Many years ago there was a television series in Britain called “The Cres”. Short for “The Crescent”, the series followed the day-to-day lives of the fictional residents of a street somewhere in England. Most episodes were engaging and humorous, and made compelling viewing. An article I read some years ago reminded me of this, and made me think that a “hyperlocal” blog could work really well for a school.
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Experiment by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
Three experiments (and a bonus one)
As a teacher, you’re meant to be the fount of all knowledge, right? Even if your teaching style is to be a guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage, you’re still expected to actually know stuff. Well, sometimes it pays not to know, or at least to appear not to know.
Read More7 questions about blogging (Updated)
You can build up a body of work without having to try going through gatekeepers.
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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Lessons from the world of sports: #5 The rule of encouragement (Updated)
How important is encouragement to Olympic class athletes? I’d like to start off with an admission of error….
Read More7 questions about blogging
You can build up a body of work without having to try going through gatekeepers.
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Blog reading, by Terry Freedman
Getting new blog posts to come to YOU
You don’t have to visit lots of different blogs to discover the latest articles on them.
Read MoreWhy should new teachers use social media?
It seems to me that the sense of belonging to an intellectual community is becoming less apparent in the staffroom, because of the need for schools to deliver on the latest half-baked, ill thought-out “initiative”
Read MoreBeing connected without being connected
I have finally – finally! – realised what all the Facebook status updates I find so tedious have in common. That is, apart from the fact that they ostensibly have nothing in common, and that I find them tedious. I talked about the things I find irritating in How much should we share online?, so there's no need to rehearse it all over again.Crafting the perfect eTextbook
Starting very soon is a 5 week online course called Crafting the perfect eTextbook. I’m slightly biased, because I’m involved in it, but it is shaping up to be really great.
The syllabus consists of, in brief:
Teens and social media
There was an interesting article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph about the film The Bling Ring. Entitled “Is the Facebook generation anti-social?”, the article presents what I think is a fairly balanced view of how teens seem obsessed with recording every moment of their lives. Well, balanced in the sense that the writer, Tim Stanley, attempts to present it as something we have always done. He cites the example of people in years gone by insisting on showing their (boring) holiday snaps to their friends and family. Now they upload them to Facebook instead (thank goodness!).scribefire test
I've been having a play around with Scribefire, which is a blogging application you can use from within your browser. In this test, I tried the 'blog this page' feature, which enables you to, er, blog the web page you have open.
Read MoreAlternatives to Google Reader
I have just updated my article entitled What’s RSS and why is it useful?
Read MoreThe internet in a day
Here is an infographic that depicts what happens in an internet day. It goes through what happens in one second, one minute, one hour and then calculates the statistics for a day.
It’s interesting, though not – in my opinion – for the statistics in themselves. If big numbers impress you, then you will be impressed. Indeed, those whose mission it is to promote so-called 21st century skills and to prove that the current education system cannot cope with the new reality tend to use statistics like this to prove their point.
BETT 2013 Interviews: Simon Finch
E-safety guru Simon Finch talks about why pupils should be allowed to use social media, why teachers should use it, e-safety and identity management.5 ways to establish credibility on your blog
I don’t know what it’s like living in other countries, but here in England we are fortunate indeed. If I want to have a discussion on any subject at all, I can simply walk into the pub nearest to where I happen to be at the time, where I am virtually certain to discover a self-styled “expert” declaiming about the economy, or what’s wrong with kids today, or how to solve the financial crisis, or whether or not kids should be taught how to programme, or how the entire education system should be put right.
Lessons from the world of sports: #5 The rule of encouragement
Welcome to the fifth part of this mini-series, in which I consider lessons we might learn from sports and sports personalities which we can apply to educational ICT. How important is encouragement to Olympic class athletes? I’d like to start off with an admission of error….
Using the search engine right
Independent e-Learning Consultant Rob Ellis gives some tips on how pupils can use search engines properly.
When Terry tweeted about his post ‘Using the right search engine’ I rather flippantly suggested that he’d be better off simply reordering the words in the title to read ‘Using the search engine right’.
Leaving aside the damage I’ve done to the English language with that there is a serious point here. Despite the prominence given to information literacy I’d say that, anecdotally, there is widespread agreement on its importance but little progress on organised adoption in schools.
Screen-sharing made easy
Have you ever been in a situation where you are trying to explain to someone over the phone what you are seeing on your computer? Or trying to explain to them what they should be seeing on theirs? I’ve come across a neat little application which enables you to share your screen with anyone you like – and without installing anything, downloading anything or even paying a penny!
Reasons to have a blogging team
It took me an hour and 29 minutes to write a blog post this morning. Actually, it took me over two hours, because I thought about it last night. Fortunately, the amount of time I spent, which was about 1.5 hours longer than I’d intended, didn’t have too much of an impact on my work schedule, because I did the thinking last night whilst watching TV, and this morning I was the computer by 6am in order to get lots done before I started work.
But why am I telling you all this?
Because when I think of what I need to do to keep my blog updated every day, I realise what needs to be in place for a school blog to thrive. The answer is: a team.
Why schools should have a hyperlocal blog
Many years ago there was a television series in Britain called “The Cres”. Short for “The Crescent”, the series followed the day-to-day lives of the fictional residents of a street somewhere in England. Most episodes were engaging and humorous, and made compelling viewing. An article I read this morning reminded me of this, and made me think that a “hyperlocal” blog could work really well for a school.