Some people think that if people want to study a subject that doesn’t benefit anyone else, why should everyone else pay for it? However…
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Terry: dreading the bombardment of ill-informed views!
Twitter toxicity: Beware the ultracrepidarians - revisited
It all started with Brexit. At least, that’s when I first became aware of the preponderance of people who are more than happy to pontificate about, and lecture the rest of us on, a subject of which they have no expertise.
Read MoreAs the school's edtech lead, you need to be pernickety
All too often these days there is so much to be done, and so little time to do it, that we have to adopt a “good enough” attitude. That’s fine most of the time….
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Photo by Divyadarshi Acharya on Unsplash
Authentic Learning and Education Technology
To the casual listener, stride piano, boogie woogie piano and rock-n-roll piano all sound pretty much the same. Yet Fats Waller, perhaps the most famous stride pianist, detested boogie woogie. And nobody could deny the hint of menace in Long John Baldry’s voice as he sings his song....
Read MoreDon’t try to lay no boogie woogie on the king of rock-n-roll!
Terry teaching
Converting an online course to an offline one
Having run a couple of very successful courses online, I’d like to convert one of them to a course in a physical classroom, having launched it as an online course right from the outset.
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Zoom meeting, by Terry Freedman
Converting an offline course to an online one (Updated)
In 2019 I taught an introductory course on blogging, for adults. I was invited to teach it again. Then a small event called a pandemic intervened, so I was told that the course would be moved from a physical classroom to an online one. My reaction? Excellent.
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Review: Breaking the News Exhibition
As the British Library’s event, ‘Breaking the News’ exhibition demonstrates, fake news has been a feature of news reporting for at least 500 years.
Read More#Flashback Friday: Sexism in computer stores
In 1994 I set out with my wife to discover the best place to buy a computer system -- and discovered a lot of sexism along the way.
Read MoreA Single Comment on my School Report Turned my Life Around
A letter to one of my secondary school teachers.
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Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
What's your dream team?
One of your tasks, along with your new colleagues, is to recruit people to be in your team. What a wonderful feeling that must be!
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books to be reviewed by Terry Freedman
Navigating nonfiction books
One of the first things I look for when reviewing a non-fiction book is whether or not it contains an index. If it does, the next thing I check is whether the index is actually useful.
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Conference, by Terry Freedman
Upcoming events
The following events may be of interest to teachers.
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Photo by Honest Paws on Unsplash
Is honesty always the best policy?
Starting a new job as head of the Information Technology and Business Studies department in a school, I was filled with excitement, and a certain amount of anxiety — but not entirely for the usual reasons…
Read MoreThe state of Computing
Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education) has published its first report in ages into Computing as a subject. I've summarised the findings, and added some links and comments on my own in italics.
Read More#Flashback Friday: Review of The Long Tail
The “Long Tail" has been lauded and quoted at length. But what does the book actually say, and how does it stand up to scrutiny. In this lengthy review I give it a cautious "thumbs up".
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Books to be reviewed #3: Climate Change for Dummies
This is another book to be reviewed for Teach Secondary magazine.
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Follow the signs to a couple of new newsletters. Photo: Signpost pointing right, by Terry Freedman
New publications alert: If it don't fit...
After a year of weighing up the pros and cons I decided to start a couple of publications on Substack. One is about literature and life in general, and the other one is focused on education more generally
Read MoreReview of Tools for Teachers
My review of this book has just been published in Teach Secondary magazine. The review there is slightly different from the one I submitted, so I’ve included my original one here as text, and the Teach Secondary one as a scan.
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Printing press, by Terry Freedman
Introducing teachers to desktop publishing
When I started at a school where part of my role was to encourage other teachers to use the education technology facilities, one of the strategies I used was to produce fake news stories using the school’s desktop publishing software.
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Image by Tumisu, please consider ☕ Thank you! 🤗 from Pixabay
#FlashbackFriday: Lesson observation
A still-relevant article from a few years ago.
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