Standards – “presume good intent” or….

Claire replied to my last post on standards and I commented. As I wrote the comment I felt this is possibly more that just a reply, so I have posted it here. Thanks Claire
There is a sign on a wall of an office near my classroom that says “Presume good intent“. I believe that intention [...]

On the wire

In this weeks catch from the net we have Mathematics and data sources, infographic maps, web 2.0 tools and more.
1. The Maths Apprentice – http://www.mathapprentice.com/Activity/explore.html – this is a fun primary and middle years site for mathematics. Directed at the younger audience. Worth considering using with an IWB.
2. Kids online – me and mymaths – [...]

On the Wire – Educational games and visualizations

Here are some interesting games and visualization sites that you can use.
1. National Atmospheric and oceanic admistration – http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/ This is a government site with some good visualisations and animations on weather etc. Good use of satellite images  – worth a visit

2. Science net links – http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/systems.html This interactive starts with a voice saying “please [...]

A handful of the best

A handful of the best is one of the presentations I ran at uLearn09. The basis of this presentation is a collection of open source, free or great proprietory tools that I use in my classroom.
While the “software for schools” deal does provide a basic productivity suite for computers in schools and an OS it [...]

On the wire – Science resources

It seems to have been a week for excellent resources appearing on my desktop. This post looks at four websites that focus on the periodic table (thanks to free stuff for teachers)
1. The periodic table of videos – http://www.periodicvideos.com/# this has appeared in my blog before but is worth a second (or even third visit). [...]

The influence of Teachers

This is a follow on post from the cell phones in class post. One of the comments I received cause me to reflect on the influence teachers have.
Chris left this comment:
I like what you said about respect your students’ privacy. My seventh grade math teacher confiscated a note I was writing in class and [...]

Adventures in Arkansas continued…

Well, we are back in Memphis, we went out to the Rum Boogie  Blues club last night, which was great.
This trip has been thought provoking and has challenged many preconceptions I had.
Yes, I did meet a couple (and only a couple) of “red neck” teachers, but the majority of the teachers I met were profoundly [...]

On the wire – education videos

The internet has masses of resources that we can use for education. Increasing there are sites dedicated to educationally focused videos. Here are six that I come across:
1. Teachertube – http://www.teachertube.com/ This is a great sharing site for teacher developed content and some professional material.
2. Teacher TV – http://www.teacher.tv This is a brilliant British [...]

Teaching – a 9-5 profession?

A non teaching friend of mine was making the not unusual series of comments about teaching in general and teachers in particular. He commented about the hours we work and the number of holidays we have. I suspect all of us have heard these comments.
As I drove into school yesterday morning at 7.30am I was [...]

Bloom’s Activity Analysis Tool

I have been working on a simple method of analysing teaching and learning technologies against Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. I have taken the verbs associated with each of the taxonomic levels and arranged them across a sheets and then added a column for the activity components.
The idea is that you take your activity and break it [...]