Frank’s Education Pages» Study and Teaching Resources

Welcome to Frank Carver's Education Pages.

For many years now, I have been taking courses and gaining qualifications, both locally and on-line. In 2002, I started a job as a teacher at Suffolk College, which in turn has led to me studying for qualifications in teaching. While studying for several of the courses, I shared both some of the notes and thoughts from the teaching, and the work I and my fellow students produced, on a sprinkling of web sites and servers. Eventually I reached the stage where I felt these widely-scattered pages deserved to be gathered together. This site is the result. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me by email.

Popular Pages

If you need to find something in a hurry, it may be on one of our most popular pages:

Our growing collection of teaching book reviews and details
Our page for the City & Guilds 7407 course including example assignment submissions
Our page for the PGCE in adult education course including example assignment submissions

If you can't find what you want there, please try our rough-and-ready site map.

Recent News

Online course for Sun Certified Web Component Developer qualification	19 January 2007
I have a friend, Marcus Green, who co-incidentally also works as a Java software developer and occasional FE teacher. Marcus is currently developing some on-line courses related to software development, and his latest offering is for the Sun Certified Web Component Developer exam. At the moment I believe signup is free, so if you are at all interested, now is a good time to take a look. Posted by Frank as Resources at 10:24 AM CET No Comments »

Online course for Sun Certified Web Component Developer qualification

19 January 2007

I have a friend, Marcus Green, who co-incidentally also works as a Java software developer and occasional FE teacher. Marcus is currently developing some on-line courses related to software development, and his latest offering is for the Sun Certified Web Component Developer exam.

At the moment I believe signup is free, so if you are at all interested, now is a good time to take a look.

Posted by Frank as Resources at 10:24 AM CET

No Comments »

Coming very soon, 7407 stage 2	30 August 2006
I’m very pleased to announce that due to the generosity of an “Education Pages” reader, we will soon have some example assignments for the City & Guilds 7407 stage two available. As many of you will know, I never took the stage two myself, instead jumping straight to a PGCE course, so I never had any stage two assignments of my own to offer as examples. 7407 stage two material is probably the single most requested feature for this web site, so I’m extremely happy about this. If anyone else would like to give back to the community and share their work here (from 7407 or any other course), please let me know, and I’ll help in any way I can. I will be uploading the new 7407 stage two assignments over the next week or two. Sorry for the delay on this. I have changed jobs, been ridiculously busy, and all the other excuses. However, The first two of Ashiq’s 7407 stage 2 assignments are now available. See Ashiq’s Work for more details. I hope to put up more as I get a bit more spare time. Thanks for waiting, folks. Posted by Frank as Site News, Study at 1:24 PM CEST 12 Comments »

Coming very soon, 7407 stage 2

30 August 2006

I’m very pleased to announce that due to the generosity of an “Education Pages” reader, we will soon have some example assignments for the City & Guilds 7407 stage two available. As many of you will know, I never took the stage two myself, instead jumping straight to a PGCE course, so I never had any stage two assignments of my own to offer as examples.

7407 stage two material is probably the single most requested feature for this web site, so I’m extremely happy about this. If anyone else would like to give back to the community and share their work here (from 7407 or any other course), please let me know, and I’ll help in any way I can.

I will be uploading the new 7407 stage two assignments over the next week or two.

Sorry for the delay on this. I have changed jobs, been ridiculously busy, and all the other excuses. However, The first two of Ashiq’s 7407 stage 2 assignments are now available. See Ashiq’s Work for more details. I hope to put up more as I get a bit more spare time. Thanks for waiting, folks.

