teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

The inaugural NextGenTeachers podcast has now hit the Internet and is available for free download. I’ve attached it to this post as an enclosure and you can subscribe to the RSS feed in iTunes to keep up-to-date with each podcast as it’s released.

The first show is an introduction to the current planning group (including me) and a bit of conversation about how and why NextGenTeachers came into being. There’s also some great discussion in the second part of the show about the use of technologies, School 2.0, and whether Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) are already out of date…

The EducationGuardian reports that the government has designated fifteen schools with SEN (Special Educational Needs) status. Although I welcome such moves, it’s a bit hypocritical when teachers are constantly hammered for the need of ‘inclusion’ and ‘differentiation’. So lets close special schools, move kids into mainstream education, and – oh, it’s not working – move them back…

Today I was dragged kicking and screaming (OK, invited) to London for an event hosted by Futurelab as part of their Teachers as Innovators programme. The idea is to map good practice in terms of digital technology use within teaching and identify enablers and barriers to their integration.

In the end, London proved to actually be a happy and nicer place than I tend to remember it. People actually smiled back at me. My goodness. :s Anyway, I digress…
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Yesterday I had a great experience in talking to the current crop of the NextGenTeachers planning committee during our inaugural podcast recording session. Justin Medved’s still editing and putting the final touches to it so it should be available at nextgenteachers.com before the end of the week!

If you subscribe to the NextGenTeachers RSS feed the podcasts should appear in an embedded flash-based MP3 player in your RSS reader. Alternatively (or additionally, should I say) if you add the feed to iTunes it will automatically appear there once it’s uploaded to the site. (To do the latter, simply copy and paste the RSS link into the box that comes up when you go to Advanced/Subscribe to Podcast.

I’ve just come across a great article in the Observer entitled Why homework isn’t working. It talks about the strain homework can put on families and the fact that very little learning takes place as a result of the boring homework usually set. If it was up to me I wouldn’t set any, or I’d make it optional. Unfortunately, I can’t so I set the minimum amount I can and try to make at as interesting as possible. My Year 10 students, for example, are blogging pretty much all of their History homework…

After having my original thesis proposal pretty much panned as being not specific enough, I’ve just submitted version 2 to my Ed.D. supervisor. I use Google Docs for most of my word processing now, so it’s available here. I’d greatly appreciate any comments, but if you do so, please leave them on my Ed.D. blog here! :)

This is fairly short for one of my main posts, but I want to make as many people as possible aware of it. I’ve started a new blog at edtechroundup.com to deal with – yep, you guessed it – everything to do with educational technology. I was finding that a lot of the stuff I was posting on this blog was edtech related which isn’t its main focus. Of course, I’ll still be posting those things which are directly relevant to teaching here, but you might want to head on over to edtechroundup.com as well as subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss out on anything! :D

It’s been a hectic, tiring yet exciting week this past 7 days. As usual, I have endeavoured to keep up with my reading of my RSS feeds which I manage now with Google Reader. As usual, then, below is what I’ve been looking at mostly this week…

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The Independent and the BBC report that schools are to be made to teach ‘British values’ to their students, alongside ‘cultural diversity’. And how exactly shall we do that? Shall we run the Union Jack up the flagpole every morning and salute it, make each other cups of tea and force children wait patiently in queues outside classrooms? They’ve also noted that the teaching of Citizenship is taught badly in at least 25% of schools (according to Ofsted). Funny, that… ;)

I’ve just been notified that the Education Map of the Decade has been released. I’ll post about this fully when I get more time, but for now I’d like to direct your attention toward the claim that is made for it: “Developed in partnership with the Institute for the Future, the Education Map of the Decade identifies external future forces that are likely to shape the primary and secondary education system over the next 10 years. It identifies six key global and American trends and considers how those trends may affect five “impact zones”: family and community, markets, institutions, educators and learning, and tools and practices. It also identifies five “hot spots” – trends that will profoundly affect educators and students over the next decade and deserve particular attention.” (emphasis in original)