One of my year 8 classes working on ePortfolio in Google Apps. Here they are showing one, two or three fingers to indicate to me how confident they are in the current learning activity. An idea I have learnt from our Maths department who deploy a similar AfL approach throughout the department.

This church is where I teach 10 year olds how to pass entrance exams. Maths, English & reasoning.

My view from the stage at #TMBETT2010. Great stuff.

Two days ago my Bosch washer/dryer smoked itself to death on it's final cycle. Nine years service to a family of five is a good life for an appliance. To celebrate we bought this hotpoint. Ugly but effective (hopefully) and a good price from our friendly plumber. This is it's first cycle.

Pat Kane @theplayethic on Twitter;

Talking at TeachMeet TedXOrenda about people (you, me, children) love to play. It's what we do when not addressing the need to survive. Good talk. See my TedX post for the transcript.

This is a better image of the open source software iTalc.

http://italc.sourceforge.net/

Youtube (not mine) of iTalc at work:

What is iTALC?

iTALC is a use- and powerful didactical tool for teachers. It lets you view and control other computers in your network in several ways. It supports Linux and Windows 2000/XP (Vista support will come) and it even can be used transparently in mixed environments!

In contrast to widely used commercial equivalent software, iTALC is free! This means you do not have to pay for expensive licenses or things like that. Furthermore the source-code is freely available and you're free in changing the software to fit your needs as long as you respect the terms of iTALC's license (GPL). Freedom in two ways!

We are experimenting with iTalc 1.0.9. It is a remote control software app that enables one computer to view and control many others. There are a few flaws (these might be because we run two domains and getting teacher PCs to talk to pupil PCs is complicated) but mainly it works very well. I have used ranger and netop before and it doesn't have the same power but it does the essentials for free.

My Year 9 class are an experimental class where I get to choose exactly what they do - therefore, I let them choose some things. At the moment they are trying blogging on for size. Some of them are like a duck to water, others a little shy. Subscribe to their blogs and say hello, or don't. They would love some comments because they're wondering what this is all for.......

http://rhavs.posterous.com/
http://keras.posterous.com/
http://ahopg.posterous.com/
http://tobes.posterous.com/
http://thekillers.posterous.com/
http://fudgalicious.posterous.com/
http://snowpunkfreestyler.posterous.com/
http://p1996.posterous.com/
http://becky1907.posterous.com/
http://titourockfun.posterous.com/

Didn't have a photo for yesterday so I am cheating. My phone has this shot on it from Christmas Eve in central London. This light structure repeated itself down this pedestrian street. It was spectacular.

Preparing for masters. Tuition on Wednesday. Article is Halliday (2002), Researching Values in Education.

Arguing values in research are inevitable and that we should find a better language to discuss the possible limitations intrinsic in research.

'There may be more appropriate vocabularies that at present with which to accept the contextuality and limitations of educational research without giving up on the idea that such research can be systematic and cumulative. It might then be possible to communicate more directly the hard core of educational research programmes.' Halliday (2002:61)

Not finding article very accessible but doing my best to crack a few new neurons. Or is it simply boring me stupid?