Children being failed by progressive teaching, say Tories: "Generations of children have been let down by so-called progressive education policies which have taught skills and "empathy" instead of bodies of knowledge, the shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, said yesterday."

Maybe it's because it's the Guardian, but this opening paragraph sounds absurd IMHO. Make all-round humans or regurgitating robots?

Grove went on, "if you come from a poorer household where you don't have your own bedroom, where the only printed material is the Daily Star, then school is the only place you learn, and progressive methods let you down."

Sounds like a snob. I wonder if Michael Grove was Eton educated? A quick look around Google draws a blank. Though, I have a feeling that he was privately educated.

Schools minister Jim Knight claimed the Tories were "out of touch" with reality. "This artificial distinction between trendy teaching and learning dates, events and places bears no relation to what actually happens in today's classrooms," he said.
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 9/5/08; 8:26:40 AM to the Education news dept.
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Robots and humans

Stuart the Dep Head at Walsall Wood has dug into the email to the site structure. Five nice pages of 146 pictures of Dad's Day.

Powerful feature.


# Posted by Steve Hooker at 7/5/08; 1:35:44 PM to the Community dept.
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146 pictures in one sitting

Steve
Each time I have visited over the weekend it has been a revelation! I just wish I had found you a year ago!!!  

A FANTASTIC job and I am really looking forward to introducing the site to parents and pupils. I have decided that the way forward to start with is for me to get to know the site a little and then launch a school "Web club" then children will be able to get actively involved in the process. In the meantime, Gina and I will continue to post items.  

Once again many thanks. I look forward to a long and happy working relationship!

Woodside near The Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, had an IK site but found it too limiting. I took the bulk of what they did there and their prospectus and created this new editable, bloggable, manageable site. Just awaiting some bigger pictures of their good looking school to complete the design. Then, they're off... Into the blogging world :-) With me, as big brother, watching over them.
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 6/5/08; 8:11:21 AM to the Walsall Schools business dept.
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Happy new customer

Good parents 'should be rewarded': "What I would like to see is a benefits system that would reward parents for engaging with schools - that could be linked in some way to the benefits they get.

Perhaps parents who spent time reading to their children, going to school parents evenings or helping out in their school, could get higher payments."

Perhaps also, contributing to the school's website? This could be easily recorded and tracked...
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 4/5/08; 11:40:43 AM to the Psychology dept.
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Quality earning

Playgroups 'cut leukaemia risk': "Children who attend daycare or playgroups cut their risk of the most common type of childhood leukaemia by around 30%, a study estimates."

Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
Just because I eat worms

Short fat hairy ones
Long tall skinny ones
See how the little ones squirm

Bite all their heads off
Suck all the juice out
Throw the empty skins away.

It's the reverse of what you'd think. "Protect your children from coughs and sneezes..." It's wrong.

I sent my two to nursery. There, they caught some weird infections... Who'd heard of slapped cheek disease?  However, Brad, caught RSV, which is like a very bad cold, or flu in very young children. Blue lips and a dash to the hospital panicked me. All this made me feel awful for having to work, having to send them to nursery. Now... I can feel righteous. Oh dear :-)
Next, it tomatoes, tomatoes, everywhere! Oh dear--again :-(
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 29/4/08; 4:39:32 PM to the Psychology dept.
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Just 'cos we eat worms

Boys 'might do better in single-sex classes': "boys would benefit at all ages from being taught English in English schools with as small a proportion of girls as possible."

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 28/4/08; 9:49:08 AM to the Psychology dept.
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Less girls, better boys

Sorry! We were off line for 5 hours, from 5.15 till 10.15pm. It was the connection, not us.
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/4/08; 10:51:08 PM to the Walsall Schools business dept.
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Oops! Outage

Teacher strike shuts out 1m children: "At least a million children at 8,000 schools will be barred from lessons today as striking teachers trigger acute shortages across the country.

Headteachers and teaching assistants have been drafted in to take the place of striking colleagues after school authorities failed to avert widespread school closures. A third of schools will be turning some pupils away and one in six will close entirely."

Think I'll go out and take the dog for a walk.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 24/4/08; 10:01:14 AM to the Education news dept.
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Going to be quiet here today?

