Blog

I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!...

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:...

I’ve decided to return to social media a bit earlier than planned. Here are two things that I thought I needed to share and brought me out if hibernation. For the first, I’ve been catching up on Bryan Alexander’s discussions in his Future Trends Forum which can be viewed on this YouTube channel. I’ve been particularly interested in the discussion with Phil Hill on ‘Towards the future Learning Msnsgement System’ and ‘The Future of Moodle’ with Martin Dougiamas....

Over the last week or so, I have found myself getting more and more depressed about the state of the world and my place in it. The constant bad news about the UK election, Brexit, Trump, and the vile responses you read when you follow a Tweet stream on any of these topics. The crisis in Higher Education, too many students, falling student satisfaction, TEF, the stress of teaching and managing teaching, the false dawn of e-learning, analytics, AI; dire warnings about so-called “Generation-Z” students and their likely impact; and the devaluation of human relationships between teachers and their students....

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class....