Have you ever taken a moment to consider what you share online? What about all those photographs of your children? Have you even asked your child if they are happy with you sending their digital likeness into the ether, at a time when an ever-greater number of tools are being launched, and used, with minimal thought for their longer term impact. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was written a long time before we had any reason to worry about online presence - after all the the UNCRC came into action in 1992, a year before CERN placed its World Wide Web technology in the public domain and gave birth to the phenomenon of online communication. Yet the UNCRC has incredible relevance for our children, especially given omnipresent online access and these new AI tools : Article 3 - The best interests of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children. Article 8 ...
(CC) Black Claw Hammer on Brown Wooden Plank A place for everything and everything in its place Our old house was once owned by a professional gardener. When he had lived there, he had only single glazing, bars on his windows, no central heating and no kitchen. He had cooked using a single gas hob in the little shed behind the house. Whilst small, this was not a rudementary setup, the garden was both irrigated and lit using a complex network of subterranean cables and piping which all led back to the shed. This man, as many men of his generation were prone to, spent an inordinate amount of his free time in his shed. It was the control centre of his realm, a place to tinker, to cook, to think, and to escape from the world. A large workbench dominated the shed. As testimony to the years of thinking and tinkering, this bench was peppered with nails, all pointing in different directions and hammered in to lesser or greater degrees. Despite their number, it was clear that each nail had been...
In Initial Teacher Education programmes, we spend time and effort clarifying for our student teachers the importance of collaboration and partnerships. Rightly, much of our emphasis is put on the importance of keeping the child at the centre of our decisions and working with partner agencies and colleagues to ensure our young people are Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible and Included. Worringly, it can be all too easy for classroom teachers to withdraw into their own classrooms, developing tunnel-vision in their pursuit of improved professional practice. For these soloists, the pressure mounts as the year moves on, they gallantly struggle to deliver the type of learning expected by management and parents, heroically accommodating the needs of all their learners whilst simultaneously ensuring their students jump through all the right exam-prep hoops (at just the “right” time), all whilst spending their evenings marking and painstakingly pouring over dat...
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