BlogDale

Alice is a free programming environment from Carnegie Melon that anyone can learn quickly. Using drag and drop characters are added into a world then events and attributes can be assigned to them to make them move and/or respond to other events. Hey presto, it is possible to quickly build a 3D world with interactive characters and you just started Object Oriented Programming. (You really didn’t want to know the name of the process did you? Ignore it. Like Algebra. It’s not hard to do, but anything with a weird name is easy to deny knowledge of).

NASA never showed this on the out-takes

Check out the podcast interview

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I took these meagre notes during a session on coaching. The poor quality of my notes is in indirect proportion to the quality of the session; I gave up taking notes and began to listen and participate instead. But here’s what I wrote anyway.

A number of schools are developing coaching as a means of CPD as a whole school initiative. Coaching is well-received in schools as teachers are finding that they value the dialogue that is generated between them. Schools are setting aside timetabled sessions for developing coaching.

Advisers support the development of the coaching in the school and help to facilitate the coaching relationship. Teacher/Pupil coaching is showing remarkable results as pupils develop quite sophisticated understandings through dialogue.

People trained as coaches are often passionate about their development. Cynicism is often dissipated through coaching dialogue.