Launched today, supported by the DfE, Computing At School, Microsoft, the Quick Start Computing site is something I was put on to which I think could make somewhat of a difference for those teachers struggling to gain confidence with the new Computing curriculum in the UK. The site has two…
Vidra is a great free new app from the creators of the also brilliant Grafio – TenTouch Apps. I was using Grafio on my iPad today and saw that they were promoting this new app – the end result looked pretty good and not too dissimilar to Adobe Voice (which I…
I love the Bett Show. When I first attended well over a decade ago I wasn’t that engaged. It was all companies trying to sell me things and it wasn’t really anything that was special for me. Nowadays it’s a completely different story… There are learn live theatres with seminars, discussion…
Great lessons have key characteristics. Many edu-bloggers have discussed this but for me, the one person that nails it is as discussed in my introductory post to this series is Tom Sherrington. In his series he discusses the topic in some detail across ten posts. In my series I will be looking at…
Great lessons have key characteristics. Many edu-bloggers have discussed this but for me, the one that nails it is Tom Sherrington where he discusses the topic in some detail in his ‘Great Lessons‘ series on his brilliant blog. He breaks these down in to ten key areas: Probing (questioning) Rigour (pitch and tone of…
Streamed live on December 30th, this AppSmash Live featured educators from all over the globe sharing their ideas. Big thanks to Richard Wells (@iPadWells), Joe Dale (@JoeDale) and Jenny Ashby (@jjash) for joining me in this session. Watch it back again now below:
I’ve been creating a number of posters featuring quotes from the inspiring #Nurture1415 blog posts that many educators have been writing although I haven’t made one for myself (if you’d like to, please do and pass on?). It’s a labour of love, but I get so much each year from…
Who would have thought it? Google now have an impressive number of apps available on the iOS App Store which can help, support and enhance learning. Of the 32 available that are optimised for iPad, I can easily see there being use for most of them in a learning space,…
I remember 1980 well. It was a time of fluorescent socks and real technological innovation. I remember vividly walking to school at 6 years old without a care in the world and the promises of the future. Now That’s What I Call Music was about to be given to me…
Originally posted on Staffrm, this is a post with some ideas about how you can get some balance with work & your personal life… I’ve had a lot to think about lately. I’ve seen lots of talk about the emotional well being of staff. The emotional well being of our…
As you’ll know, I’m no stranger to Teachmeets but the one I attended last night in Oxford, organised by the dapper Amjad Ali had the ingredients of a really special learning & sharing experience. It was honest, fun, reflective, full of sharing, laughter and learning. I’ll say it here –…
Social media in education has the power to transform all manner of aspects of school life. How students learn, how parents interact with the school, how teachers can develop their CPD, can all be transformed through social media. Today’s BettChat focused on this very topic. The discussion was wide and varied…
I was put on to a great resource for practicing binary conversions today which I had to share – it works on a kind of Tetris game basis. See how you get on. It’s great fun! Check it out by clicking here. Cheers!
1. No two days, classes, students, are the same. It goes in many ways to what Coe said in his recent report: “Ultimately, the definition of effective teaching is that which results in the best possible student outcomes. There is currently no guaranteed recipe for achieving this: no specifiable combination…
I’m liking the updated sections in the App Store that have been broken down by different learning stage. Have you seen them? They’re broken down by key stage and then within each of those sections they’re broken down further by learning activity. What is also nice is to see the…
My presentation for #TMStockport was quite a difficult choice. Knowing who else was speaking and the topic of use of technology, I wanted to do something on purposeful use – yes… I know… but I had an inkling that their host @ICT_MrP would probably cover that, so I went for…
It’s that time of year again. It is staggering that this is the 11th Edublog awards. So much learning and sharing has taken place over those 11 years in the education community. I learn so much on a daily basis from all of the brilliant teaching professionals who share their practice….
If you haven’t noticed, whilst I love technology and its propensity to enhance learning, for me it always has to be purposeful. I’ve written at some length about it previously but I thought a handy checklist might be, well… handy. So I made this. Please forgive the brevity of the…
I am extremely excited to have been nominated for the UK Blog Awards 2015. I have been nominated for Education blog of the year! Thank you to the people who nominated me for this. It is exceedingly humbling. I have always seen this space as a place to offer help…
What a day today on #BettChat. Lots of engagement and ideas flowing. To help keep a record of the discussion, I took the tweets from the chat and added them to a Storify which you can read and check out below. It was as always a fast and furious debate…
Right. When someone asks you to write about your #teachinghighlight (thank you @ictevangelist) the first thought is “Ooooh. Thank you. Erm…what have I enjoyed? No. Not humble enough. What challenges have I helped my students with?” This reaction surprised me. The teacher ‘put yourself second’ double-take is normal teaching behaviour….
As you may have seen in my recent post I am moving out of the classroom to be able to work and support schools in a number of different ways. To help with this move I’ve just built a new website to showcase the sort of support that I am offering…
A very short post just to say I have had a look at Lee Parkinson’s (@ICT_MrP) new book “The 12 iPad lessons of Christmas” on iBooks today. It’s got some great ideas in there for lessons using iPads in a Primary setting whilst in the run up to Christmas. He…
When you’re new to Twitter as a teacher one of the difficult things to do is find great people to add to create your PLN. The Twitter search feature isn’t exactly great so what do you do? Well previously lots of word of mouth, trial and error and hashtag searches…
I read a lot of blogs. There’s some heady work out there. For example I just read a (yet another) great blog by John Tomsett on student-centred leadership. A subject close to my heart particularly given the work I did at Clevedon with the brilliant John Wells on student focused…
© 2025 ICTEvangelist. All rights reserved, Mark Anderson
You must be logged in to post a comment.