As teachers, we know the importance of vocabulary for accessing and meeting the demands of an increasingly challenging secondary curriculum. One way that schools are addressing the vocabulary gap is through explicit teaching of, and reference to, not only subject-specific (Tier 3) words but also general academic (Tier 2) words, as the glue that helps […]
Rhetoric? Would you want to work in a school that had a narrow, unbalanced curriculum? How about one with a broad, balanced curriculum? The questions are rhetorical; the answers are obvious. From one perspective, ‘broad’ and ‘balanced’ are rhetorical terms used to persuade us of the value of whatever curriculum a writer or speaker is […]
We can find a justification for music as an important part of human development right back to Plato. In the Middle Ages, music continued to be seen as a tool for the ‘formation of the adult who would best fulfill those functions expected of him or her by the society of which he was a […]
The author of this article is the Director of CreativeKids, an organisation offering chargeable workshops to children and young people in Hong Kong. Fear of failure is one of the blocks to children’s thinking and can act as a barrier to learning (Fisher, 2005). Conversely, children’s curiosity can fuel exploration of possibilities. Art in particular […]
Principles of community curriculum-making Most people will be familiar with the African proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Hold that thought. There are a range of pressing issues facing society in 2019. These are well represented in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which include: affordable and green energy sustainable cities […]
Ofsted’s consultation about its new education inspection framework, with its focus on the curriculum, is leading Early Years practitioners to wonder what a curriculum for the youngest children might look like. Yet the notion of a curriculum for young children is not new. For example, Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA/DfEE, 2000) was the […]
A UNICEF report in 2013 on the 29 most wealthy countries placed the United Kingdom as lowest in terms of children aged 15 to 19 remaining in education. Although, since then, there have been legislative changes to the ages of compulsory education in the UK, it is a telling comparison. It is particularly compelling when […]
Drawing is widely called upon across the secondary curriculum and has been made more prevalent by the Department for Education’s (2015) review of art and design GCSE subject content. Drawing is increasingly viewed as an essential part of the curriculum, underpinning many aspects of study. It is a means of both making sense of the […]
The music education climate The music classroom is a different place to the one I studied in as a child, and quite different to the one in which I began teaching in 2004. The environment is very different in 2018; music departments are likely to have more computers in their classrooms (Savage, 2010; Ofsted, 2012) […]
In recent years, providing student feedback has become increasingly burdensome, to the point where it is now one of the biggest contributors to teacher workloads (Elliott et al., 2016). This considered, I want to ensure that the feedback I am giving is of good quality and that my students engage with it. I hypothesised that […]
Note: The author of this article is an Apple Professional Learning Specialist. ‘Well, that was fun!’ was a comment I heard after a recent professional learning session with teachers. We had focussed on using robots to teach computing. The teachers had all taken part, solved problems and there was a real buzz in the room. […]
Note: The authors of this article work for LessonApp, an education technology company offering a product for teachers. Designing quality lessons is one of the cornerstones of teacher education in developed countries. For example, in Finland, lesson planning is based on the latest scientific research on learning and how to foster it. Achieving a versatile […]
This article reports the initial findings undertaken by a transnational team of academics and teachers funded from an Erasmus+ project entitled ‘Designing and Evaluating Innovative Mobile Pedagogies’ (DEIMP). We recognise that mobile technologies have been used inappropriately by students and do not deny that smartphones have generated problems and challenges for teachers, leading to concerns […]
The possibilities that technology offers us to improve learning are tremendously exciting. In the past few years, the question has shifted from whether technology should have a place in the classroom to understanding how technology can be integrated into lessons to achieve specific learning goals. But as technology advances at lightning pace, it can be […]
This paper considers how technology-rich authentic learning environments (TALE) can be achieved through mobile applications for teaching and learning within the subject ‘elements of business skills’. The affordances of technology open up a seamless authentic learning environment, which can effectively engage both individuals and groups of learners. This is a natural learning approach, where learning […]
When he wasn’t lecturing in psychology at Ohio State University, Sidney Pressey spent his down time building a machine that may one day replace him: a teaching machine. It was 1921 and the dawns of binary computing, early artificial intelligence and electronic displays had not yet broken. But Pressey’s machine was visionary and could mechanically […]
The ‘blended learning’ strategy Blended learning is described by Garrison and Kanuka (Garrison and Kanuka , 2004) as ‘the thoughtful integration of classroom face-to-face learning experiences with online learning experiences’. This approach is particularly useful in building learning communities, and there is a reasonable body of supporting evidence for the benefits of digital learning technologies […]
Research suggests that difficulties in low-level transcriptional processes such as handwriting and spelling or capitalisation can affect the quality and fluency of text and restrict children’s capacity to generate and record ideas (Graham and Perin, 2007). Using speech recognition software (SRS) provides an opportunity for students to dictate, edit and review their work using voice […]
The context of 360-degree video in teacher education Video has been used as a professional development tool for teachers for some time. However, despite the benefits, there are a number of barriers to using standard video playback with trainee teachers, in particular their difficulty in recognising issues in teaching and learning, resulting from less well-developed […]
Digital technology has the potential to transform pedagogy and improve the retention of knowledge (Leer and Ivanov, 2013); (Diemar et al., 2013), but many schools are not fully taking advantage of this due to the absence of a clear framework for technology integration. For many schools, this void is filled by the SAMR model, which […]
