This is such a simple idea for looking at the impact of design and colour on Branding for Marketing, this website has literally used white-out (or Tipex for our UK colleagues) to remove all the colours from some very everyday objects.

It makes a really nice starter activity to put 6 or so pictures up on the whiteboard and get students to see if they can spot the most famous brand that matches each picture.

There are four examples above! what are the brands???

Top-left: Converse
Top-right: Trivial Pursuit
Bottom-left: Toblerone
Bottom-right: Tabasco

They make an excellent activity with mini-whiteboards to see which group can guess the correct brand the quickest (if you project one picture at a time).
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I have to be honest, I don't think much of the technology adoption curve!  It is not like the Product Life Cycle Curve (which applies to product / services) and has defined periods of:

• Introduction
• Growth
• Maturity
• Decline
• (and possible extension strategies)

The Product Life Cycle works and there are exceptions that don't follow the normal curve (fads ,fashions etc). The problem that I have with the Technology Adoption Curve is that it seems to assume that every single technological development is a must have for education which is not true. There are, I am sure, many technological options that are not good, not useful. The way this curve works is as a convenient oversimplification to try to persuade others that new technologies are good and that they all follow this type of model.

.I must admit I created a twitter account but did not really do much with it for a long time. I think my problem was thinking that everything I tweeted had to be either so profound or so interesting, that this inhibited me from tweeting anything at all. The sad situation was that I did not use twitter at all for quite a long time but this changed a couple of years ago.

These are my tips for getting the most benefit out of using Twitter

1) Build your network of people that you follow and make sure to especially follow those that you might not agree with. Keeping an open mind and challenging your current ideas is a vital part of reflective practice. I have found Twitter invaluable for giving me ideas and for me to share my own! You might also want to follow any experts in your field of teaching and learning.

2) Use Tweetdeck to aggregate a flow of news so that you can follow topics of interest using hashtags. This is my general list of hashtags and the ones that I use mostly are highlighted in red. Other Twitter users might have collated lists of Twitter users in certain fields and I certainly make use of the lists provided by Tutor2u (I like to look at their Business Studies Teachers on Twitter list as well as their list of economics teachers)

3) Participate in a Twitter chat on topics of interest - these are normally held at a certain time on a regular schedule and you can share a lot of ideas about teaching and learning. I personally like ones that are in the morning and on weekends so I can dedicate some time to sharing ideas.

4) Use Twitter in class, this could be a simple Plenary at the end of a lesson, it could be the sharing of resources, quizzes, news articles, it is a very simple way to give links out to students on the fly and saves having to post them all up on your school Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). You can also run simple polls with student favouriting or retweeting to vote / show an answer to even tweeting an answer in reply. I like the ways that Twitter forces students to summarise and distill their ideas.

5) Share with other school stakeholders; parents and guardians can follow your school Twitter accounts to get a general idea of what topics are being covered in class or what is going on at school. Twitter can very easily be linked to school websites of blogs to give a live feed of information!

I am always looking at how to make Computer Science accessible, interesting (and fun!) for students and the next unit I will be teaching requires students to start to understand how simple graphics can be created (and understood by a computer). I remember when I first played around with a BBC microcomputer in my school computer lab that we had to look at doing some simple bit / block manipulation so that we could print special characters such as Pi.

This then is my take on getting students to use their simple binary knowledge (they have looked at binary and how up to 5 bits works) and now it's time to take this knowledge and use a simple task (1 bit binary which means two colours) and then progressing to 3 bit combinations (allowing for 8 colours).

There are two spreadsheets that can be used which are available here and these can be shared with students.

• Task 1 is a simple 10 X 10 grid with 2 colours
• Task 2 is a 15 X 15 grid that allows 8 colours to be used

For students that are not doing programming,  a simple spreadsheet can be constructed by students to show their understanding (example shown below).

For students that are doing Python, I get them to write a simple program to make the conversion. 

The example below is a particularly nice one as it also makes use of functions and a very simple menu system!

The example spreadsheet and python code can be accessed here.

A very different approach done by my students can be seen here

Getting to grips with Python and Year 10/11 requires some quick ideas of tasks that build on prior (coding) knowledge and enables students to apply the concepts they have studied.

​I am in the process of building a list of resources and tasks that can be used to teach / practice coding concepts (and where possible link into other aspects of the curriculum in other subjects) and this is one simple idea that practices quite a lot of different aspects of Python. 

In writing a program to calculate the average of a number is inputted numbers, it practices the use to lists, variables, iteration, use of some simple functions  (and also use of printing text with variables).

The task that I set my students was as follows:

• Ask the User for how many numbers they need to input (to calculate the average)
• Take the input(s) from the user
• Calculate the average of the numbers
• Print - The total of all the numbers inputted
• Print - all the numbers inputted
• Print - the average of all the inputted numbers

This program can be achieved in a number of ways (but the aim would be to do it as economically as possible) which is shown above!

For more gifted students, there is the option for an Extension task: to Calculate and Print out the Highest and Lowest numbers as well (code for this program is shown below):

The files for both programs can be downloaded here