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This post is now out of date! Check out my new ebook entitled:

#getthatjob: an educator’s guide to finding, applying, and interviewing for a teaching-related job

There are a number of dark arts in the world of education: classroom management, keeping on top of marking, applying for teaching jobs, being three examples. In this post I intend to deal with the last of these. I can only speak from my own experience, although I have been fairly successful in getting interviews from my applications. Any views or additional advice in the comments section would be very welcome! :D

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I’ll let you read the excellent post yourself, but I have to quote you this from Haberman: “Star teachers spend as little time as possible on tests and grading. Apart from particular school rules that must be followed, they are generally quite disinterested in the topic. Their evaluations are based primarily on students’ effort. … [T]hey have little faith in – and place little credence on – standardized tests of any kind.” There’s some other great quotes in there for the next time your Head of Department has a go at you for not slaving over marking books rather than actually teaching. (via dy/dan) :s

I thought it might be interesting to use Twitter not only for my non-school life, but also for the day-to-day things I do as a teacher. For those who are reading this in a feed reader, I’ve added a scrolling widget at the top of the blog which displays the most recent updates. It might provide insights for those elsewhere in the world! For those who don’t know, Twitter exists to answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ and is rather addictive. You can subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed here, or visit my Twitter page here… :D

Ideally, students should never be put into boxes or categories. However, the realities of teaching around 30 students at a time necessitate at least some levelling and pigeon-holing. In this type of environment, it’s best to try and keep mixing up the boxes in which you put students. My latest venture is to arrange my classroom according to CAT scores.

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In a provocatively-titled article, Wired has given an overview of the excellent Elgg social networking software for educational purposes. I use this for my Ed.D. blog and it’s pretty good. You can use Elgg as an ePortfolio, which should be of interest to some people. For the relative merits of Elgg Spaces (now EduSpaces) and Wordpress MU you might want to view my previous post here… :D

It’s getting towards the home stretch of the academic year (at least in the UK) so it’s report-writing time. I can’t help but think every time I do this that it’s a case of using the wrong tools for an outdated purpose. Allow me to explain… :s

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I often find it difficult to explain the midway position I want to occupy when it comes to technology. Often people see me as wanting to use educational technology for its own sake. Not true! Thankfully, via Chris Craft, there’s a presentation which explains very well what I’m about:

You can find the presentation on Slideshare here… :D

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then I should be delighted that fellow UK History teacher Dave Stacey has started a new blog. Blue theme? Check. 3-column layout? Check. ‘Teaching’ subdomain? Check. Only kidding, Dave – this has the makings of a great site and it’s a worth addition to my feed reader. ;)

I’m applying for jobs at the moment and, as usual, I searched on Google for the school to which I’m currently applying. Interestingly, one of the first results was a link to the Wikipedia page for that school. It’s actually a fairly balanced entry, but it still got me thinking. In this brave new world of technology, should schools be hiring PR people to make sure they’re represented in a good light? (or at least that they’re not slated unfairly…) :s

The Guardian reports that Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has called for those in charge of companies such as YouTube to block content which demans teachers. This is crazy. For one, there’s no way that such companies could ever make 100% sure that no content was doing this (it depends upon interpretation, anyway). For another, why can’t we have a public debate about the use of technology (including mobile phones) in schools, instead of such reactionism? :p