I’m not one for waiting until New Year for resolutions, but I do have a couple of targets for myself this year:

• To be less quick to lose my temper/snap at students.
• To be better at promptly checking and chasing up homework at KS3.
• To avoid doing *any* school work at home before putting my youngest to bed on a workday

So far I’ve not had a chance to test the middle target but I’ve done well on the other two. I’m quietly hopeful for a good year,

I have had a PD, a working school day and a Year 12 ICT lesson. And we have the biggest cohort of AS ICT ever in the school (2 more than we have computers in one of the ICT suites) plus a reincarnated A-Level Computing class (following a 12 month hiatus due to a lack of willing students). So it’s looking good and I’m enthusiastic about the next 11 months!

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before, but a few months ago I started a collaborative Google Docs presentation (in the style of Mark Warner’s Ideas to Inspire) aimed at gathering ideas to share with colleagues at work.

Since then I’ve had much inspiration and many ideas from a range of people (particularly Mark Berry) and have so far printed up two issues of ‘Techy Tips for Not So Techy Teachers‘ (although I would love to go for a non-paperbased version, I would miss the very market I am aiming for) and have had a few positive comments from individuals.

Have done a bit of work today on the next two, I’ve published all four at mwclarkson.co.uk. Feel free to use as you see fit, but please do provide a link back to me (here / my website/ my twitter account) if you do.

I was planning to write two blog posts; one descriptive and one subjective. Thankfully, Chris Harte has already done the first for me, so I can concentrate on the reflection and thoughts – which could go on a bit, I warn you.

I remember back at the start of March (I know, because I checked), I saw a blog post by Lisibo about speaking at a TeachMeet, and I wrote my own blog entry saying that my aim was to attend one within the next 12 months. Not to speak, but to attend. And so here I am, barely 3 months later and I have exceeded my own goal. The next one will have to be world domination (or at least he downfall of published league tables).

Without gushing too much, I had an absolutely brilliant night. The attendees were fantastic – supportive, friendly, keen, enthusitic and much more besides. Our hosts and sponsors provided us with accommodation, wine, canapes, wine, notepads, wine, a little cash and some free wine (all of which were greatly appreciated).

The presentations themselves varied in content, but each and every one had ideas that I need to write a separate (or several separate) posts about – and I certainly will. I’ve already been in touch with a number of new (to me) colleagues in a variety of subject areas and have even managed to carry some of that enthusiasm through a full day of teaching.

Now if I can find a way of entering students early for GCSEs after turning them into more independent learners that have collaborated via e-twinning, demonstrate their work using documentaries, Go-Animate, Crazy Talk and Glogster and use PEEL to assess their understanding whilst monitoring their alpha waves and playing the Helicopter Game simultaneously with their eyebrows then I will have achieved something very positive. Otherwise, I just don’t think I’ll have time to fit it all in!

If anyone wants to see my part of the presentation, you can watch a fairly low-res video of me talking very quickly for 9 minutes and/or view the full presentation and see a list of links to real-world examples of the tools in action at my website.

Caveat: This is more of a geek dad post and, although there are educational lessons to be learned, I’m not going into that aspect too much.

Most websites that require an account have a lower age limit of 13. And most youngsters under the age of 13 either click the ‘Yes, I am over 13′ button or lie about their age in order to get in. As teachers, we are sometimes frustrated when we want to use sites like Animoto, Prezi, Xtranormal and other sites. So why IS there an age limit?

The issue was brought to a head for me this week because of Facebook (which operates the same age restriction). My 10 year old son signed up 6 months ago, although he doesn’t know the password and his email notifactions go to me first. All has been fairly well and about half of his class is signed up, along with about half of the parents – and everyone seems to be everyone else’s friend.

As part of his Catholic school’s work in Years 5 and 6 there was a trip organised to visit a Mosque, and some of the parents were less than happy about this (although I don’t want to turn this into a religious debate so I won’t go into the details). The debate (running through the comments on one of the parent’s status updates) got quite heated and some very harsh, ignorant and upsetting things were said. All in full view of the 10 year old pupils who were meant to be going on this trip.

The issue I’m taking here is not that some parents disagreed, or that some were spiteful and ignorant, but that 10 year old children were able to read this stuff. And I, as a parent, had to have a long, hard think about whether I really want my son to be using Facebook if this is the stuff he might have to wade through. Had he browsed to a site with this kind of stuff on I would be worried.

