Staff and students are expected to be fully conversant with school email. Not only do users need to check their email regularly enough so that they don’t miss important announcements but they also have to understand and apply the complex landscape of netiquette, respond to emails quickly (and politely) and action any instructions that they receive. Being on top of your email inbox has never been so important in schools. So why, whenever I help a member of staff or a student, do they have an email account that is bursting at the seams with often more than 1000 emails in their inbox? It seems that how email is managed in schools is, well, often not managed well.
The following list of 9 top-tips could make your use of school email even easier, more efficient and slightly less stressful. The following never gets taught to email users. Why? I’ve no idea as my suggestions are key to ensuring that school email users are getting the most from this core communication tool.Read more…
Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours putting up displays in classrooms and corridors. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually seen anyone stop, read, and enjoy the content on any of my boards. I’ve also grown weary of that pesky small tear that inevitably appears in the bottom corner of my boards, which rapidly spreads like a crack in a car windscreen, due to students picking at it or the careless brushing of chairs and schoolbags against it. I’ve tried so hard to get a ‘wow-factor’ display every time but I fear that boards are so ubiquitous, they are lost among all of the other classroom and corridor display board offerings. If I were to be really cynical, I’d say that display boards are not for the students at all but to merely make schools look attractive for Governors, prospective parents and alumni. Whatever the reason, it’s time to upgrade those 2D display boards and bring them to life with Augmented Reality!
Pokemon Go is everywhere. It’s been in the news, discussed and dissected in blogs, highlighted as an e-Safety concern for children, 
During the 2016 Rio Olympics, the BBC are broadcasting a number of events, live, in 360° Virtual Reality. Fancy a front row seat at the Olympics? Want to immerse yourself in the fun and excitement of sitting with the crowd? Interested in testing a new way of experiencing sport? If your answer is “yes!” to any of these questions, join me this summer while I test this service during the Olympics. I’ll report my findings on this blog later in the summer. If you are interested in this experimental Olympic Virtual Reality service you’ll need some equipment…
If you’re a teacher then I suspect that you will have asked your students, at one time or another, to watch a video on YouTube. We all know it’s a great place for resources but using it for homework tasks comes with problems. How can you prove that a student has actually watched the video you’ve set? How do you know that they carefully watched the video and didn’t just give it a minimal amount of attention? Or, worse, they just pressed play and then walked away (or got distracted by other more interesting looking videos?). There’s never been a way to ensure that the video you have set as homework is given just as much focus as some traditional paper based homework task. I’m pretty certain students love it when teachers set them a ‘watch a video’ task as part of their homework. No writing, no test and an sanctioned opportunity to get online (where so much procrastination can take place!). Watching a video often doesn’t seem like ‘real’ homework to students as it’s too easy to complete and similar to their normal online activity. Parents may also object to the ‘watch a YouTube video’ as homework. To them, it may not seem as academically rigorous as researching or reading and then writing findings in an exercise book. Step forward EDpuzzle, a great video flipping tool which ensures that your carefully sourced and vetted video is not just watched but is also interactive for your students.
Gullibooking. My Facebook feed is full of it. If you use Facebook then you’ll be familiar with it even if you’ve never heard or noticed it. It’s extremely tall, lighter than a nano-atom, a curious shade of beige and quite possibly hacking into your bank account and ordering 25 copies of Fly Fishing, by 
Had a bad day at work? Has a colleague annoyed you? If so, why not write a review about them and vent, anonymously, your feelings online? No? I’m glad to hear it, but that’s just how one website does work – Rate My Teachers. This website offers students and parents the opportunity to reflect and provide feedback on teachers in their school. On the face of it, I agree that it sounds like a good idea, an opportunity for prospective and current parents to find out exactly what students/parents think of a school and its staff. However, having recently re-visited the site it doesn’t take long to see that is more of a haven for unadulterated venom rather than a place for balanced views and opinions of teachers. I quickly signed-up to be the ‘moderator’ for my school thinking that I could filter out the obvious trolling of some staff, delete feedback for staff who had left and remove some of the more grotesque comments. Much to my surprise, the moderator has very little influence or editing rights. That is, unless you become complicit in the murky world of teacher feedback yourself…
Currently the Head of e‑Learning and a teacher of music at a large school in Sheffield, UK. Stephen Wiles is a front runner in the use of technology in the classroom. Alongside his popular 
