On top of the world

There is something about being up a mountain at Christmas with all the family. I'm not sure if it is the quiet (snow absorbs sound a lot), or the sense of being "up in the clouds" (the cloud base is often below), but it is a wonderful break and i count myself very lucky to be able to enjoy it each winter.

Happy Christmas to you all

Happy Christmas

Escaping to the French Alps with al the family for skiing over
Christmas and the New Year... it's peaceful and beautiful. Hope your break is likewise. Oh, and the snow is wonderful.

And is it just me, or can you see a face in that icicle too?

Deck the halls...

...and here at the wonderfully manicured Pinehurst resort in North Carolina (it's a golf Mecca apparently) they have done just that.

Suddenly it feels very, very Christmassy! Interesting to reflect on what parts of education have been naughty or nice this year...

Digital divide

Proud dad takes photo of one of the many delightful details on his eldest daughter's classroom wall.

People wonder sometimes about a digital divide - personally I applaud the accessibility that technology has brought, together with the spectacularly lower costs in many cases, BUT I do worry about the widening gap between what you might describe as the educational fundamentalists who ban and bar everything (no YouTube, no phones, no social networking, precious little joy...) and those rapidly increasing numbers of 21st century schools who have embraced the new opportunities that ICT have brought us all in learning.

The worry is that the gap between enlightenment - as exemplified here - and educational fundamentalism is in danger of getting to be too big to bridge soon. And that is a very real digital divide. What will we do with those "ban 'em and bar 'em" schools, with their cells and bells, then?...

Focussed

Filming at the excellent Lampton school (where eldest daughter teaches) with the ITN camera crew doing a bit of a documentary for BETT 09.

It just never fails to amaze me how students can still focus AND do useful work when they have mountains of camera equipment and a film crew quite literally "in their faces".

Amazing generation really... On the other hand filming in a London taxi last month for a Pearson Foundation feature, a car alongside us crashed straight into the back of a bus in front (airbags deployed etc - big crash!), the driver presumably completely distracted by the filming inside the taxi!. So the generation before this one are clearly not nearly so relaxed with all the paraphernalia of a media rich world, are they?