teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

Come Tuesday I’ll have 30(ish) young, eager faces looking at me on their first day at ‘big’ school. That’s right folks, I’m going to be a Year 7 tutor! Being a tutor was something I loved doing at my previous school – in fact I considered it the most important part of my job. As I prepare for next week I’ve been thinking about ways in which I can be the best tutor I can be – with a little help from Stephen Adams’ A Guide to Creative Tutoring (which I picked up from a library sale for about 10p…) :p

Read the rest of this entry »

It turns out that the ability to download full-text PDFs of books via Google Book Search isn’t as great as I first thought. Thankfully, Resource Shelf has a post about other archives you can try – both paid-for and free. Worth a look, especially the linkfest that is the directories page at the British Columbia International Digital Library!

Google Book Search now allows you to download the full text of public domain books in PDF and text format via the ‘Full View Books’ option. The example given on the Google Operating System blog is Dante’s Inferno, but what excites me most is easy access to the text of pre-Socratic philosophers… It’s also reported at BBC News.

tiddlyspot offer tiddlywiki, a personal wiki that can be run from pretty much anywhere – a USB flash drive, hard disk or web server. It can be edited offline and then synced next time you go online. (via Lifehacker)

This is the last in a series of posts designed to help me structure my Ed.D. assignment for the Policy Studies module I opted to take. So far I have introduced the idea of markets in education, before considering whether they are a bad thing or a good thing. Thus far, I have have attempted to keep my own opinion out of my presentation of the ideas and arguments of others. This last post, however, is where I can state what I really think… ;)

Read the rest of this entry »

Flickr, the photo-sharing website, has announced geotagging using Yahoo maps is now built-in to the Organizr interface. I’ve had a quick play about with it and it’s a really intuitive system – just drag and drop! This could be great for local history projects, especially given the networking and tagging facilities already present in Flickr!

Wes Fryer has written a post entitled The case for instant messaging in the classroom in which he focuses on the opportunities rather than the threats of instant messaging. Along with ideas surrounding interactivity and engagement, he looks at it enables students access to real-time experts. A breath of fresh air!

I’ve been aware of EdBloggerNews, a place to find the most-discussed posts in the edublogosphere since its inception. It’s a great idea that should have more people using it. Via Jeff Utecht I discovered that Dave Warlick has implemented an easy ‘Add to EdBloggerNews’ link at the bottom of each of his posts. I simply copied and pasted his javascript and played about with it until it looked like I wanted it to (its under the title of each post). The obviously-very-talented Chris Craft has turned this into a Wordpress plugin which simplifies the process even further!

Many educators’ initial reactions to the market reforms which were introduced in western education systems in the late 1980s/early 1990s were negative. They put forward many arguments which I’ve looked at in a previous post, ‘Markets’ in education – a bad thing? However, advocates of marketization have fairly convincing arguments at times which we, as educators should be willing to look at with an open mind. So, with you having read at least ‘Markets’ in education – an introduction for background, here goes… :D

Read the rest of this entry »

Most educators I’ve met are collaborators: they enjoy sharing resources and ideas with other people and, in turn, ‘mashing-up’ those of others to use themselves in the classroom. The trouble is on many occasions the sharing of digital files with those not in your institution. Enter AllPeers, an excellent new extension for Firefox. It allows quick and easy sharing of files and folders with friends and family. For a brief video overview of how it works, click here.