Thakfully, the parent removed the status completely, along with all record of the comments and after a discussion with Mrs. Clarkson, the decision is to stick to the status quo. It does raise an issue, however, about the way some ‘grown-ups’ use Facebook and I’m still not entirely happy about my son reading about some middle-aged woman’s drunken night out and subsequent one-night stand. (Note: That hasn’t actually happened AFAIK, but you see my point).

So that is why there are age limits, and that is why we need to make certain that younger children are supervised in these potentially harmful environments.

What we do need is a way of recording, storing and reviewing the criteria involved – and this is where I need help:

Lets say there are 40 criteria (8 for Level 3, 8 for Level 4 and so on…) and 3 assessed units per year. Each unit will only be able to meet some of the criteria and there will be overlaps so that the same criterion culd potentially be covered by several units.

Using Moodle I want each classroom teacher to have an online checklist of relevant criteria to mark as pass/fail for that unit in order to manually generate a level. I would also like that data to be stored so that an overall, cumulative picture can be seen at a glance. It would also be pretty much essential to be able to see/print a class set of criteria for report writing and such.

Ideas anyone?

It’s also really hard to write this post.

My anonymity is laughable, given the way that I have carefully protected my pseudonym over the years (I originally intended it not to be obvious who I am whenever I posted here, believe it or not) and so colleagues, potential employers, even students may see this. So I must be careful. Tactful. Oh dear.

In short, I’ve seen a Head of Department job at a very good school nearby, have looked round the school and need to make a decision about what to do next.

At the age of 29, I’m an Assistant Head of ICT with an appropriate TLR. Where do I go from here, and when? Do I jump straight in for the Head of Department job? The pastoral side is not for me – I like having a tutor group, but have no intention of becoming a Head of Year or Head of House. Do I wait a little longer to be more settled and comfortable? Do I want to be a Head of Department? What advantages will it offer? Am I better off looking at an e-learning or whole school role?

The advantages of being a HoD seem to be freedom/autonomy, responsibility, money and something good to put on your CV. Where I work I already have the freedom and autonomy, responsiblity is tempered with accountability, the money I’m on isn’t bad (although I could always find a use for more), and the last point is where I’m stuck.

But do I want to take a risk of leaving the school that I love working at, with colleagues I’ve come to know well and like, with students who know me and (generally) respect me and all of the others things that are great about where I work – for the sake of improving my CV?

But if I don’t, will that leave me sat here, unable to move should I want to because I’ve stagnated; procrastinated for too long?

I’m really torn, as you can probably tell. And I can’t really say I’m looking for someone to tell me an answer. This blog is a good way for me to reflect, and the things I haven‘t written have likely helped me as much as the things I have.

A difficult decision indeed…

P4C (or Community of Enquiry) is a way of getting kids to think and discuss issues in an organised way. They sit in a circle, you provide a stimulus and they come up with a philosophical (or simply ‘big’) question to discuss. There is (of course) a lot more to it than that and having run 3 or 4 P4C lessons over the last 2 years I have enjoyed the experience.

So, in my citizenship lesson next week (which is being observed, yay!), I’m running a P4C lesson for my Y10 form class on the topic of conflict. I have 3 images I am considering as a stimulus – the key to which is choosing something that will lead to a GOOD question (my use of a train decorated beautifully with graffiti led to a rousing endorsement of street art – but no discussion at all) and without pushing my opinions onto the students. So here are my 3 candidates:

• Option 1
  
• Option 2
  
• Option 3
  

Option 1 is probably too humorous, but something about it appeals to me. Option 2 is quite shocking (good) but may lead straight to ‘war is bad’, which is not a productive discussion. Option 3 has a lot of relevance as it affects British civillians but there are so many possibilities I’ll end up disappointed at all the ones they’ll miss.
Any thoughts or opinions? I’ll let you know how it goes…

After a lot of work we managed to set up roaming profiles – so work was automatically (transparently) saved into students’ home directories on the network. We even managed to set up local shortcuts for DV files and video editing. Huzzah!

The problem now is that applications such as Flash, Dreamweaver (and everything else made by Adobe), Google Earth and even MS Office applications use temporary and cache files on the server rather than locally. This means that applications run slowly and running Flash with a full class is simply not viable.

So do I return to a local profile and risk students bemoaning their lost work and that PCs are easier because My Documents works or do I stick with a simpler file managent system and sluggish (even unusable!) applications? Some days I hate computers…