David Rogers

Teaching with apps at ks3 from David Rogers My second session at the RGS’s New KS3 curriculum day was around apps.  The session was only 40 minutes long and therefore I focused on a few ‘killer’ apps and mainly around the thinking behind the use of Apps, which I didn’t restrict to those that are on mobile devices. The main points were: There are hardly and decent subject specific Apps – get over it.  Apps aren’t creative, students and teachers are.  It’s important to take Apps and subvert them for our own use.  This to me is more exciting than a subject specific App.  Start with a genuine teaching problem and take it from there.  The best thing is to ask and chat to others, both face to face and online.  A huge wealth of information and inspiration for me lies in our school’s IT support team and IT and computing teaching team.  Go and watch some lessons.  For example, I am sure that there is a geographical use for Sphero. The story w...

Getting creative with your (geography) curriculum from David Rogers Last Friday was busy.  Before heading over to BETT to give a talk at TMBETT15 , I spent the day at the Royal Geographical Society, of which I am a Fellow and Chartered Geographer.   It’s always great getting back to geography, I consider myself a geographer before a teacher.  But some of the points here are relevant for teachers of all subjects and ages.  Some of the specific ideas are clear in the slides, but my main points are below.  It’s always tricky when challenged to give a talk around the idea of creativity or inspiration.  With this in mind I started by thinking about creativity and have posted my thoughts here and over at Staffrm . To me, there are a number of exciting aspects of the current curriculum changes: 1. Teachers Standard 4. This, to me, is something to savour and celebrate.  Even though it came out of a Tory DfE, it’s bloody good.  The DfE are ...

I’ve been lucky to be involved with the Staffrm adventure for a little while now, and I urge you to ignore the picture of a sweaty Lockyer on the front page…..  He’s actually a bit of a legend.  Staffrm is quickly shaping up to be a must read.  You’re limited to 500 words and it’s very much designed to be a sharing thoughts space without the egos.  To give you a flavour, this is my latest post there.  You’ll have to excuse the header, but it fits in with the theme of creativity…. The site is very quick to post on and works on mobile devices.  I also like the themes that run through the community, the latest one based around questions on technology: #techandme It would be great to see you over there!

I haven’t headed to Bett’s TeachMeet for a couple of years, and it was great t head over after a day at the Royal Geographical Society .  After locating some Post-It notes and acquiring an epic new staffrm T-Shirt I was called up on to the stage, a little caught off guard!  Anyway, the talk was based around something that I’ve done for quite some time now, and spoke about at the Google Teacher Academy back in October 2014.  The idea and approach attempts to develop children’s critical thinking, especially in terms of accepting what’s online.  Furthermore, there’s I’ve tried to tackle this issue that many children have of not being about to safely provide feedback to peers. Here’s the presentation, explanation is below: I illustrated the principle by starting with the Iceland topic, which sits within the Amazing Places Scheme of work.  I meant to read the following extract, from Meltwater written by Michael Ridpath,  describing a volcano: The cloud th...