Digby Court – Please Help
This was forwarded to me by a friend of Kate’s. I’ve signed up and if you could spare a moment to read the following, I hope you might too. Hello lovely friends I write to ask for your support for a cause that is very close to the Parkinson family’s heart. This email is a […]
Oxford, Chainsaws and Trampolines
I found out on Saturday that a friend of my mother’s is in hospital at the moment with numerous cracked ribs and a punctured lung. How she got there is, somehow, wonderfully “Oxford”. Her husband has been very ill and is now in a wheelchair. He felt that a tree needed pruning in their back […]
The Photocopier Challenge
Enjoying The Lazy Teachers’s Handbook at the moment. Love this idea – will try it in the New Year. “may I suggest something I like to call the Photocopier Challenge, an easy and straightforward way of finding out the extent to which you are wasting your own time, let alone letting others waste it for […]
Little Printer
Christmas next year … Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper. link: Little Printer | BERG Cloud
Time-lapse Earth
Meanwhile, in Milton Keynes …
Social Graphs & Communities
Very, very well put. The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on […]
Too much “Tuck that shirt in”
Interesting article in the Independent called The Politics of the School Uniform. While there are no legal requirements to have uniforms, a 2007 report by the Department for Education found that almost 98 per cent of schools chose to have one. Compared with much of the rest of Europe, where uniforms are relatively rare, we […]
Cashiers and Maths Prodigies
From Bounce: In 1896 Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, carried out a simple experiment to find out. He compared the performance of two calculating prodigies with cashiers from the Bon Marché department store in Paris. The cashiers had an average of fourteen years experience in the store but had showed no early gift for mathematics....
The Effects of School Are Overplayed
John Hattie’s book Visible Learning is a (dense) treasure trove of statistically backed educational research. He looks at 800 meta-analyses of school research and then analyses them for effect. The idea is essentially to try to come up with a way of measuring how much good various initiatives as compared to, say, a child’s...