Posted by Frank as Site News, Study at 1:24 PM CEST

12 Comments »

Five Killer Education Resources - Traditional College is Doomed	11 August 2006
I guess the page title is a bit extreme, but the study resources mentioned are definately worth a look. Read more at: Five Killer Education Resources - Traditional College is Doomed Posted by Frank as Other News, Resources at 2:11 PM CEST No Comments »

the strangely named stu.dicio.us	10 August 2006
I read on Scott Leslie’s EdTechPost about the strangely-named “stu.dicio.us“. In principle it’s a neat idea - a very simple, Javascript/Ajax on-line note-taking system which automatically shares and searches everyone’s notes. I found the implementation a bit uncomfortable, though. It seems welded to a rather simplistic idea of study - physical attendance to regularly-scheduled classes taught by a “professor” at a “school”. To sign up you need to enter an email address and time zone (both very reasonable), but also need to specify a single “school”. I fell at this hurdle, as I would like to add notes from courses at both Suffolk College and The Open University. To continue, I decided that I’d test the system using the OU courses I have just signed up for, which will start in two months and I’m already gathering research materials. Then another stumbling block. Before you can even begin to take notes you need to create a “class” record to attach the notes to. This is not in itself a big problem (although it does limit the ability to re-use notes with more than one course), but the implementation refused to let me proceed without specifying a “professor”, choosing one or more days of the week, and selecting a time. Open University courses are generally self-paced (thus it makes little sense to specify days or times), and supported by student collaboration and a pool of tutors (so it makes little sense to specify a professor) Even if it made sense to enter the name of my allocated tutor, I don’t know who it will be yet. The day and time section was particularly weak. It seemed to assume that every course takes place at the same time each day of the week, which has not been true at any place I have studied. Taking lessons for a particular course, module or unit at (for example) 10am Monday, then 11am and 3pm Tuesday is not at all unusual. Eventually, I managed to specify spurious values for these fields and could proceed to the note-taking section. Once I got there it was actually quite usable. This is obviously the concept which drove the application as a whole. At the moment it’s a fairly simple text-only outlining system, with pretty good keyboard-integration for moving about and adding basic emphasis. I can see obvious future opportunities to add sketch graphics, upload resources, automatic (wiki-style?) linking between notes or searches, and drag/drop of external links. Essentially this is cool little note-taking application which is let down by a needlessly restrictive process before you can use it. My suggestions for improvement are: Run with the whole “tag” thing. Hard associations are just so inflexible. Lose the “school” setting from the “new user” form, to allow students to study different courses at different schools. Turn all those compulsory course fields into tags which may be applied to anything (a user, a course, a note, a to-do,…) Allow users to create arbitrary groups of tags (perhaps with “wizards” with some initial suggestions for common concepts) and provide both single tags and tag goups in a single drop-down when entering/editing a note, to-do etc. Turn the concept of “course” into just a group of tags. Allow multiple day/time pairs to be associated with a course. Allow association of start and end dates with courses Keep track of “created” as well as “edited” dates on notes, and (optionally?) show them on generated output Oh, and why is it “stu.dicio.us” instead of the much more reasonable “stu.dio.us” ? freedbacking stu.dicio.us What is Freedbacking? Posted by Frank as Other News, Resources at 11:01 AM CEST No Comments »

the strangely named stu.dicio.us

10 August 2006

I read on Scott Leslie’s EdTechPost about the strangely-named “stu.dicio.us“. In principle it’s a neat idea - a very simple, Javascript/Ajax on-line note-taking system which automatically shares and searches everyone’s notes.

I found the implementation a bit uncomfortable, though. It seems welded to a rather simplistic idea of study - physical attendance to regularly-scheduled classes taught by a “professor” at a “school”. To sign up you need to enter an email address and time zone (both very reasonable), but also need to specify a single “school”. I fell at this hurdle, as I would like to add notes from courses at both Suffolk College and The Open University. To continue, I decided that I’d test the system using the OU courses I have just signed up for, which will start in two months and I’m already gathering research materials.

