook to keep track of everything I’ve found interesting around various education-related blogs. I’ve done this via the Firefox extension which makes the experience easy and pain-free. You can view the notebook I created for this week’s roundup here… :D

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The Sunday Telegraph reports that the Labour government has ‘more than one in three of its vital targets in education – the policy area claimed as a personal priority by the Prime Minister.’ It continues: ‘Of the 15 performance targets set in 2004, five have “slipped”, five are on course and five have not been “fully assessed”.’

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser allows you to see in a visual fashion which websites are linked to any one that your specify. Could be useful, although it seems to need a ‘www’ at the front of a URL so it doesn’t work for this site…

Mike Baker, the BBC News education correspondent looks at what ‘personalisation’ in education actually means. He critiques the jargon that produces definitions such as: “Personalised learning is about learner-managed and co-constructed learning the shift from dependency to independence and interdependency and invitational learning and assessment.” He concludes with the salient point that league tables emphasizing GCSE performance are going to make true flexibility and personalization a difficult thing to achieve…

BBC News reports that a Bradford University lecturer has abolished traditional lectures in favour of podcasts. “Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University, says the move will free up time for more small group teaching. He told The Times Higher Education Supplement that first year biochemistry students would watch or listen to virtual lectures in their own time.

As many of you know, I’m current studying towards an Ed.D. (a taught doctorate) at the University of Durham. This weekend is the second weekend of teaching for the Policy module I’ve opted to take and I’ve to make a short presentation on a paper. I thought I’d share it here…:D

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WikiMapia.org brings together wikis and Google Maps (with satellite imagery). Potentially useful if you haven’t access to Google Earth and for projects involving ‘tagging’ your locality…