The first 100,000 words: Writings on Education by a Teacher

Using the Incomplete and emerging research into video type and presentation to inform video production for teachers It is widely agreed among researchers that video-based learning in conjunction with pedagogical methods have the potential to improve learning outcomes (Lubrick & Zhou & Zhang, 2019; Yousef, Chatti, Schroeder & Wosnitza, 2014). Among teachers, there is a wide range of video forms being produced, using a range of technologies and approaches. The newness of these strategies, video production forms and technologies being applied to education means that in this case educators are ahead of the research and innovating often without, and indeed in spite of the emerging data from the educational research community. To illustrate this fact: Lightboard technology can be dated to 2013 (Lubrick & Zhou & Zhang, 2019); whilst Flipped Learning as a methodology begun in 2009 (Bishop & Verleger, 2013); Green-Screen use in education is hard to pin down in the ...

Thinking the unthinkable, John Hattie is halfway there? Early this week whilst preparing some materials for the educational discussion group that I run online, I stumbled upon a paper written by John Hattie that had been floating around my piles of paper for a number of months. Having a spare moment to fill, I began reading the article. To my genuine surprise, I found myself nodding along in agreement. The paper in question is entitled ‘What doesn’t work in education: The politics of distraction’ (Hattie, 2015) and did exactly as advertised, despite Hattie’s overreliance on his own work to support his contentions many of the points rung true.   For background, my engagement with Hattie’s work has come largely through official channels (including the HITS model) and was delivered without question. This allegiance to his thinking and methodology was strongly tempered however, by the growing distrust and challenges made against his work. These challenges come from the prof...

Instructional Video for Leadership For anyone with even the tiniest awareness of Educational Leadership, the reality of schools is almost entirely predicated on time. Specifically, for leadership and leaders, the most impactful and crucial time is that devoted to meetings. Indeed, I have argued before that the quality of leadership is almost entirely dependant on two factors: the quality of conversations and the quality of meetings. With a subset of meeting quality, being the amount of voices genuinely given priority and a chance to influence the decision-making process. Yet, at the same time, meetings as a whole are one of the things within schools that are perhaps the most robustly resistant to change. A meeting now would be recognisable to anyone from almost any point in previous history. You might argue perhaps that the use of PowerPoint is an innovation that allows for more succinct communication (or the complete opposite, the leading cause of death in meetings), perhaps...

Building a Custom Lightboard: Portable, robust and tall! My forthcoming National Education Summit presentation covers what I believe to be the full range of instructional video outputs and methods for creation. The goal of the presentation is to introduce teachers to the range of possibilities that exist and to consider which of these they are prepared, or already equipped to implement in their own settings. To support this, there are suggestions around tools that may need to be purchased and leading experts, besides myself, who would be good contacts in moving towards these methods. The ‘Forms of Instructional Video’ below are my current understanding of the available forms, in what must be considered an ongoing project of discovery: Forms of Instructional Video External Document Camera Phone as Document Camera DSLR and Tripod w/ Directional Mic Face-to-Webcam Camera Purcha...