The state of Social Media in 2012

An interesting Infographic produced by The SEO Company (seoco.co.uk) and NowSourcing. Available here: http://www.seoco.co.uk/social-media/
The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company

Trying out Pinterest a new online noticeboard. Found this image and embedded the pin. Lovely but what else can it do?

Source: flickr.com via Shannon on Pinterest

The Guardian, 7 Jan 2013: Gove is careering towards an omnifiasco over baccalaureate

 

"The education secretary's plans to replace GCSEs with the Ebacc have met with furious opposition, and he should pay heed to the many concerns, argues Fiona Millar here.

 

There is a telling line in the evidence given at the end of last year by Michael Gove to the Education select committee. Quizzed about the way his department is managing reform of KS4 qualifications, the secretary of state explained: "Coherence comes at the end of the process"."

The Ebacc is ill thought out, incoherent and more than anything divisive, creating a two tier system that goes against everything I believe in in education. It's time Mr Gove stops destroying our education system and starts living in the real world where vocational and academic qualifications are equally important to the society as a whole instead of advancing a few at the cost of the majority!

PDC in MFL are proposing new assessment framework for KS3&4

The Professional Development Consortium run by the Universities of Oxford and Reading have just published draft versions of their alternative assessment system for MFL at KS3&4. It looks very interesting offering 5 Levels across KS3 and 4 with 2 sub levels at each level thus providing an all through system from beginners to top grades at GCSE (like the ASSET languages ladder - which goes all the way up to Mastery, i.e. uni level).
The two receptive skills are grouped together as their assessment is very similar and the same is true for the two productive skills. The success criteria are made clear and different sources of evidence are taken into account.
The question is: will this be taken on by the government or schools to replace the existing system or would this add an extra layer of assessment, i.e. work?

So, go and check it out on the PDC in MFL blog here and leave a comment!

FREE: Excellent tools for Interactive Whiteboards (or even just whiteboards!)

TRIPTICO offers this free set of tools that can be used with IWB but many of them are equally useful as long as you have a projector to share with your class what you can see on your laptop/PC!

Download the software to access these excellent apps from here: http://www.triptico.co.uk/
Some highlights: spinning wheel to select topic randomly, random student selector, scoreboard for up to four teams, sentence order challenge and many more!

Check it out now - it's well worth it!

OFSTED: subject specific guidance for inspectors

I've just been forwarded this link to an interesting page on the OFSTED site:
Generic grade descriptors and supplementary subject-specific guidance for inspectors on making judgements during subject survey visits to schools

Enjoy!

Languages of the World (Wide Web)

From the Google Research Blog:

"The web is vast and infinite. Its pages link together in a complex network, containing remarkable structures and patterns. Some of the clearest patterns relate to language." Posted by Daniel Ford and Josh Batson here.

This blog article includes an amazing graphic showing connections between languages!