PGCE Survival Guide book

Tom Henzley has put together a great PGCE Survival Guide book, I know it’s good because I read it and was super happy to see 2 of the services I have been working on over the last 12 months represented =)

Thanks Tom!

Download the book with this link

Preview only:

Bye bye creative curriculum?

The new Primary Curriculum is axed. Cutting the creative curriculum means 1 of 2 things, either:
a) schools can adopt their own creative curriculum without government guidance
or
b) schools have to stick to the current curriculum

Option a seems to make most sense as Cameron talks about empowering teachers.

So it is very likely schools will have to stick the current curriculum (option a) as sensible decisions isn’t the way Whitehall operates.  Anyone else get the “If it can be cut – cut it” type mentality?  On the same day as Cameron reminded us that our national debt is larger than Ron Jeremy’s libido.

It is no surprise that any “new spending” or “new project” would get cut but it seems like the Conservatives need to be clear and frank about the Primary Curriculum and their reasons for not proceeding with it after teachers have collectively spent tens of thousands of hours working towards delivering it.

Before Becta closes they have rushed through the Self review framework changes.

What do you think?  Do you think it will be option a or b?  Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

UPDATE:  In the meantime, the Department has advised schools that the existing primary curriculum will continue to be in force in 2011/12 and primary schools should plan on that basis.  Source

Ouch…

Alternative to Sparklebox

As sparklebox is blocked / banned / running into a few issues for a reason unknown and some teachers need teaching resources I wanted to just let you know there is an alternative!

Primary School Teaching has a great bank of teaching resources and you can upload your own and share resources with other teachers making it the perfect alternative to Sparklebox.

Facebook connect on playstation 3 (ps3)

Turns out that the playstation 3 doesn’t like facebook, also turns out that the playstation 3 has strange javascript controls and displays pages in a weird fashion (weird css support).

I love the option of browsing the internet on a playstation but it has to work correct.
News on when the playstation 3 will support facebook connect is sketchy, according to Sony it already does.
I have updated the playstation and it still doesn’t seem to want to work with the facebook connect function from Primary School Teaching
If anyone can shed any more light on this please leave a comment!

Elgg – All entities must be public – Remove friends and everyone else as options during inupt

Wow possibly the worst topic ever for one of my posts 😛

This is relevant if
a) You use Elgg
b) You want all users to only be able to post as public
c) You have the allpublic elgg plugin
If not you won’t be interested..
Basically, the array that holds the values takes 0,1,2 then you drop out 0,1 (this is default behavior in the allpublic plugin).
For some weird reason this leaves behind “Friends” as an option, this is not desirable behavior and the fix is to remove -2 ( I know wth were they thinking) from the array. Use this line of code in the allplugin access.php:
unset($vars[‘options’][-2]);
Put that with the rest of the unset’s in the plugin.
Full file path will be mod/allpublic/views/default/input
As another note, if -2 isn’t right for you just echo out the $key value from the array like..
{$option . $key} then you will get the name of the option and the key/id.