Chris Betcher

There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace "21st Century skills". Of course, there's a lot of discussion about what these "21st Century skills" actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today's learners know in order to function in the "21st Century". I'm sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things. Instead, here is a list of simple, easily-learnable skills that I think would make life as a teacher in the 21st Century simpler and much more productive. While they're not exactly earth-shatteringly profound in terms of the big issues of education, they are greatly useful skills to have... and in my experience they are also skills that all too few teachers seem to actually possess. I find that posse...

UK blogger Terry Freedman wrote a great post on the TechLearning blog called " Oh Sir, you are too kind ". He actually wrote it a while ago now (Sept 07) but I only just stumbled across it... I guess that's one of the great things about blogs, the way they can capture someone's thoughts at a particular point in time and make them available to anyone, even people who stumble across them much later. Terry's basic premise is to ask why we keep putting up with teachers who can't or won't get to grips with ICT in their teaching. He seems to think that it's time to tell teachers that ICT is an important component of being a teacher and that if you can't, won't or don't get yourself up to speed with technology and how it should be used to integrate with student learning then it may be time to find another job. And he suggests that we are being way too nice about accepting this sort of thing, and allowing the laggards to get away with it. He...

I'm running a course for our school staff at the moment called 23 Things. I borrowed the idea from the very successful 23 Things program run by the San Jose library, but have adapted it slightly for our particular school situation. Essentially, the teachers work their way through 23 separate tasks, some as simple as reading a blog post or watching an online video tutorial, while some are a little more complicated such as setting up their own blog, feedreader and delicious accounts. The course runs over 9 weeks in total, and each week they are asked to do 3 or 4 "Things" - 23 in total - that will expose them to a wide range of Web 2.0 tools and ideas by the time it's over. I'm running the course internally using our school Moodle, and have set it up in such a way that people must sign up for the course and work their way through it a week at a time.  I thought it sounded like a good idea, and  so did they it seems... 14 teachers signed up for the course very soo...