Thanks for reading our blog over the past two years (and longer, in its old format - going back to , with the first post from ), I hope you've found something of interest hidden amongst .

You can keep up to date with the latest learning output at our , and more general Scottish content at , along with the .

Seemed like a good idea at the time when I got an email asking me if I would take part in a children's radio show for . After all I'm used to working with kids and this looked like a great opportunity for them to and take part in their own show. The request came several months ago and I plotted it in to my calendar but as usual with my life, things can change on a daily basis and I found myself working in London the day before... so when my alarm rang at 4.30am on the morning of the recording, I was definitely having second thoughts!!

I had to take the early flight in order to be sure I would get to Glasgow for the scheduled slot. No problem though - flight was on time and I even had time to grab a cup of tea and an outrageous strawberry cupcake from a phenomenal little caf茅 on Byres Road, before heading over the for my rendez-vous with p6s. Perfect.

is a small town in Clackmannanshire, about 15 minutes from where I live in so I was delighted to be mixing with kids from my area. I wasn't sure how much they would know about tennis because the two courts in the town at the old DCL plant, are derelict and have been for several years. In fact there is only one tennis club in the whole of Clackmannan county... but I was aware that there had been some mini tennis coaching in the school gym during the last few months and that there's a bit of a campaign going on to resurrect the derelict courts! Good news. Hope I can help them out with that and that the kids who are keen to try tennis can finally have a club to play at!

Well, what a very pleasant surprise I got - 28 kids all very smartly dressed in their blue school sweatshirts and each of them had a question to ask. Smart move from the teacher Mrs Doran who had got the kids to print out their questions so they didn't forget what they were going to say! I sat up on a pretty high chair at the front of the room with the shows presenter who told me she was training to be a football coach because her daughter had got into girls footy! She also bemoaned the fact that there are hardly any female coaches. Had to agree with her there. It's the same in tennis.

Anyway, back to the studio. Richard Bull, the producer kicked off by explaining all the house rules to the kids - very important for them to know where the fire exits are, and the loos! Laura who was fantastic at engaging the kids and making them feel comfortable kicked everything off with the first question and it all rolled pretty smoothly from there. Some great questions which showed that the kids had clearly done their homework. Everything from Andy's dog to Jamie's hair to my plans for a tennis academy! One question floored me - "what is the funniest thing that has happened when you have been at a tennis event?". I really couldn't think of anything funny off the top of my head so I said I would come back to that one. At the back of my mind, I kept searching for a funny moment that would appeal to kids, but I just couldn't find anything. Their humour, I reckoned, would be totally different to mine, though Jamie and Andy would probably argue that one!

Great question from Thibault (pronounce Teebo) who asked about how kids from Menstrie could be encouraged to play tennis when there are no courts in the town. It's a real issue for me that one because so many Scottish children (and adults) are aware of tennis these days and keen to try it but we simply don't have enough local facilities across the country. It's great that mini tennis classes for p3/4 are going on in school gyms but if the kids enjoy it and want to play outwith school, they need a local park or club which is accessible, affordable and which has lots of activity going on. It's one thing attracting kids to a sport, it's another thing retaining them. That boils down to the environment - facilities and people to create activity.

I suggested they approach their local newspaper to highlight their participation in the show and to draw attention to the fact that there's no tennis in the town but that there are two derelict courts which could be regenerated. Put a bit of pressure on the local council. I can see that will be my next project and I will kick it off with a visit to the school next month to do some mini tennis sessions - in the gym - and follow that up with some teacher training classes and an equipment drop.

So you have started something Thibault...

It looked like the kids and the teachers enjoyed the day out. "Better than maths?" I asked. Resounding "yes". I enjoyed it too and for sure I'm going to see them all again! Well done to the 91福利社 for dreaming up this great idea and giving the kids the opportunity to make their own radio show. Wonderful experience for them all.

Listen to the q&a with Judy Murray and the P6 pupils in the podcast which is .

You can subcribe to podcasts for Scottish learners at and . And have a look through the other available or the .

is joined by , , and , for the debate in front of invited guests and a live audience - tackling everything from children's education to learning in later life.

I'm looking forward to watching the programme after attending in December and catching up with 's programme, looking at the future funding and role of Scottish universities and .

Showing tonight at 22:40 on 91福利社 One Scotland, the soon after, for the usual seven days. If you have any comments about the debate or programmes, do let us know your thoughts...

Our site is a beginner's guide to the brain, and getting yours to work better. And if learning neuroscience helps to understand the mechanisms of learning and aids teachers in identifying how children learn best in order to maximise their capabilities, it sounds a good thing.

But if, as suggested by of Edinburgh University on , learning is all about getting knowledge into your head - and locking it in by using the information, will we be back to drumming things in, learning by rote? Will teachers want that? And is that the best for the ?

I hadn't heard of before our . But from that event and watching talks and interviews with him in our , elsewhere , on , on , and this , I've found him to be an engaging speaker and entertaining storyteller.

In the second half of his impassioned speech he turns his attention to this country. If you can't spare the full 44 minutes, watch from 27 minutes for the question we should be asking, "are we doing the best for our children in schools here at home?". With survival and liberty, education is one of the most fundamental rights of the child. How can we all make a real difference to young lives?

will be available on 91福利社 iPlayer until Tuesday evening - watch or download it while you can.

