teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

Members of the Schoolhistory Forum will have already seen this, no doubt, but the venerable John D. Clare has put together, in one place on his website, a store of the wisdom he has accumulated over the years. Every teacher, not just History teachers, should read what’s there! Top quality stuff…

You’d think that in a week that’s been, globally, one of the hottest – if not the hottest – on record, people would be out enjoying the sun. It would seem that, on the contrary, the sun’s kept people inside blogging away at a very high level about things of importance. Perhaps it was too hot outside. I don’t know, fussy people… :p

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Let a ninja explain it to you! Check out the rest of the blog whilst you’re there, as it looks like some good stuff – I’ve added it to my Bloglines account…

In a somewhat alarmist article, the TES reports that schools will ‘no longer have to teach the difference between right and wrong’ nor teach ‘the importance of Britain’s cultural heritage’. Instead it talks about identity, understanding and responsibility. I don’t know what all the fuss is about, to be honest. The original policy document wasn’t exactly tattooed on my forehead during my teacher training…

This is something I hadn’t thought about, so thanks to Noel at DigitalGeography for the heads-up. In schools up and down the country, children’s fingerprints are being taken so that they can take out books from the school library. As being fingerprinted is compulsory and done without parents’ consent, how likely is it that this information will end up on a national database? Answer: very.

As I reported earlier this month, Futurelab have recently come out with a report about how social software can be used in an educational context. The EducationGuardian has picked up on this with a quick overview, useful if you’re not familiar with the territory…

Both BBC News and the EducationGuardian report that a survey has found that teaching is the occupation with the lowest ‘boredom rating’ amongst people in the 21-45 age bracket. I should hope so too. If you’re bored during term-time there’s something wrong with you! Whether the opposite of boredom is enjoyment, however, is a different matter…

There’s been a lot of talk on US edublogs recently about the draconian way System Administrators have been locking down various (usually social networking) sites. Unfortunately, as Techcrunch reports, this has now been formalised in law through the DOPA act. It has the potential to lead to the blocking of huge amounts of websites, and unfortunately I doubt it’ll be long before we see the same kind of short-sighted, misjudged political point-scoring legislation introduced here.

Following on from my previous post about John Holt’s What Do I Do Monday?, we’re looking this time at what Holt has to say about, amongst other things, the rather disturbing parallels between how people develop schizophrenia and the experience of students in schools… :o

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I’m not only braindead from a week’s Research Methods up at Durham University for my Ed.D. but I’m physically exhausted after playing for my church at the National Christian Football Festival this weekend. And I’m sunburned. Anyway, on with the show! This week I have been mostly looking at a diverse range of blog posts including teacher development, the use of wikis and… hoovering. ;)

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