BBC: Strike to disrupt 6,000 schools: "Warnings to parents from 88 local authorities - half of the total - show that 28% of schools are expected to face disruption.

The one-day pay strike is being staged on Thursday by members of the National Union of Teachers."

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 23/4/08; 9:21:48 AM to the Education news dept.
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Strike to disrupt 6,000 schools

Homework for primary schoolchildren 'is complete waste of time', claims study "Researchers struggled to find a link between how well the children do in national tests and the amount of extra tasks they are set.

It is thought that young pupils tire too quickly, do not have the skills to study effectively, and are too easily distracted.

This is in contrast to secondary school students, who perform better academically if they regularly do homework."

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 19/4/08; 9:55:04 AM to the Education news dept.
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No more homework anymore

Where is everybody? These Easter holidays have been strange. Our local schools started on Easter weekend, others will be back next Monday... That's 4 weeks of holidays.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 17/4/08; 1:56:27 PM to the Community dept.
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Double holidays?

As usual, I'll still be here, in a darkened room, staring at a computer screen. So, if you want to tinker with your website while everybody else is collecting Easter eggs from snow bound hiding places, you can still call me, or email or text, or just update your site, knowing 'big brother' is still watching you.

Here's an email thread between me and a Head which made me think that not everybody realises that I'm here all the time:

Headteacher wrote:
Hi Steve
How are you?
Are you working over the Easter holidays at all? I intend to spend some time on the website and may need help if you are working. I wanted to add a page to the site structure entitled ECO News and another entitled assemblies and worship. I would then post photographs of such events to those pages. I may need a reminder of how to post something to a page other than the home page.

Hi Helen,
Sure, I'll be stuck inside as usual during your holidays :-)
Welcome to call me, as usual :-)

You may want to think of creating a category/folder/directory for these. Thus, you may have more pages inside worship. In this case you could email lots of photographs to a page inside worship. Something like:
/worship/goodSinging
/worship/easter2008
/worship/harvestFestival2008
And so on.

I think this would be better for you, in the longer run. As usual, you'd merely email stuff in the rest would be handled automatically.
Your email subject line may read at its most minimum (it could get more interesting):

Good singing [news item story] [[[worship]]]

You may want to add [pending] to the subject line, so that the associated news item is held in the pending area.
You may want to add [[Notices Head's Letters]] or some other department so as to categorise the associated news item into a department (or you can edit it, later).
Also add [nc] for no captions.
And [h149] to the very front of your subject line (all size info has to go at the front) so as to make all the portraits the same size as the landscapes. Just makes for a neater look.

Of course, as is usual, if you're unsure, nervous or confused, call me :-)
Steve
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 20/3/08; 12:51:38 PM to the Community dept.
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During your holidays

[Background:] I've been watching the updates come in today. At last, Matt at Croft Community in Walsall is emailing stuff into the site. He had been uploading pictures one-by-one, which was much faster than writing HTML and FTPing.
I guess, he thought it couldn't get much faster, which is why after nearly 2½ years he's finally begun emailing stuff...
 
I suggested that he may also send stuff deeper into the site, if he needed to. He replied...

Matthew Prosser wrote:
I on a bit of a mission today. Have staff emailing stuff to me and then I forward it onto the website. The kids are really getting to the teachers so I gathered the more I mail, the more the kids will moan and then the more news items I will get sent and the website will be busy. Or something like that. I will have a look at emailing into site structure.
Many thanks
Matt

Steve Hooker replied:
Perfect! If they're emailing you. Why don't they email the site!
This has been my cunning plan all along, and they fell for it. Mmmmhaawww!
Now, you don't have to be the one and only. They too can be updating the site, even Mr Dickenson [the Head] :-))))

Share the fun :-)
And the glory.

You'll need to add them as editors and add their email address to the authorised senders list.

And then you're away. Can you imagine their faces when you tell them to, "update the bloody site yourself." Mmmmhaawww!

Or, don't tell them, just tell them to email this address instead of that address. While you put your feet up, drink tea in the computer room reading 'men's magazines.' Mmmmhaawww!

