teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

My son Ben is now 6 months old. Immediately after his birth, my reading of other education-related blogs (understandably) plummeted, but is now again on the rise. Prompted by Karyn Romeis listing the bloggers she reads regularly, I thought I’d take the opportunity to both prune my RSS reader and share the things I read as a matter of course… :p

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Homework Helper is a Microsoft Live Search-powered search engine designed to help students find relevant information. They input information about which Key Stage they are in and which subject they are studying and then enter keywords. This is a good idea as I’ve had some homeworks come back on completely random things! :s (via it4L)

Many thanks to Nick Dennis for making me aware of this. And yes, I’m going to suggest again that he set up his own blog… ;-) I’ve often found it strange that whilst the government is willing to put decisions about interest rises, etc. into the hands of experts, they’re unwilling to do the same with education. Now, with this article in the Guardian, it seems like there’s more than just me crying in the wilderness… Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone interested in what is meant by the term ‘digital literacy’ or what it means to be educated in the 21st century might want to head over to my Ed.D. blog to look at the work I’ve been doing recently… :)

I’ve just added the WP-cache plugin to the installation of Wordpress that’s powering teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk. I’ve added it to the list of plugins which help make this site what it is. I’m aware that the various images, etc. can take a while to load, but hopefully things will be a little zippier now.  Please let me know via the contact form or via a comment to this post if there’s any problems! :)

I greatly value the comments people make on this and my other blogs. Some comment occasionally, some comment often, but I read – and usually respond to – each one. This, and trackbacks from other blog posts referencing this blog, build a sense of community. I’m now trying to take this one stage further through a comment rating system via SezWho. :D

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Karyn Romeis, frequent commenter on this blog, has a great post entitled Why I’m not a schoolteacher. This bit resonates with me: ‘One conversation that keeps coming up is “what is education for?” Until we can get that one sussed, I can’t see myself on the inside of the formal education system.’ Indeed. This is kind of the area of my Ed.D. thesis and a reason why I get extraordinarily frustrated in my current occupation. At least half of the times we do things in schools just because ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’. :s

The Guardian and the BBC report today on Ofsted’s recent criticism of the teaching of History in schools. Never mind that the majority of secondary History lessons are judged as ‘good’ or better and that it is, in fact, the best taught subject in UK schools. Whilst I agree that the march through history from 1066 to 1945 during Key Stage 3 doesn’t exactly do wonders for chronological skills – a thematic approach is better, I think – the new orders from 2008 should hopefully shake things up a bit! :)

I’m still way behind on my RSS feed reading, but I did have time to read a post over at Futurelab’s Flux blog entitled 21st century schools. It reflects on eight questions being asked in the public sphere by the European Commission. I’d be interested in your views on the following questions… :)

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Social networking is big business. MySpace was bought in 2005 for $580m, whilst Facebook is supposed to be in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for $6 billion. Naturally, educators have begun to use social networking sites as well. But herein lies a problem…

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