Nick Clegg says that modern Britain expects too much from teachers | Politics The deputy prime minister is to open up a new front in his disagreements with the education secretary, Michael Gove, criticising the recent decision by the Tories to heap responsibility for children's development on to teachers. Nick Clegg's aides believe the Conservatives have placed too much emphasis on teachers as arbiters of authority over children in the wake of last month's riots. Gove is planning to fast-track former soldiers into school to provide children with more male role models. In a speech to teachers and pupils, Clegg will say: "We already expect our teachers to be social workers, child psychologists, nutritionists, child protection officers. "Teachers are not surrogate mothers and fathers. Clegg's comments come as his party claimed to have reined in Gove's desire to allow his free schools programme to become profit-making, and that any new wave of free schools had to be in deprived areas. Clegg will talk about the experience of raising his own children.
Socrative: Turn Student SmartPhones into Clickers – Technology for Academics [Update: See a more recent post on new features.] This is the tool I’ve been waiting for. Socrative turns your students’ smartphones into a powerful student response system. It’s like PollEverywhere (see this earlier post), but with greater flexibility and ease-of-use, the ability to attach student names to electronic quizzes, and free – even when you have more than 30 students. This promises to be a real challenge to the makers of student response systems. You and your students have options for accessing Socrative. Socrative includes a simulation on their website, so I took the liberty of taking screenshots. To experience it yourself, on your ‘teacher’ device, go to Connecting student devices to the teacher’s device On the lecturer’s device, you see “my room number”. Multiple Choice Questions Pose a multiple choice question orally, or by writing it on the board, or in your presentation slides. Short Answer Questions Pose a short answer question to your students.
When and how often you should be posting on Twitter and Facebook Some of us tweet and post on Facebook almost nonstop throughout our day, while others tend to limit their posts to a few updates here and there for fear of overloading their friends and followers. As it turns out, there is an optimal time to tweet and post, as well as a favorable frequency of updating that will lead to peak results. In a recent study by award-winning social media scientist, Dan Zarella, he reveals research that determines when and how often we should be reaching out to our own audiences for maximum exposure. Timing your Tweets: Nearly 80% of the general US population is in the Central and Eastern time zone.The highest percentage of retweets occur around 5PM EST, while the highest CTR (click through rate) occurs between noon and 6PM EST.You will achieve a higher CTR by only tweeting 1 – 4 times per hour, especially midweek and on weekends. In terms of tweeting frequency, I also agree. Timing your Facebook posts: Hidden factors for scheduling posts: In no particular order …
101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of new tools. There has been a surge of new scholarly communication tools in recent years. But how are researchers incorporating these tools into their research workflows? Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer are conducting a global survey to investigate the choices researchers are making and why. Insights from these surveys will be valuable for libraries, research support, funders, but also for researchers themselves. Are we witnessing a major overhaul of scholarly communication rules and tools? In the last six months alone, this blog has featured posts on all phases of the research cycle. Avalanche of tools Almost half of the tools in our database of scholarly communication tools were created since 2013. Simple model We use a simple model to get a grip on this abundance and variety of tools. Global survey We think the survey can become one of the largest multilingual surveys into researcher practices. Workflows and interoperability Towards a scholarly commons? About the Authors
Ideas to Inspire Apps in Education