Steve

[My own joke:] I liked the idea of Matt sitting back while the rest thought he was working hard. Later, Matt replied...

Matthew Prosser wrote:
They are all interested in posting stuff but I like to add detail and check. Some people have strange ideas about what makes a good post so when they send it at 11 o'clock at night and I don't spot it till the morning and have to remove it knowing our Pakistan audience have seen it—it's too late. I just like control I guess because it will be me who gets moaned at.

I had one the other day about someone trying a sausage–not a good thing to put on our website with the children we have here.

Matt

Steve Hooker replied:
Oh. So you're like the twins and the ticker machine in Good Morning Vietnam.

I suppose it's a simple task to edit and forward. Just so long as it's easy for you—that's my mission :-)

Steve
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 18/3/08; 10:15:24 AM to the Community dept.
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Laughing at my own jokes

I love it when we get so many updates in one day—last Friday. It should have been ten, but one school created several news items then left them hanging in the pending news items. When you update and children have finished reading your site, they love to travel onto other schools to see what's been happening there. At least this is what I've learned from anecdotal evidence from schools and the information I see from the stats. When I was a kid I had no idea what went on at other schools. I barely even registered that there were other schools outside of my universe. I know my daughter, 9 years old, loves to see what's been happening in other schools. She's fascinated. Though I remove the little 'recently updayed' widget from some schools' website when requested—particularly secondary schools, I'll always, always agrue the case for it to stay. It's good to be in a community. Sure, the school is it's own little community, but also, it's in the wider community of schools around it. Here, on the web those nearby schools maybe in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales or England and the distance adds an extra level of exoticism. I've always hoped that schools would mingle. That one school's pupils would post comments on another, for friendships to be made. It hasn't happened yet, though there is competitiveness to stay in the list of recently updated, to not drop out. But this comes from the people who manage the sites: the Heads, the ICTs, the secretaries. I love being in the middle of all this, but I would like more cross posting, more help, more acknowledgement passed from one school to another. So, if you do go to another school, just post a comment somewhere to say you've been, you've read, you've liked and you're thankful and you're from 'such-and-such' school. It'll make a lot of difference, I know!

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 17/3/08; 9:34:57 AM to the Community dept.
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Other schools have news too

The answer was right there in front of me and I never saw it. I've been wearing sandals without socks for so long and I have, at times, been vaguely aware of my feet being cold. (Only joking!)

I know, I shouldn't have linked to socks, sandals and dudes here—I don't think it's some kind of porn, I hope it isn't. Nor a new fashion. But this was so jarring, so bone rattling shocking, I needed, really needed to tell the world.

There's just no cool way to make your feet look like ninja turtle feet.

Never, ever do it!

P - leeaeeze!
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 13/3/08; 11:59:05 AM to the Off topic dept.
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Socks, sandals, dudes

Batch convert PNG to JPG: "This is a command line script to convert all .PNG-files to JPG. We will show you how to convert .png-files by right clicking on a folder. All the png-images will then be converted to jpg and saved in a sub folder (named ´jpg)"

I had this one my Apple Mac... Needed it on a PC and instead of paying £25 for some software I followed the instructions and it worked perfectly. Just adding this here for others who may need it and for me to find again easily later.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 13/3/08; 11:34:51 AM to the How tos dept.
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Convert PNG to JPG

Religious state schools accused of fuelling social segregation: "Anne West of the London School of Economics told MPs, "where schools are responsible for their own admissions ... Some are likely to use whatever means they can to select their own intake." Some schools were circumventing the rules by "renaming" interviews as "admissions meetings".

Church leaders addressing the same committee challenged the findings and hit back at claims by MPs that faith schools "are adept" at keeping out children from low income families and those with special educational needs."

