Brian's Blog

  The Potential of Personal! In the evolving landscape of education, the concept of personalised learning has gained considerable attention. This pedagogical approach tailors the learning experience to cater to the unique needs, interests, and strengths of individual students. With its origin deeply grounded in academic research, personalised learning holds the opportunity to transform the classroom into a dynamic environment that fosters engagement, motivation, and deep understanding supporting the student to flourish academically, socially and emotionally. Academic Backing for Personalised Learning Research consistently highlights the advantages of personalised learning in the primary classroom. According to Black and Wiliam (2010), students thrive when their educational experience aligns with their personal interests and preferences. Hattie (2012) emphasises that by catering to learners' needs and strengths, educators can improve students' academic performance and confidence...

This is my interview with Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher discussing ways we can create opportunities for students to make connections globally with each other to leave a lasting impact.

Sitting travelling at 307km an hour travelling from Beijing to Suzhou for 5 hours with a group of 80 gives me time to reflect on some of the engineering, architectural, fashion and acrobatic feats of China. This trip our group have been give the privilege of walking on the Great Wall, cruising through the canals of Suzhou and riding on the high speed train. What I have noticed is all of these engineering marvels were completed with amazing efficiency, are structurally sound and have aesthetic appeal. Our tour guides said this is because of the time taken to plan and execute, taking into consideration the natural beauty of the region and working with it. They suggested the public only sees the rate in which something is built; however, highlighted that it took long term vision to create something that was radically new for their culture. This idea resounds with me! As educational change agents and leaders we need to see the budding talent encompassed within our students and s...

Reflections from Day 1 of the Google for Education Innovation Academy.

Do you remember the moment that you decided teaching was your career? Some of us maybe still searching for that moment! For me, it was in Year 6, as we did the time honoured “light” unit of work. My teacher was eccentric but in one moment helped to define the direction of my professional life. Wrapped in his white lab coat and armed with 4 D-cell batteries, alligator clips, a jar and one of my pacer leads, he made magic happen! "Let there be light!" In that moment he captivated all of us with awe. I cannot remember the exact details of what he was teaching but I remember the experience of seeing the light illuminate from the bottle. There is a constant tension between what we need to teach and what we as professionals know our students need to know to apply this understanding. Frequently, these two don’t perfectly match and as a result, there is a tension. Teachers often try to find the links to draw correlations between the two but an essential and oft...

This post is the second part of a series that I have been working on to identify what  does a post-industrial class look like? In my previous post , I looked at using video, collaborative discussion, grouping and student-centred learning. Why a large display and one to one? The large electronic display is used as it offers many benefits to a given lesson; these include demonstration and modelling as the teacher could showcase the application or video from the board (Moss, et al, 2007). It is easy to show the important features of particular web-based activities and have students interact with the material on their own devices. The board can accommodate different learning styles (Herrington & Harrington, 2006). Interactive boards can help tactile learners by touching and marking the board. Audio learners can have the class discussion and auditory multimedia, visual learners can see what is taking place as it develops at the board and it offers multimodal learni...