More from Mr Pink. Would be interesting to make a quick taxonomy of school behaviours that benefit from a carrot-and-stick approach.
To do what needs doing
Michael Ellsberg has a book out called The Education of Millionaires, which outlines the 7 key skills you need to know to become a millionaire like college drop-outs Zuckerberg or Gates. The argument, loosely, is: yes college can teach you many wonderful things but those things do not transfer easily to the real world. various millionaires have done really well … Read More
Education 2.0 and Bruce Lee
I’ve just done a feedback survey at school to try to understand why teachers don’t use our intranet more. I’m keen to do some internal workshops on flipped classrooms, BYOT etc but wanted to see what general attitudes were beforehand. There were two recurring themes: it is an extra that gets in the way of real teaching it is too … Read More
Good News, Bad News
Via: OnlineEducation.net So, the good news is that Twitter can help students boost their grades. The bad news is that many students are device-o-holics. Or perhaps it’s all bad news. Perhaps it’s just that students without Twitter lose marks because the Delirium Tremens they are wrestling with after being told they can’t use their phones makes it harder for the … Read More
Workspace, Learnspace, Brainspace
I’ve just been watching Channel 4’s The Secret Life of Buildings. The presenter’s an acquired taste but there are some fascinating bits to it. The main take-aways for me are : buildings and spaces actually change the way the human brain works. (more complex, interactive spaces make for more engaged brains. Fred Gage’s research on this is stunning.) too much … Read More
Books, desert islands and play with a capital P
Isn’t this, in reverse order, what we should be showing children books can do? [via 3quarksdaily ] Robinson Crusoe is notable for a lot of reasons. It was one of the first English novels. It brings up stuff like cultural relativism and morality and providence with a capital P. Marx favorably critiqued its depiction of pre-capitalist man. It can be … Read More
Are you as clever as your tie suggests?
via guardian.co.uk Students with purple ties are gifted and talented. All the children at Crown Woods college in Greenwich, south London, know that. They are taught in separate colour-coordinated buildings, play in fenced-off areas and eat lunch at separate times. At 11 years old, all pupils at the college are streamed according to ability in what the headteacher argues is … Read More
Taking student feedback seriously
Here’s something any teacher (and probably by extension any school) should be thinking about: How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers? Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad. Teachers whose students described them as … Read More
Sound of the Funky Drummer
Gavin Bradley’s bit of musical archaeology is fantastic. Might use it to try to show students that remixing is different from copying.
If Steve Jobs designed a school …
Steve Jobs, as I probably don’t need to say, was an unemployed college dropout who became, well, Steve Jobs. I’ve been thinking about setting up schools, free schools and the like and thought it might be an idea to do a mental exercise. If I had Steve Jobs on the phone, what would he recommend? Firstly, I suspect, trust the … Read More