When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled “vocab”. At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan – the kids know the vocab, right?Continue Reading
ArchivesCategory: education
02AugSearching the web & information literacy
One of the big rubs in this brave new world of technology-assisted education is getting students to realise that not everything posted online is true. With young children, even getting them to realise that search engines don’t actually provide you with information – rather, they link to websites that do – is very difficult.Continue Reading
13JulThe impact of ICT: Facebook hits 200 million users
Thought I’d share my latest effort comparing Facebook users to populations, which I am well aware is like comparing apples with legwarmers, but a fun factlet nonetheless.Continue Reading
11JulDemystifying abstract terms
One of the problems with a subject like ICT is relating seemingly abstract terms. In a recent discussion about storage & computer memory, I found some of my Key Stage 3 students had little concept of the units of file size. After a little while we established that a kilobyte was bigger than a byte, a megabyte was bigger than a kilobyte, and a gigabyte was bigger than a megabyte, but that was about as far as it went.Continue Reading
09JunPupil speak level descriptors
The requests for ICT level descriptors in pupil speak continue to pile up on the TES forums, so I thought I’d make mine available for download. Personally, I think they make a lot of sense, and cover the array of ICT skills we ought to be covering in high schools very well, but at first glance seem inaccessible, particularly for assessing pupil progress.Continue Reading
07JunResources: lesson plan proforma & Bloom’s taxonomy for ICT
I posted these a while ago on Twitter, but I think they deserve a repost. During my training year, I saw lesson plans as a hurdle to jump before teaching a lesson, but over the course of this year I’ve come to appreciate the value of an in-depth lesson plan. I put together a new Continue Reading


