Writing Reliefs for Relief Teachers

I'm away for 3 weeks this term and face the frustratingly long process of preparing my lessons for someone else to teach. Having recently developed class blogs I had the idea to use this format to set up my lessons for the relief teacher. I decided not to do all my subjects this way but did do my Year 8/9 Health and Year 9 English classes. I already have a Year 9 class blog so used this to present my work for the weeks I will be away.

Incentive Based Motivation

Recently I posted a video about how fun motivates people to do things. The video below is by career analyst Dan Pink. He presents researched based evidence that incentive based schemes in business do not produce results and in some cases can be detrimental to creativity and productivity. I couldn't help but think of the suggestions in the past 1-2 years of teachers pay being linked with incentives. Dan says that research clearly states that external incentives like money work well for tasks that have a clear goal or end point such as working on an assembly line or entering data into spreadsheets but are detrimental to tasks requiring people to think outside the square and be creative. Which area does teaching fall into?

Wiimote - Record G Forces Applied to Wiimote

The following ideas are courtesy of Jared Robinson at http://www.thepegeek.com/ and Ben Jones who Jared credits in his video explanation of how to set up the Wiimote and gives some ideas about how to use it.

Why IWB's?

The following presentation is by Chris Betcher http://chrisbetcher.com/Why IWBs

View more presentations from Chris Betcher

Handwriting?

An interesting if not one sided article slamming the poor handwriting found in UK schools.