My friends ask me why I blog, and why I make the time for blogging. Sometimes I wonder myself why I blog. I’ve posted blog posts that have hundreds of hits, and ones that hardly register. Sometimes I get an email or message about a blog post, but usually I don’t. I carry on blogging, even when I don’t get any feedback, because I know somebody, somewhere will read what I have to say.
This is a collection of extracts from my logs over the last few months showing some of the more interesting visitors to my site (I’ve removed the IP addresses myself). The bottom image shows visits from Microsoft and Google following an Outlook web access vs Google rant I had (#GoneGoogle).
Secondary teachers tend to forget what a useful tool video can be in your lessons, even I do sometimes! I’ve a selection of devices that record video but my students’ favourite device is my Flip camera.
In the past week three different groups have made use of video recording in their lessons. Two of the groups videoed themselves – in the format of a news report on climate change, and an anti-drugs video. Unfortunately I’m not able to show these videos outside of school but the third group however decided to video their experiments so that they could watch them again, and show them to pupils who were absent from the lesson.
This is the video they recorded (I just did the editing).
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a thousand pictures. Learners who have special needs respond well to this medium, and it can be a tremendous motivator and confidence booster.
Staff in my school have finally become confident at using digital photography, but we spend a fortune printing out photographs to put in folders that no-body looks at. Staff members who want to keep digital copies of photographs have to pass them to our technician who stores them on an encrypted drive (as per our data protection policy). It’s taken 10 years to get staff members using email and digital photographs, so videos may require a few more years of training before adoption!
I’d be interested to hear from anyone, especially in the special education field, who uses digital media with their classes for any purpose. Contact me or leave a comment below.
A few years ago I wrote a course for teaching assistants who supported students in (secondary) science lessons. The course was widely attended by colleagues from across our local authority. With the recent bad weather we decided to run a refresher course inhouse for our our own staff, since we have had quite a few new teaching assistants join our school in that time. The materials have also been modified slightly to give them a more generic slant rather than being science specific.
The presentation embedded below shows some of the strategies that teaching assistants can use with students in lessons, and the toolkit is a set of templates that can be used to support these strategies.
Feel free to download the toolkit/presentation and use them in your own establishment (whilst respecting our copyright of course). I hope you find them useful.
I work in a special school, with a small number of pupils. This means we enter a relatively small number of pupils for examinations etc. Earlier in the year my bursar came to find me with an invoice for well over £1000. “Is this yours?” she asked me. Being a stickler for financial protocols in school, I was sure I hadn’t spent that much money, until I noticed the logo on the top of the invoice. The logo belonged to Edexcel, and the invoice was BTEC Science fees for the 18 students I had just entered. Scale that ten times or more, and across multiple subjects, you start to get an idea of some of scale of examination spending by schools, but is this really value for money?
On the day we broke up for the Christmas vacation I received a message from a copyright officer at AQA concerning copyrighted materials on my blog. Immediately my mind jumped to the science resources I had put online. Did any of these contain examination questions or materials from AQA that shouldn’t have been there. I have been extremely careful which of my resources I share, so I decided to investigate further. A quick search of the logs revealed that someone with an IP address belonging to the Northern Examination And Assessment Board in Manchester had been following links from Google Images to my site. In fact they had visited my site over a period of an hour and forty-five minutes so they clearly had nothing better to do a few days before Christmas. Yes I had been very naughty indeed, I had linked to an AQA logo in a blog post of two years ago offering free resources to support the AQA exam. Of course I removed the offending link from my blog, requested that Google re-index the page, and emailed the copyright officer to let them know. It is strange that they didn’t have time to acknowledge my email given that they had an hour and forty five minutes of free time to keep looking at it! If only AQA would invest more money in the format of their (atrocious) multiple choice core science exam and less money on red tape and copyright, our children might perform better in their examinations. I’m glad to see they are putting our huge examination fees to good use.
In a press release on the 7th January (and reported in the TES on Friday 8th Jan) the National Education Trust questions the spending of millions of pounds of pounds of taxpayers money on examination fees. With the current huge levels of public debt we should be asking ourselves if it is still best value for money to pour money into the pockets of the examination boards’ shareholders. Perhaps it is time to look at examinations at 16 (and their fees) afresh!
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