Today I went to a food bank

Today is my last day of maternity leave, and I am really looking forward to being back at work. I have joked on Twitter about spending a large proportion of my maternity leave in supermarkets, but it is in fact not really such a joke. I have spent approximately 85% of my maternity leave so far

Writing programming workshop resources

I write a lot of educational resources, so I thought it might be useful to share some tips for things I’ve learnt over the years. I’m hoping that these tips will be particularly helpful for those people in the wider community who volunteer to give up a lot of their time to run workshops for

Computing – A beautiful dream

I didn’t believe the hype on the news about bad teachers. I mean, nobody I worked with was rubbish at their job so I put it down to teacher bashing media nonsense and got on with my life. I was happy to share my resources here and on CAS and to help people who asked for my help,

Computing – Pitfalls of a new subject

I read a really good article the other day which compared learning to program to leaning to read and write in the middle ages. It goes on to give two good criticisms of the accessibility of programming to students. Firstly, setting up and choosing your language and environment is a lengthy and difficult process. For the most

Hands up who likes PHP?

(Clarification: I’m a UK high school teacher. “School” in this post means high school, not university and “IT Professionals” is the term used to distinguish those who are not teachers on the forum in question.) On the miffed-off-ometer, I’d have to say that I’m getting quite close to a 9 with some of the CS

I’m a Excelebrity, get me out of here!

Yes, I actually did it.  Twas the night before Year 10 IT class and all through the house, All the teachers* were starting to whine and to grouse. “It’s spreadsheets”, I grumbled – I taught them with care But the knowledge and recall, it just isn’t there! The students were nestled all snug in their

HEY! Self promotion online

I have to say it, I’m a flawed human being. As various people know, particularly Neil Brown, Alan O’Donohoe and Reena Pau who have been on the end of some of my grumbling, a lot of my motivation for new projects comes from the potential to have a positive impact on others. Since I started

Is the word “geek” offensive?

Yesterday morning I had an interesting tweet conversation with @ianskenny about the word “geek” after I had mentioned @mcrgirlgeeks in a previous tweet. His opinion is as follows: I find the word ‘geek’ particularly unhelpful…   because I believe it’s an ‘excluding’ word that doesn’t attract modern young girls, or boys. It’s used pejoratively…  

Are you doing your job properly?

Whilst I have been away collecting in all of my coursework and writing endless reams of reports, I have still been keeping a keen eye on what my Twitter colleagues are up to. It never ceases to amaze me how other teachers can manage to go on so many courses and conferences, write articles, or

Social networking and the demise of friendship

When I grew up, from the point my parents actually bought a Windows computer with a modem (I had previously been using an Amstrad PCW8512…ahhh), THE thing to be seen on was MSN messenger. The little person icon in your Windows 98 tray, bringing you the possibility of talking to your friends without having to