Bias with multiple perspectives

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Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond

After his Grandma’s death, Kit and his family return to the village his family first came from to look after his Grampa. As Kit settles in, he also begins to discover the connections with his new home and make him realise his role in this place, in the present and across time. But this is [...]

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Storyboarding with Deep Fried Films

This was a fascinating bit of CPD with Martin Greechan from Deep Fried Films, looking at just one aspect of film-making: the storyboard. So what did we learn today? Film has certain similarities to books, with scenes instead of chapters, and a different grammar. First we learned some vocabulary There are different styles of shots: [...]

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Water Week

A blether with a colleague turned into a fully fledged plan for an Eco Schools cross-curricular Week of Water. It would obviously need to be ok’d by SMT, but nothing here is too difficult or costly and most of it ties in beautifully with what’s already in the curriculum. Just brainstorming, we came up with [...]

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Reading

After one too many arguments with a class of 2nd years, I have decided to ban all book borrowing. In fact, no reading at all. Why? Because “We don’t like reading” despite the fact that they’d happily sit for hours at a computer screen, flick througha  pile of mags, devour the sports pages and cartoons…  Nah, [...]

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The Box of Delights

Allow me to quote from the DVD Times website, At least seven television channels, seven national, one international and a host of regional radio stations, a website that’s amongst the best in the world, an early adopter of digital television, of widescreen and of on-demand services, all of which are entirely free of advertisements, and [...]

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A day in the worklife: period 1: mindmapping

Sometimes the most innocuous comment gives you a gentle nudge to look again at your most familiar work.  Like, mindmaps. I love mindmaps. They match my grasshopper brain and help keep its output under some kind of control. Lots of people don’t love mindmaps. And yet, when I show pupils how to put a mindmap together, very few seem [...]

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Brains – the right stuff

Second class in the Train your Brain lessons. It’s a kind of introduction to studying for 1st years, focussing on different techniques to help them learn – mindmapping, acronyms etc - and demonstrating how their brain works - to the best of my current research – through association, using creativity and memory games inthe process. I’ve taught this course for [...]

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Amber in Perthshire

Had a lovely night at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. The drive up was fabulous. I love night-time driving, so long as there’s other traffic around and it’s not inclined to attack. The presence of another, slightly more sane human is also of benefit. Our hotel room was massive! (I reckon it was larger than our living room) and we had great [...]

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Terror and the Cake Fairy

Did my good deed on Monday night, delivering birthday cake around darkest Lanarkshire, leaving friends about 11.30 to head home. Travelling along the Clyde Valley I get that horrible feeling: there’s something behind me… (Not behind me inside the car you understand, but following me on the road. I hate it when that happens.) ~Don’t [...]

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