Steve Moss, who I know from his days as ICT leader in Manchester, apparently was steering schools away from the notion of building ICT suites in schools in his presentation at the Naace conference. Indeed, I know several schools (my wife's included) that are actively considering other uses for the s...

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Some of the best bits from the BETT show are always conversations you have with visitors. This year was no different and I'm going to highlight two resources I came across in my journey around the stands. Pepod What a simple and effective idea! Lots of video podcasts of children demonstrating PE ski...

I blogged this live on my mobile during the event as I figured everybody else would be twittering. So it's a bit rough around the edges. No Powerpoint, no Keynote, let the fun begin. Ian Usher is introducing the rules of unconference. John Davitt is getting rowdy - this will be an interesting experi...

Credit Crunch notwithstanding, 2008 saw two major personal highlights for me. The first was getting under seven hours for the UK 70.3 Ironman at Wimbleball; and the second was coming in under six hours for the Vitruvian. More pleasing in many ways was the fact that I trained much better for the year...

I was just finishing my breakfast (toast with my Dad's excellent homemade rhubarb and pink grapefruit jam - sounds weird, but works really well) when the phone rang. To my surprise it was the east midland tones of Doug Dickinson that cheerily greeted me. The conversation was fairly brief and to the ...

Yesterday I took part in a track taster session at the legendary Manchester Velodrome. It was an assorted bunch of triathletes, urban commuters and would-be Chris Hoys that walked down the somewhat surgical corridor to the changing rooms. The modern and strictly utilitarion interior of the Mancheste...

A few weeks ago I asked whether I should allow my year 6 classes to undertake independent research on Hitler. I was concerned that the independent nature of the task I had set them could lead them to unsavoury web content which they would be unable to evaluate for themselves. The problem was compou...

I'm at the Northern, a trendy backstreet bar in Manchester's Northern Quarter for the inaugural meeting of the Manchester Social Media Café, a group formed to discuss social media issues of the day. Unsurprisingly, for the first meeting, the topic is, "Is blogging dead?" There is a good crowd - at ...

Yesterday (30th October) the Manchester Evening News was carrying banner headlines about children accessing porn on school computers. My initial thought was, "Here we go again, yet another internet scare story involving schools." I just loved the article's opening sentence: "HUNDREDS of kids are loo...