My Resources
Basic Bread Tutorial
Sometimes I like to take a break from teaching and digital technology. Using 4-5 simple ingredients (flour, water, yeast, salt and (optionally) oil), and this tutorial, you can bake a simple, but very satisfying, loaf:
Simple Scratch Game
In this post you'll learn how to build a simple game using Scratch, the block-based programming language designed for learning to code. The instructions are not 100% complete, so you'll need to solve problems yourself, as they arise.Baking Bread
In last year’s End of Year Assessment (which I did not write about, but you can get a sense of it from the prior year’s) students asked for more curriculum surprises. One them related with obvious relish the tale of the (very random) occasion …
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Apple MagSafe vs MagSafe2 vs USB-C Chargers
At my school, we loan students Apple laptop chargers fairly regularly. Usually, the loan process takes longer than it needs to, because we need to find out what kind of chargers students have. Turns out, few of them know the chargers by their official Apple nomenclature: MagSafe, MagSafe2 and USB-C. The poster below aims to help educate and remind students what they have:
Classroom Graffiti Art
A few years ago I started to think of ways to make my classroom more aesthetically pleasing. A large space, with dark blue walls but plenty of natural light, I felt it could be made more welcoming and interesting. Having recently seen a film on …
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Producers & Consumers
For a long time I have struggled to convey my passion for free and open culture (via open source software and Creative Commons) to my students. They live in a context which often promotes (or at least accepts) piracy, and most of their cultural …
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Visual Assessment Guide v2
The Visual Assessment Guide continues to evolve alongside my school's requirements for assessment and reporting. v2 adds some new terms, uses a simpler scale in terms of levels and fixes a bugs with highlighting individual terms. In using this with students I am now opening it in Apple's Preview, and using its built in highlighter to colour terms according to student achievement: green, yellow or red. This ties in with my school's Common Formative Assessment reporting, which uses the terms Secure, Secure In Parts and Not Yet Secure to describe student learning.
The Wall Of (Internet) Culture
Over the past year I have been building up a wall in my classroom with a range of Internet inspired cultural artifacts. The aim is to present interesting, thought provoking ideas in a humorous way, using a graphical language that my students are familiar with and respond to (e.g. Internet memes). Although I never promote the site directly to my students, many of the materials are from 9gag.com, which though crude and inappropriate at times, nonetheless provides a wealth of cultural learning opportunities for teachers. Want to understand your students, what interests them, what they are talking about? 9gag is a great place to start.
Click on the image below to see a really large version, allowing you to enjoy the wall in some of its glory.
The result is that, unlike my more traditional boards, students really do stop and look at this one. Often this happens in pairs, and a discussion breaks out as they try and work out a joke or decide if something is serious or not. This might be called teaching by stealth.
Emoji Story
I am starting to wonder how emoji (expressive characters) might affect the way students learn to communicate. As an experiment, I am going to ask my Year 7 students to produce an "Emoji Story", using the instructions below: 
I imagine that they will copy and paste emoji into a slideshow, and when they present, they will talk through the slideshow, narrating their story. The slideshow can then be read by others without narration, to see how differently it can be interpreted.
I imagine that they will copy and paste emoji into a slideshow, and when they present, they will talk through the slideshow, narrating their story. The slideshow can then be read by others without narration, to see how differently it can be interpreted.