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Reading for School
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Analysing Sheila Birling: 20 minute screencast on a Student Response
Lecture: An Apology for Gaming Culture: Intellectual Trickery or Mindless Clickery?
A lecture I gave defending gaming culture, or at least my favourite parts of it. Gaming Culture: Intellectual Trickery or Mindless Clickery? from gregorycanderson
Enriching Visuals for Teaching PowerPoints: The Quill Guy’s Recommendations
Good visuals on a PowerPoint enhance thinking and therefore learning. Working in a school that promotes the sharing of PowerPoints, I have happily developed useful design principles that enrich the visuals of PowerPoint for my colleagues and others. Advice to a...
Book Review: Ready Player One. Readable but Replayable?
Ready Player One is an interesting and fun book. It raises some interesting questions and is plotted well enough. Some issues in its style and content make this a difficult book to fully recommend, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. The power of this story comes in a...
Pioneering Digital Debate: Some Ideas
To create further opportunities for our students to think and debate in our context, I have tasked my debate club to look at digital debating. Some great colleagues elsewhere are taking me up on the challenge. Skype and suchlike have ongoing issues of connectivity and...
Teaching literary essay writing: a critique of warrants and reasons
Some more intense reading and thinking since yesterday with trusted colleagues old and new made me reevaluate my previous thoughts about warrants. The purpose of a warrant in an essay is to stake a generalised condition that grants authority to a reason or statement...
Developing Academic Argument Using Claims, Reasons, Evidence and Warrants: Using Turabian’s ”Manual for Writers”
Today my students sat their English Literature GCSE exam. Our in-class focus on understanding reasons, variables and our insistence on continually planning different responses meant more confident students. Whilst we fed them the usual diet of understanding academic...
Why Triptico is still the most useful app suite for English teachers
Each year teachers in my school gather together to discuss their uses of technology. For many this is a joy; for some it is a compulsion. The best examples start, as ever, with what thinking is needed by the students. These examples also harness the expertise and...
OneNote – Reflections on the first term of use with three new ambitions
After one term of using OneNote in the English classroom, this is what I found: a) Navigating PowerPoints via a printout on OneNote is more functional: Being able to scroll up and down through the PowerPoint was interesting and useful. A key number of students were...
Writing Composition in the British NC: can we learn something from this American focus?
The examinations in the British NC focus heavily on word and sentence level analysis. Analysing the connotations of individual word choices, for example, is a dominant focus on most of the current English language exam, and not to mention being useful (perhaps even...