If I was being honest, my Coetail final project isn’t what I thought it might be. When the final project was first mentioned, at the start of the course, I had grand ideas of doing something that took me […]

Yesterday was the end of the Learning 2.012 conference at Western Academy in Beijing. It was my first technology conference so I didn’t know what to expect, and a couple of aspects caught me by surprise. The first […]

It’s not facebook official, but it might as well be. For many good and varied reasons, this will be our last year in Japan. It is no negative reflection at all on working at YIS or living in Japan; both have been […]

A couple of weeks ago saw what is probably the highlight of my Coetail course; I got a comment on my ‘Getting Offline’ post by the utterly excellent Jeff Utecht. The fact Jeff spent the time to read my post, […]

As a Head of Department, it always makes me sad how much I authorise to spend on textbooks each year. Some books are good, some not so good. In either event, we are spending thousands of dollars each year, and […]

It’s been a little under four months since the last post on my Coetail blog, a large chunk of which was taken up by the summer holidays. Maggie and I spend our summers near Mineral, Virginia. Mineral is a lovely, […]

For my course four final project I wanted to expand on one of the course’s weekly themes: the use of games in teaching. As I wrote here, I am an advocate of the use of games in my classes. Whereas there are some […]

The summer term (as us Brits like to optimistically call it) is by nature a good time for reflection. I think this is especially true for high school teachers who tend to be afforded a little more time in the last […]

I would be a brave person to argue against project-based or challenge-based learning from a pedagogical perspective. With buzzwords like ‘trans-disciplinary’, ‘exploratory’, ‘student-centered’ and ‘collaboration’ […]

As a teacher of economics and business, games are an invaluable learning experience, and not just for the reasons put forward in this Carleton College post. Games are vital in these subjects as they act as a […]

On numerous occasions in the recent past I have read posts that declare that the classroom is dead, that schools should be shut-down and that lessons should become entirely virtual, like the Massive Open Online […]

At last week’s Tuesday Coetail meeting there was an interesting two-faceted discussion taking place about the teaching of ICT standards within schools.

The first part of the conversation focused on whether […]

FDR was a pretty clever guy. He was, and will always remain, the longest serving president in US history, and during his tenure he managed to drag the country out of the Great Depression and then lead them through […]

Over the Earcos weekend, Adam Clark (YIS), Garry Baker (ISSH) and I teamed up to devise a lesson plan based on different perspectives – more specifically looking at how historical figures can be viewed from a […]