Category: online world

‘10% braver’ – learnings from WomenEd Thailand

‘Be 10% braver’ is the (now surely really well-known) call to action from the WomenEd movement, which aims to support and connect aspiring and existing women leaders in education, … and I was 10% braver on Saturday last week as I said ‘sure, I will speak!’ at the WomenEd Thailand Career Clinic. It was all …

Continue reading

How to learn to be a better Board member

One of the hidden elements of really good courses run by professional educators is the expertise, careful consideration and detailed planning that goes into ensuring that the course has really impactful outcomes for its participants. This means that the course needs to be designed in such a way and to set up the learners (for …

Continue reading

Why learning for the sake of learning is transformational

I spent half an hour the other day learning about aphids. Did you know that there are 500 species of aphid in the UK alone? And that colonies of aphids often consist of females only, who give birth to live young who develop from eggs which are simply clones of the mother? And that they …

Continue reading

The importance of discipline in a successful life

I spent a glorious hour last week tuning into a live talk with the author Alexander McCall Smith, hosted by the Caledonian Club in London, but of course all on Zoom (which made it much more accessible, if less social). Anyway, he was, as ever, a delightful speaker – entertaining, modest, self-deprecating, intelligent, with a …

Continue reading

Blessed be the tech makers

One of the great delights in my working life is working with other professionals, to achieve more together than we could as individuals. Besides, with the right people it is enormous fun, as was precisely the case last Thursday, when the lovely Matthew Savage and I co-presented a session for school leaders at an education …

Continue reading

Schools as places of the ‘now’ … and of the community

What a wonderful pleasure it was last week to speak at the Independent Schools of the Year Award 2020, to announce the finalists, and then to introduce my fellow judges as they revealed the winners! It was a really joyful occasion – all online of course, but with exploding stars and thunderous applause. A really …

Continue reading

E-learning around the world: creating, not simply following, best practice

I very much enjoyed leading two virtual professional development sessions at the Lasswade High School Learning Festival for staff on Monday of this week – I wish I could have stayed longer! I spent the time sharing – as swiftly as I could – some of the experiences I have gained from working internationally with …

Continue reading

‘The mortal in the portal’: how the online world strengthens our capacity to be truly human

I am indebted to Richard Ovenden, the University of Oxford’s Bodley’s Librarian, for the title of this blog; speaking last week at a City of London Livery Company Event in Vintners’ Hall, he used the phrase during the course of his fascinating (and passionate) insight into the work that librarians now do to educate their …

Continue reading

Today is the Day! International Day of the Girl

Today, Thursday 11th October 2012, is the very first International Day of the Girl, and it is most definitely worth celebrating. How this came about was in part because of extensive lobbying of the United Nations by Plan UK (part of Plan International), the charity which we have been supporting in school over the past …

Continue reading

We must put more women on screen

The new Director-General of the BBC, George Entwistle, has just gone on record as saying that the BBC has to do more to promote women in “serious” roles, or as newsreaders, in its programmes. In an interview reported in the Daily Mail on Wednesday, he said this: “We have made real progress in actively looking …

Continue reading