teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

You can now find answers via MSN Encarta using an instant-messaging client. Simply add encarta@conversagent.com to your contacts and send a ‘hi’ message (or similar) to get started. Give it a try!

There’s a good short piece in the TES this week (not available online, unfortunately) by Mike Kent, the head of a London primary school. In it he vents his spleen about precisely the issue which gets me – the ‘medicalisation’ of bad behaviour and the lack of simple ‘telling off’ that goes on in schools. Here’s what he has to say… :s

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TeachersPayTeachers.com is a place where you can sell educational resources you have created. Not that I would advocate doing so – teaching is a collaborative enterprise, which is why resources I produce will always be availalble free-of-charge on the Shareforum…

Wetpaint, a service which has now come out of closed beta, is something I’ve mentioned before. It allows you to very easily create a wiki (if you don’t know what one of those is, click here). Here’s the one I’ve created for testing purposes (at least at the moment) and here’s an example of one that’s properly up-and-running!

The colouring-in brigade are going to love this: QuikMaps.com allows you to annotate Google Maps and even add your finished map as an overlay to Google Earth!

There’s an article linked to by a Digg.com user about schools and open source which is worth a read. It links to another article on the same site which discusses how one school in the USA is using ‘free programs for software distribution, databases and spam filtering to help support Apple Mac environment.’

Being a teacher, the issue of trust schools obviously affects me. On top of that, my Ed.D Policy Studies module makes the issue doubly interesting and relevant to me. BBC News reported last Thursday that Neil Kinnock, former Labour leader has called Tony Blair’s school reforms ‘educational crazy paving’. But can’t all educational reforms be seen in this light? :p

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Yes, I know I’ve cried Death to the INSET in the past, but I’ve come to realise that you’ve got to meet people half-way. If INSETs are the way that schools work (rather than employing long-term change agents) then that’s how I’ve got to get my message across. So, peoples in institutions within, say, 50 miles of DN11 (Doncaster) might want to get in touch with me regarding INSET possibilities. The first few I do will be for free and my forte is educational technology… :D

What with a new Macbook, marking AS-level History exam scripts for Edexcel, and the World Cup, it’s a wonder I’ve managed to read anything this week! But I have found time to read a bit and, in fact, found a whole new set of blogs I didn’t know existed, thanks to Dave Warlick’s Hitchhikr site. Please put any grammatical mistakes or excessive sporting analogies down to me watching Portugal vs. Holland as I write this post… :p

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There’s been a bit of a heated debate in the old US of A recently, by all accounts, about MySpace and what access teens should have to it. If you’ve no idea what MySpace is, then you could do worse than watch this humorous take on it by the Daily Show…