Top blog posts from 2013

This has been the first year I have used a blog as a form of self reflective professional development, overall I have found the experience rewarding and a good way to build a portfolio of work and share it with other educators for feedback. I have also enjoyed writing about my thoughts on the future of education and where we are heading with things like web semantics and learning analytics. The most popular things I wrote about this year were;

1) Using Google calendar as a lesson planner

This was really great for my own productivity for the year, and along with integration with i-cal on

my phone I could access all dates and lesson plans at any time, I will change the method next year though - and have each class on a separate timetable and share the lesson plans with the students.

2) Overview of Google Drive Workflow #1

This is the original version of how I worked with Google drive, I have since modified the way I work through reflection and the updated post is here.

3) Using Google templates to improve workflow

This made a huge difference to my organisation over the year, as well as how the students completed the work.

Happy New Year!

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Learning analytics in secondary schools

What can be learnt from the challenges faced in the use of learning analytics in tertiary institutions, when considering its application in secondary education? photo by Frank Dabek I posed this question after reading several sources regarding the use of learning analytics in education. As a secondary school teacher I was interested in finding out if there was anything to be learnt about the application of analytics in tertiary setting , before it is embedded into secondary schooling. The NMC 2013 Horizon Report claims that within 2-3 years it will have developed beyond the 20% penetration point. After summarising sources I found common themes in the challenges faced when utilising learning analytics. Driving forces behind analytics Error correction and data override Collection of valuable data Ethics, morals and privacy I will evaluate the considerations of each challenge when applied in the secondary context to raise the achievement of learners and inform successfu

Motivation and homework follow up...

Last week I wrote about setting a homework challenge to learn muscles of the body as an online game - the students then had to post screen grabs on google+ to show they had done it and to be in contention for the hallowed prize of 'King of the Muscles' and a cafe voucher. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go, but by Thursday the buzz in all my senior classes was about ' poke-a-muscle '. The boys were so excited about it they'd post a score, and then find out that someone had beaten them, and then rush out of the class at interval to get to a computer and beat the top score. I even had an email on Saturday (two days after the due date) from two boys who had been practicing and spent the afternoon working together to try and beat the original high scores they had submitted with the homework!!!

Gamification of human anatomy

Poke-a-muscle and whack-a-bone are two really fun web apps that refresh understanding of human anatomy. I'm using them today in my lesson and getting the boys to screen grab their best score and post it to our Google+ community to encourage some healthy competition between the students. I finished the lesson off with a collaborative problem solving activity that I found on the TES website which asks the students to match up statements about functions of the skeleton !

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