Digitally Driven Cultural Evolution
In the 19th-century, the Ludittes famously objected to steam-powered manufacturing, the technology of the day: they made their feelings clear by breaking mill machines. Of late I have started to think...
View ArticleBackwards Tournament
Traveling to work this morning I was thinking of ways to get my students to collaborate better in big groups. This is something that students (and adults) are generally pretty bad at, so in my pastoral...
View ArticleTalking About Depression
Last weekend, a former colleague committed suicide, tragically unable to deal with living his life any longer. Tim Ford was, on the surface, a man who had it all: great job, wife and kids. Having spent...
View ArticleTechnology=Idiots?
There is plenty of speculation that technology is making us less intelligent. Certainly, in the classroom, I am seeing evidence that it is hindering the development of social skills, especially in...
View ArticleI and You
We come unto this earth, shooting head-first blind and wet so much like one link in a chain of boundless length. From this bundle of sopping joy we start, through an unknown life to live, and to the...
View ArticleParadox
Paradoxes are a great way to get student thinking and talking about thinking. The initial state of confusion, followed by the illusive, enigmatic feeling of understanding is somehow enticing and...
View ArticleQR Code Madness
QR codes are square barcodes, which are quick to read and can contain more information than older linear barcodes. More importantly, QR codes can contains links which take scanners directly to a...
View Article12 Hard Lessons
The following 12 ideas are lessons I think we really should be teaching students to help them become healthy, sane adults. But for whatever reason, they are hard to teach and even harder to learn. How...
View ArticleMisleading Images
This lesson aims to introduce students to the concept of misleading images, and to try and engender in students a certain skepticism when interacting with media. This lesson could potentially be used...
View ArticleRepresentation
This lesson used to be part of a unit which was dropped from the Year 7-9 ICT Course due to time constraints. However, the content is so powerful that I decided to include it, not as a unit, but as a...
View ArticleFriends Without Benefits
What Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, and Internet Porn Are Doing to America’s Teenage Girls This is an abridged version of the full article from Vanity Fair. It has been prepared for educational...
View ArticleHard Lesson #11: Guns are not glorious
Having been invited to read to a class of students for reading week, I looked for a chance to work with a group of older students who I have not taught in two years. The Y11 group I wanted to work with...
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