Research by Rebecca Allen, from the Institute of Education, submitted to the Commons education committee yesterday suggests that schools which used six or more "potentially selective" criteria admitted over 50% more pupils in the top quarter of the ability distribution in Key Stage 2 tests than they would if they recruited a locally representative intake. They also admitted half the number of pupils on free school meals than a locally recruited representative intake.The criteria the researchers are concerned about include vetting siblings' academic achievement, assessing family connections, religious criteria and interviewing pupils.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 13/3/08; 10:31:44 AM to the Education news dept.
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Only the best will do

As it says in our FAQs: "We now have sites in 19 LAs: Conwy, County Londonderry, County Tyrone, Coventry, Denbighshire, Doncaster, Havering (Essex), Leeds, Lincoln, Northampton, Morayshire, Powys, Staffordshire, Stockport, Suffolk, Tameside, Walsall, Warwickshire and Worcestershire."

That's England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Bonus link. Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 12/3/08; 12:16:01 PM to the Walsall Schools business dept.
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N n n n nineteen LAs

I send emails to schools, legally. I've built up a list from many places, some, from a school's own website. I think it wrong that they publish email addresses publicly on websites, other spambots take advantage, I should too.

Many schools block my mail, many LAs block my mail wholesale. Many people never open my mails, they either delete it before opening, or that mail box is never checked, because it's full of spam. But some finally get there.

I've learnt that Liverpool block my mails if I use my surname (Hooker). I've learnt that many LAs won't allow links. Or, won't allow HTML emails or pictures embedded or linked to.

Some schools are insulted by my mails. Rather some one is insulted. This can be the web designer, insulted that teachers and me can do a much better job. A Head, because I'm right when I say their school's site sucks, even though I've never seen it—just guessing. An ITC because they've a fantastic website, but they do it all themselves, leaving the children and the rest of the staff to wonder when they can have a go?

Of course, I make mistakes in my mails. I should never have said 'nervous secretaries' in the last mail. I should have written the 'after the demo' email better. I should not have said. 'nur nur nu nur nur' in one email last year. Some people get irritated by my mails. I guess they read all of them.  Email me back the code and for sure, I'll unsubscribe you.

For a few months, many years ago, I sold cable door-to-door. I was taught, in training, that you never know what's going on behind that door, but as you knock, you're about to find out. Smile nicely, and hope they smile back. They could be having an argument, be in a bad temper because of their boss... At that moment, you knock the door. Or, these days, they open your email...

Some, only read one mail. They like what I'm saying and respond, usually with questions. Usually, they're considering a new website and add me to the list of potential suppliers.

This time, I'm sending a bunch of nice things users have said about this service. Hopefully, there's nothing in there that will insult, irritate or annoy.

Occasionally, I do send slices of dead trees with stamps on to some schools. Though it seems ritualistic, witch-doctory. And it costs a packet! Were I ever to stop sending emails, I'd have to triple the cost of my websites as the cost of gaining a new customer would rise astronomically. And the number of dead trees sent to land fills... Shudder. I don't want to send 30,000 glossy brochures out to 30,000 UK schools.
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 12/3/08; 10:13:59 AM to the Walsall Schools business dept.
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Email marketing

An Irish council estate reply to Guinness's "laboured, unoriginal retread, completely spoiled by over-editing and with all the rustic authenticity of a Stella Artois commercial." You know the one.

I'm not going to embed it because it's a little too gritty, though still work safe.
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 12/3/08; 8:37:03 AM to the Off topic dept.
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Gritty Guinness

Fewer pupils offered preferred school place: "Abuses included schools asking parents to commit to making financial contributions [of many hundreds of pounds per term] as a condition of admission, asking [banned questions] about the marital, occupational or financial status of parents, and ignoring the priority for admission that schools are legally obliged to give to looked after children.

Other cases uncovered included schools giving priority of places to family members who are not siblings and interviewing children before making an admissions decision."

Shock over schools 'breaking law': "The general secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, Chris Keates, added: "It is also likely, and entirely understandable, that parents of pupils past and present at these schools may seek legal redress to recover monies inappropriately taken from them.""

Ministers in a mess as schools flout admission rules: From the public comments:"Count the schools where the uniform is available only from one shop, and where it is `preferred' that sports gear is embroidered with the child's name, so removing at a stroke any second-hand value or even the ability to pass it to siblings."

What's happening? I'm horrified at what sharp elbowed parents will do, or have to do. Anything to keep the oiks out?

