If you don’t already know, the next ‘big’ apple product is the Apple Watch. Yes, a watch. Do you remember them? They were those handy devices which attached to your wrist enabling you to check the time (it may have even beeped on the hour). They started to disappear when everyone started using smartphones like the Apple iPhone. So the company who made the world’s most recognisable smartphone, which abruptly halted the sales of watches, now want to sell a watch. This is an intriguing paradox so why has Apple shifted its focus to wearables rather than augmenting and improving, let’s say, the iPad? Do we really want to buy an expensive watch and what can it do that my old £30 watch can’t? As someone who is neither pro nor anti Apple I decided to have a look at this new direction for the company post Steve Jobs.
I recently gave an assembly on the rather boring sounding title of keyboard shortcuts (please don’t leave just yet!). Little did I realise that this topic would have such a huge impact on how the students use a computer.
Until recently I owned hundreds, if not thousands, of computer storage devices. Not just CD’s, hard drives and USB sticks but 3½” & 5¼” floppy disks, 
The Paperless Educator Challenge is over! Almost…
It sounds like the start of a slapstick ‘whodunnit’ but the following is a true story. Not only is it all rather amusing but it’s also a useful reminder on how the internet has become a quick reference library full of (un)reliable sources. The story goes like this… My friend and colleague Robert Hunter, the pianist of this story, was accompanying a double bass player at the 
I’m worried. I’ve noticed a steadily increasing number of students sending me emails late into the night. Many of these are one-off late night panics: ‘Sir, I won’t be in your lesson tomorrow because..’. However, a significant minority are also from students asking for advice, requesting a worksheet or handing in work. At this point let me be clear; I’m not worried about 
If you’ve created a document and sent it via email, there is no way you can be sure it will appear on the recipients device in exactly the same way as it appeared on your screen. That is unless you send it to them as as a PDF. Think of all those images you’ve painstakingly inserted into a Word document, the charts you’ve generated in Excel or those swirling text graphics you embedded into a PowerPoint presentation. They may look picture perfect on your device but can you be sure that the recipients of your document have exactly the same settings and software on their device as you do? It’s highly unlikely that they do. As a result, it’s possible that they will receive a garble of images and text that are oddly floating over some important information.
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 
