Author: admin

This is a little piece that I wrote for fun for a gifted and talented camp that I was on last week. Good fun. The great city of Setmorris was known far and wide for its wealth. Merchants used to say, if there was anything that you wanted, you would find it in Setmorris. Poets…

I was invited to do a whole day iPad training session at a school in Batehaven, which was pretty exciting for me. Liz and I have been talking for a couple of years about the possibility of moving south, getting away from Penrith and buying a place with a little bit of property. I know……

My thoughts about violence and war have been explored in this blog a number of times before; now is not the time to rehash those old arguments. Nor do I subscribe to the belief that I have to conform to my previously stated views in the present: I believe that we continue to grow an…

I’m teaching Junior (Year 7) Geography for the first time in a number of years this year, and I’m looking for a way to liven up the teaching – make it  more student-centered and allow opportunities for creative approaches. One of the topics that we look at is different biomes and ecosystems, and I was…

  Schools can be pretty focused places; it’s not surprising, really. Teaching in the modern age is very much driven by outcomes, standardised testing and measurement of student development. This can lead teachers to be really driven about what is happening at every minute – and I sometimes wonder whether this limits the opportunities for…

Sounds like the name of a post-modernist novel, doesn’t it? It’s not. Instead, it’s the way I sometimes feel whenever I go on holiday. I don’t go on many – for some reason, I don’t get around to it with the regularity of some of my friends, but when I do, they’re pretty big. Often,…

We came to San Diego along the railway line, having hugged the coast for more than 2 hours, each new vista bring a new sight: mountain bikers, RVs, even a few marine helicopters when we went past the base. And for the whole trip, so close that you could almost touch it, the Pacific Ocean…

I came to Los Angeles prepared to hate it. It was my first time in the city, but, as often happens with the great cities around the world, I felt like I had already been there. I’d seen a thousand films, a thousand news report, and none of it had impressed me that much –…

San Francisco – we fly into the airport in blinding sun, at a time when my body is telling me that it’s the middle of the night. It’s been a disrupted journey from the start – my flight was delayed for a day, meaning we missed out on the chance to go to Skywalker Ranch…

I’ve heard this one a lot since we became a 1:1 school. Let’s face it, one of the real strengths of the iPad (for kids, perhaps, not teachers) is that it is a great, portable way of playing games. There’s a reason the games category far outstrips the other categories in terms of apps and…