Then another stumbling block. Before you can even begin to take notes you need to create a “class” record to attach the notes to. This is not in itself a big problem (although it does limit the ability to re-use notes with more than one course), but the implementation refused to let me proceed without specifying a “professor”, choosing one or more days of the week, and selecting a time. Open University courses are generally self-paced (thus it makes little sense to specify days or times), and supported by student collaboration and a pool of tutors (so it makes little sense to specify a professor) Even if it made sense to enter the name of my allocated tutor, I don’t know who it will be yet.

The day and time section was particularly weak. It seemed to assume that every course takes place at the same time each day of the week, which has not been true at any place I have studied. Taking lessons for a particular course, module or unit at (for example) 10am Monday, then 11am and 3pm Tuesday is not at all unusual.

Eventually, I managed to specify spurious values for these fields and could proceed to the note-taking section. Once I got there it was actually quite usable. This is obviously the concept which drove the application as a whole. At the moment it’s a fairly simple text-only outlining system, with pretty good keyboard-integration for moving about and adding basic emphasis. I can see obvious future opportunities to add sketch graphics, upload resources, automatic (wiki-style?) linking between notes or searches, and drag/drop of external links.

Essentially this is cool little note-taking application which is let down by a needlessly restrictive process before you can use it. My suggestions for improvement are:

Run with the whole “tag” thing. Hard associations are just so inflexible.
Lose the “school” setting from the “new user” form, to allow students to study different courses at different schools.
Turn all those compulsory course fields into tags which may be applied to anything (a user, a course, a note, a to-do,…)
Allow users to create arbitrary groups of tags (perhaps with “wizards” with some initial suggestions for common concepts) and provide both single tags and tag goups in a single drop-down when entering/editing a note, to-do etc.
Turn the concept of “course” into just a group of tags.
Allow multiple day/time pairs to be associated with a course.
Allow association of start and end dates with courses
Keep track of “created” as well as “edited” dates on notes, and (optionally?) show them on generated output

Oh, and why is it “stu.dicio.us” instead of the much more reasonable “stu.dio.us” ?

freedbacking stu.dicio.us What is Freedbacking?

Posted by Frank as Other News, Resources at 11:01 AM CEST

No Comments »

eSchool News online - Teacher development key to tech success	26 July 2006
July 21, 2006—A new survey of teachers and their use of technology suggests there is a clear correlation between hours spent in professional development, classroom integration of technology, and improved student performance. Read more at: eSchool News online - Teacher development key to tech success Posted by Frank as Other News, Teaching at 7:52 AM CEST 1 Comment »

Problems with Bloom’s Taxonomy	19 July 2006
For anyone struggling with finding something to write about Bloom’s Taxonomy, here’s an interesting little article offering a critique. Definately food for thought. Read more at: PerformanceXpress October 2002 Posted by Frank as Resources at 8:27 AM CEST No Comments »

The Open University : Open Content Initiative : OCI Press Release	15 March 2006
Excellent News. The Open University is seriously getting open about its learning materials and planning to put a lot of it on the web for anyone. I reckon this project should be worth keeping an eye on: The Open University : Open Content Initiative : OCI Press Release Posted by Frank as Other News, Resources at 8:48 AM CET No Comments »

Blackboard vs. Moodle	15 February 2006
There’s quite a battle going on between virtual learning environments, as anyone who has looked into it will know all too well. Something as significant as a system to use for all teaching at an institution can be a lot of work. As with so many big investments, though, most people only get to know and work with one of the choices. So I was impressed to find a detailled and quantative comparison between two of the top candidates Moodle and Blackboard. Interesting reading. Read more at: Blackboard vs. Moodle Posted by Frank as Other News, Resources at 10:51 AM CET No Comments »

Blackboard vs. Moodle

15 February 2006

There’s quite a battle going on between virtual learning environments, as anyone who has looked into it will know all too well. Something as significant as a system to use for all teaching at an institution can be a lot of work. As with so many big investments, though, most people only get to know and work with one of the choices.

So I was impressed to find a detailled and quantative comparison between two of the top candidates Moodle and Blackboard. Interesting reading.