The previous post entitled “Bali Holiday” helped me improve my skills a little when it comes to uploading photo’s from my iPhone. If you saw my initial post then you’ll remember that the images were a lot smaller than they are now. The reason for that was because the option the app gave me when I uploaded the photo’s was similar to the usual site and I consequently chose the “small” option, as I generally do. Unfortunately this made the images too small to see properly and they couldn’t be enlarged like those uploaded from a camera can by clicking on them. So, I went back to my iPhone, deleted the originals and reloaded them, this time choosing to make them “medium”. I chose this as they are just the right size to view, any bigger and they would have taken over the page. Lesson learned and I’ll bear it in mind for the future.

Last year the students in my class asked if they could listen to music while we worked. This in itself doesn’t sound too drastic a request and as they were a very reasonable bunch I was tempted on several occasions. The students followed this request with assurances that listening to music while they studied helped them to relax and therefore perform better. However, this has always been a bit of a debatable claim in my mind, especially as my own experience in listening to music while I studied only resulted in me becoming totally distracted and ultimately drifting off into “song land”. Well, at the risk of upsetting my former students (and the ones to come), I recently came across an article from David Cutler, a teacher in Florida who clearly had the same misgivings as myself. He cites research from Dr Nick Perham from Cardiff University in Wales who conducted experiments to finally solve this ongoing dilemma. I won’t go into the details here, but the upshot of the research was that listening to music while studying has a clear negative effect on performance. I don’t wish to be a killjoy, or be the instigator of a new area of parent/child confrontation, but it’s true.  If you want to check out the very interesting and well written details click the link to David’s page above. A small “Sorry” in advance to my new class.

Not many posts at the moment as I’m having a bit of a break in Bali with family and friends. Here’s a couple of photos from today when we drove to a volcano for a 2 hour cycle through the countryside (I’m the one second from left in the white tee-shirt). A great day. I’m posting this from my iPhone so I hope it works!

Well, 2014 is already underway and I’m sure there are a few teachers out there (in Oz) who have already started to think about what to plan for their new students. I had a look at the Australian Curriculum area of History and have been faced with options such as the Romans, Egyptians, China, India and a number of skill based lessons. I suppose my next move will be to make a choice and see how I can make it interesting for the new students. Having said that, it’s actually the key concepts which really matter, it just depends on how teachers deliver these concepts which makes them interesting or not. Better get my creative thinking hat on!