January 5, 2017
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Comments Off on Keeping the Dream Alive
I was asked to write a response to Tom Bennett’s comment piece in the TES about how he thought that the use of computer games such as Minecraft in Education was ‘gimmicky‘. My response was written in early December 2016 however it was published in the TESS today. Here is the unedited version: My Christmas playlist will […] Continue reading
November 11, 2016
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Comments Off on Comment on the draft Technologies Es & Os (ICT)
Unfortunately, due to work commitments I can’t make it to any of the Technologies Es & Os days that our colleagues from Education Scotland are holding. In an attempt to contribute to this ongoing work I offer my observations/comments about the draft CfE Technologies Es & Os -with a focus on the ICT aspect of […] Continue reading
September 30, 2016
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Comments Off on Arcade Fire, Deserted Islands and Chrome Experiments
I teach on a 3rd year module on the teacher education programme at the University of Dundee. Entitled, Developing Effective Teaching and Learning, it aims to explore how learning can go beyond subject boundaries and in doing so make rich, cohesive, purposeful and relevant links between and across the subject areas. There is a focus […] Continue reading
June 22, 2016
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Comments Off on The Shape Detective says Teacher Education is Good
In the not so distant past, I, as a fresh faced teacher education student was introduced to the idea of context creation as a way to create a framework that could make learning accessible, relevant exciting and purposeful. At that time there were two documents that were being used to articulate the thinking behind context creation […] Continue reading
February 14, 2016
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Comments Off on If Vygotsky played Minecraft
A post from my first ever blog hotmilkydrink.typepad.com from August 2014. Content of which I think is still very much of interest for prospective teachers: Last week my daughters were playing with their friends. As a group they were all working together to make a movie and their efforts were industrious, noisy and committed. I listened in on […] Continue reading
February 12, 2016
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Comments Off on Eportfolio: what happens when you change the platform and change the culture?
In late 2013 I returned to work at the University of Dundee as a lecturer on the MA (Hons) & PGDE(P) teacher education courses having spent seven years working at National level with Learning Teaching Scotland/Education Scotland. One of the first tasks that I was faced with on my return was to hold individual tutorial […] Continue reading
September 8, 2015
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Comments Off on Is video freeing us to learn in the way we are meant to?
As part of our efforts to embed purposeful opportunities to explore and develop digital literacy skills in the on-going professional experiences of our MA students at Dundee University we have introduced the eportfolio via a WordPress blog. I talked about this in an earlier post however what I have done since is create and publish […] Continue reading
July 7, 2015
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Comments Off on Working with Minecraft
Some years ago I became aware of a new game that was virally spreading via the digital jungle drums of our young people – that game was called Minecraft. I had noted that it was creeping through on my Twitter feed quite a lot and when I chatted with my friends’ 12 yr old son […] Continue reading
July 1, 2015
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Comments Off on Glow blogs syndication and a new eportfolio
Today I spent some time with John Johnston from Education Scotland (ES) looking at how we can use the syndication feature of WordPress in Glow Blogs to help set up a central sharing hub that would pull in the posts from our MA students new eportfolios. My motivations for this partnership approach with my colleague […] Continue reading
