The Big City. I read an article a few years ago about how most charity shops don’t make a profit, they are just there to raise awareness of the charity by providing a permanent and cheap advertising billboard on the High Street. The guy who wrote it suggested that people would be better off selling their unwanted clothes on eBay and donating the money directly to a cause they cared about. The British Heart Foundation produced a story today, picked up rather uncritically by the BBC, about how many of the clothes donated to charities end up being sold to commercial traders.
It’s not a new story, the BBC actually made a programme about a very similar issue back in 2006. The BHF doesn’t seem to have actually published the specific details of the research that the story is based on, despite the many statistics quoted in their film, and they don’t mention on their site whether or not they sell unwanted donations on to commercial traders. Transparency is always a difficult issue for charities.
Blog My Wiki! How low can you go? Well, in the words of MC Wildski, I think it was, ‘the lower you go, the more you show you know.’ He may have been talking about bass frequency, but I think it’s equally applicable to teaching coding via Scratch in a Primary setting. They said I was mad teaching Scratch in Year 3 – well, perhaps they just said I was mad. Anyway, I’ve been teaching it in Year 2 for the last couple of weeks, initially in a classroom that had 2 available computers with Scratch installed (whereas in my Year 3 setting I had a suite of iMacs). How did it go? Rather swimmingly, actually. the first children to write up and draw a successful game were rewarded with design time on the interactive whiteboard As I’ve said before, whole-class Scratch teaching on the Interactive Whiteboard is surprisingly effective.
And then drawing. Lack of resources was a problem last week – I gave the class an A3 game design sheet to fill in: stage, sprites, a written description of the game. Next steps? Radio Blog. The life of a top breakfast DJ. Jade Goody's death. PhotoshopDisasters.