Special needs students and their teachers are the victims of a “muddled” approach to schooling, says Leicester Uni http://j.mp/qB5qcd Socioeconomic status as child dictates response to stress as adult according to University of Minnesota http://j.mp/qDZRZ8 Parents are forgetting how to play with their children, study shows – article from The Guardian last year http://j.mp/jdoiSR Teenage […]
Archive | Teens
RSS feed for this sectionApple promotes iPad for school
There’s a new TV ad from Apple extolling the potential of the iPad in classrooms. http://youtu.be/_5i1Dyj5k1A A few months ago Edudemic posted this list of 50 Innovative Ways to Use an iPad in School. What do you think? Does the iPad represent revolutionary technology for all teachers and students or simply another tool in the […]
Beach games
During the summer I went to North Wales with the youth group I help lead. While we were away, we played lots of games. Not high-tech, computer-based games but real-world, physical games. It was a timely reminder to me that play, even for teenagers, does not always depend on bits and bytes but can happily […]
Childhood articles
Some of the articles about children and childhood that I’ve seen in the last few weeks: Parents & preschool Wanted: More Playful Parents http://j.mp/mII7ph Supportive home learning experiences in the early years boost low-income children’s readiness for school. From NYU. http://j.mp/j3JmWs Parents prefer media content ratings system in national study led by Iowa State Uni […]
Social justice articles
Some of the articles about social justice that I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks: Not quite one person, one vote. Stanford paper on democratic discrepancies http://j.mp/kNIRg6 So much for digital democracy: New Berkeley study finds elite viewpoints dominate online contenthttp://j.mp/jaw6vm Prisoners give their time back to community in pioneering project http://tiny.cc/hu2d3 Death by […]
What is school for?
I was party to a fascinating discussion with colleagues from the RSA yesterday about the nature of education: asking the basic question – what’s the point of school? Catalysed by the change in UK government, there seems to be a battle between the idea of school being a place for ‘transferring a body of knowledge’ […]
A degree of value?
Today the UK parliament votes to triple fees to study for a higher education degree. Given the composition of the House of Commons, the outcome of the vote is largely predictable. The effect on future generations is less clear. When student tuition fees were introduced in 2006, Universities UK (UUK), the representative organisation for the […]
Social Media in Education (Part 3) – Learning
This is my last blog of the thoughts I shared at the recent Social Media in Education podcamp. In my previous two posts, I’ve suggested that educational initiatives using Facebook et al have often failed to appreciate user behaviour or offer any genuine social value to their audience. I end with the thought that for […]
Social Media in Education (Part 2) – Value
In my previous post, I suggested that for learning providers, simply having a presence on social media networks is not enough to engage students: not only are teens fabulously fickle, they are wary, resentful even, of authorities encroaching into their personal space: “Facebook is more a ‘personal’ thing and i don’t really want to get […]
Social Media in Education (Part 1)
I was fortunate to participate in the recent Social Media in Education podcamp at Doncaster College. In the midst of many people highlighting the benefits of social media, I speculated about the reasons so many initiatives from educational establishments fail to engage. Not to ridicule or condemn but to improve. This is about learning, after […]