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 11/3/08; 5:03:42 PM to the Education news dept.
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Ed Balls used the word 'horrified'

I've received some feedback from yesterday's post: inspection evidence. It seems like there are boxes around after all.

Please note! Take pictures of your work, do not spend a whole bunch of time scanning. Pick a nice flat, well lit area and snap away.

I was asked where to store the virtual boxes. I replied: there's two places...

As a department
You could create a new department, just for that box. Say, art, which takes up lots of space as a box. Then, email into that department all your art works. Categorise them as you see fit. Perhaps by date, perhaps by class, perhaps by topic. Use the subject line, which become the title and the body of the email which becomes the body of the news item. As usual, change the file names to captions.

The disadvantage is that it will appear on the front page as well. IMHO, this is not a disadvantage, everything should go on the front page. And you can only see the last 30 items, without delving into the archives. (I could fix this.)

As a folder
As above, but this time it doesn't or need not appear on your front page. It becomes a page deep into your site structure. (At the same time a news item is created and links to the page, thus you can point to the new page which would otherwise be lost and unvisited in your site structure.)
Glendale do this already.

Downside is that the pages are categorised according to when you posted them. Newest at bottom, though you can change this through Editors only:==>Prefs==>Advanced==>Site Structure. And, over several years, you will need to tidy this up, manually. Which isn't really a biggy.

I'm guessing / thinking that the folder option would be the better solution. In this way you can whack all your old stores of boxes into the site. Certainly, they don't need to go onto the front page if they've got whiskers on.

You could email them into a folder called:
/art2006/autumn
/art2009/spring

/artAutumn2006/class1
/artAutumn2006/class2

/artAutumn2006Class1/patterns
/artAutumn2006Class1/shapes

Your subject line may, then, look like this:
[h149] Shapes [news story] [pending] [[Subject Art]] [[[artAutumn2006Class1]]] [nc]
Review the how to for a detailed explanation of the above. In a nutshell, you're saying: keep all the images to a height of 149 pixels so I don't have portraits and landscapes looking odd. The page name will be shapes, I want a news item and a story page and for the news item (a short, one liner) to be in the art department. Put the story into the folder artAutumn2006Class1. Oh! And don't add any captions.

(It doesn't matter which order you put all these switches. But you should make post-it notes or even stationary in Outlook, if you're going to be doing lots of them.)

With the site structure, it's fairly easy to re-jiggle all your folders and pages at a later date. Doing such will take only a minute. You may for instance re-jiggle everything into:
/art/evidence/2006/autumn/class1/shapes

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 11/3/08; 9:23:01 AM to the Community dept.
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Follow up: inspection evidence

Homophobic abuse endemic in schools, says teacher survey: "The word "gay" was reported to be the most frequently used term to put someone down, followed by "bitch" and "slag".

Half of teachers have also witnessed gossiping or the spreading of rumours about other pupils' sexuality."

I don't get this 'big news.' It's old hat. Change the name and it's all the same as 30 years ago. I bet you change the name again and it would have been the same 60 years ago.

[Disclosure:] I went to an all boys grammar school in the South Wales Valleys.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 11/3/08; 8:34:24 AM to the Education news dept.
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It was 'homo' in my day

Sussex University Gets A Second Life: "Every user creates a virtual version of themselves, called an avatar, which they can transport to different locations, including the Sussex campus.

Once they have arrived, they can fly around the university's main square to visit the library, attend online seminars, call into the students' union or the Meeting House or just admire the campus views."

This is interesting, for the future. I've never been to Second Life, plan never to go. There's a learning curve, which I don't want to downtime on.

However, the idea behind this is cool. Certainly, it's a VLE, potentially, on steroids.

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 10/3/08; 7:27:13 PM to the Education news dept.
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Virtual worlds, virtual education

Union calls for homework to be scrapped: "Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) general secretary, Mary Bousted: "Middle-class children can go home and get help with their homework; disadvantaged children can't and then they get in trouble," she added. "I think it sets up a cycle of resistance to school because they don't have access to the cultural and emotional and learning support which middle-class children can get.""

# Posted by Steve Hooker at 10/3/08; 7:09:38 PM to the Education news dept.
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No more homework anymore

Talking with