teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

When I was younger I used to wonder why a lot. That’s stayed with me to some extent – I’m not content with just accepting things the way they are. Recently, I’ve been wondering why about schools and institutions in general. What causes them to change in fundamental ways? I think I’ve come up with a model to make some sense of it… :p

Read the rest of this entry »

Splashr is a tool for presenting Flickr photos in a way that is very easy on the eye. As Ewan McIntosh – who alerted me to it – notes, it would be great for an interactive whiteboard. You can click on the photos to enlarge them and there is a link back to each photo’s page on Flickr. See an example using photos tagged with ‘dougbelshaw’ here. :p

You’ll have to indulge me a little in this week’s roundup. I’m going to include two quotations from the same person, one of which is rather hefty (but nevertheless worth quoting in its entirity). I’m still trucking on in the personalization of learning vein, this time coupling it with how to construct a curriculum and learning environment for the 21st century… :p

Read the rest of this entry »

John Pederson is putting together a Del.icio.us Guide for Educators. So far the first part looks at tagging. I completely moved from Firefox bookmarks to del.icio.us about a year ago and haven’t looked back! It’s great to be able to access your bookmarks from anywhere, search by tag – and even better, share them with others. :)

I get a steady stream of requests to name the plugins I use at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk so I decided to list them all in one place. Whilst I’m aware that there are plugins that can actually do this for me, they don’t seem to output the list in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. So instead, you can either click the ‘Plugins’ link in the navigation bar at the top, or just click here to see which plugins are currently being used (over 30 so far!) :D

BBC News reports on a review by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NfER) who found that students secondary schools are less interested in learning facts and more interested in ‘active learning’. Funny that. Teachers hate tests, parents don’t particularly like them, and the kids certainly don’t. So why do we test them so much and so often? :s

As regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed I am rather fond of metaphors. I’ve mused on what I believe to be the false dichotomy of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ before (On the false dichotomy of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’) but in what follows I want to try and extend the metaphor so that it can be applied to real-world situations and actually mean something… :D

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so I’ll help with the effort:

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

If you’re poor you can’t be a good parent… or so the nanny-stateish government think, according to BBC News. They report that children from deprived backgrounds are to be shepherded into nurseries and educational institutions from age two. Whilst I think that in some cases children could and should be forcibly removed from some people who never even wanted to be parents in the first place, this is just Mother Blair gone too far… :o

All weekend at the parents’ means that I didn’t have time to put together my Weekly Roundup. Instead, then, some Weekly Links. This time it’s mostly about pedagogy and I’ve tried my best not to launch into a long tirade about the purpose of education… ;)
Read the rest of this entry »