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Feb 27, 2012
2 min

New Technologies – teaching the new generation

Don’t they know it all already? In a word, no. Just because our pupils are exposed to a massive amount of ‘tech’ it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be adept at using for a variety of outcomes or be able to critically evaluate the impact that it has on them or on society. Most people tend to use this stuff on a ‘need to know’ basis. No-one knew how to tweet or IM before the technology became available, and so young people will tend to use whatever is most popular or most us

Oct 21, 2011
2 min

Media Literacy Part 2

Limiting the field? While I am incredibly pleased to see something so vital and fundamental to modern education being approved by the powers that be, unfortunately the main focus of this seems to be the ‘big bad media’ approach, through which we are all mindless, passive vehicles blindly accepting what the media tells us and that children should be protected from its evil intentions. This is, of course, only part of the story. On the one hand, I am reluctant to follow the lin

Oct 19, 2011
2 min

Behaving Yourself

The recently published ‘behaviour checklist’ (or ‘naughty list’ in The Sun) will no doubt prompt another debate about poor discipline in our country’s classrooms. Many things seem to prompt this discussion, such as riots in the summer, school exclusion figures or any other number of general societal ills we can blame on those ‘badly behaved’ youngsters. This is invariably twinned with some sort of wistful reminiscing about how we were all so angelic in our day. For teachers,

Oct 17, 2011
2 min

Media Literacy Part 1

Qualifying The term ‘media literacy’ (often also termed ‘digital literacy’) has been bandied around in educational circles for a while now, and has been the subject of several documents (http://bit.ly/gKEWmz) and case studies (http://bit.ly/qUdCz0), of which this is clearly only a sample that I have come across. It is a hugely broad and encompassing term which is possibly one of the most problematic issues, as it takes just as long to define exactly what it is we’re talking a

Oct 10, 2011
3 min

‘Embedding’ across the curriculum – real possibility or box-checking exercise?

Cross-curricular concepts As a teacher in a secondary school, we are constantly bombarded with new initiatives, ideas and concepts that are to be ’embedded’ into the school as a whole. These can vary from government-led legislation (cynically often a knee-jerk reaction to whatever the popular press happens to be shouting about or the exact opposite of whatever the last government did, despite how effective it may or may not have been) to governor/headteacher priorities. Ideal

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