Update: You can now watch online, or embed into your own blog.

There's been a series of attacks on pay and conditions.

First up politicians proposing a - effectively a pay cut as inflation is escalating.

There's to be a .

And is already tackling gains such as and its pay levels.

Now a think tank the - run by a former teacher - is calling on so that in-service days are less disruptive for families.

That suggestion seemed to strike a chord. When my colleague Jackie O'Brien in Inverness interviewed parents outside she found many had already thought about the report they'd first heard about on 91福利社 and that morning. It is unusual to find this level of awareness of an education issue in the news.

Interestingly the straw poll indicated a gender divide. Mothers seemed to be supportive of reorganisation of in-service days while dads indicated the current arrangement is absolutely fine.

The activities in Talkie Time are great for early and first level and and are so much fun that the adults may just get carried away too! You can find extensive clips from Rodd's shows on the , where they will remain even after the programme is no longer on iPlayer. It will shortly become available too in our , where you can find

In addition, CBeebies have a where you can talk to Rodd and help him with all the scrapes he gets himself into. For all the grown ups who just can't get their head around talking to your telly, CBeebies have also provided a

I'd love to hear from any of you who have used Talkie Time at home or in class - we hope you enjoy it and have lots of fun chatting to Rodd.

Outdoor education and enterprise are just some of the lessons which may not be delivered by traditional teachers there.

Some want no truck with the principle in Scotland arguing that instruction is likely to be superficial. There's concern untrained teachers may for example address for the most part the most extrovert children in the class or even lack the skills to engage the majority of the class.

Potentially there could be bored or ignored children.

Others argue the injection of new blood from the outside world especially young blood isn't the worst thing that can happen to a school. More than one teacher goes straight into teacher training after completing their own education which limits the experiences they can draw on.

Some teachers don't believe they received substantial training in sport and the arts so may not be totally against someone else taking over those subjects.

But for teaching unions the concern is that the introduction to schools of less well paid instructors makes it more difficult to uphold teachers' pay, conditions and status.

You can watch a discussion on this topic from Sunday's (around 35 minutes in)

is a new sitcom aimed at pre-teens which addresses all those thorny topics around growing up. It's a collaboration, so we're working with , and as well as practitioners across the country to make this a really great resource for the classroom and home. The idea is to tackle these issues but in such an entertaining way that embarrassment levels are kept to a minimum - for pupils and teachers alike!

Keep an eye here on the blog for more updates about Lara and her friends, and we hope you will follow her adventures when the series launches soon.

It isn't every week that poetry dominates the news, but this past week may just be exceptional. The appointment of , in succession to the late Edwin Morgan, continues a fine cultural tradition in the life of the nation and could hardly have come at a more appropriate time, in the week when we celebrate the birth of THE national poet, the man whom , another of our modern-day poets and Burns biographer, described as 'the rhythmic heart of the nation, forever supplying warm sustaining blood to the otherwise cold body of Scotland'. Cultural status doesn't come much higher than that!

The young Robert differed from most of his peers as a result of the value his father placed on a formal education, he was also conversant with some of the great writers in the English language and could quote freely from Shakespeare and the Bible. How many young people leaving Primary 7 could do that today?

But the world is different today, I hear you say. How is it possible, in the age of the iPod, Wikipedia and Lady Gaga, to engage children in the life and works of a ploughman poet who has been dead for over 200 years? Of course, the world moves on, as last week's release of the (available free from iTunes) will testify, but some things never change, like the quest for love, the struggle to feed and care for one's family, the companionship of friends, the appreciation of music and a good story, the search for justice and the absolute belief in the equality of men, regardless of colour, class or creed, the very things which Burns valued in his life, and has come to represent in ours. And thanks to new technology, the interest in the man and his works is likely to increase, rather than diminish, with time.

How apt for a man whose greatest achievement was arguably that he collected and preserved for future generations the traditional songs and tunes of Scotland, many of which would have been lost but for his determined efforts - no Microsoft Word, Google docs, memory sticks or CDs at the end of the 18th Century!

The first engagement with Burns should always be through the ears, rather than the eyes. After all, many of the early poems were not originally written down, but composed by the author in his head, memorised and delivered first-hand to their normally flattered recipient (the biting satires would come later). Hence the importance of rhythm and rhyme, and the need for the poems to be spoken aloud.

So when introducing Burns in the classroom, make use of the and let the poems speak for themselves. Children will delight in the imagery, the onomatopoeia and the often ghoulish nature of the subject matter. Burns had latched on to the fact that we all like a scary story long before Harry Potter or the Twilight phenomenon.

Set kids the challenge of identifying the Scots words which are still in use today. Send them away to ask their grannies to supply them with more, and when they are ready, encourage them to tell their own stories in the style of their very own national bard. More importantly, try it yourself, just like I did!

Some Interesting Facts about Robert Burns (That Perhaps You Didn't Know)

• After Queen Victoria and Christopher Columbus, Robert Burns has more statues dedicated to him around the world than any other non-religious figure.
• Auld Lang Syne is recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as one of the three most popular songs in the English language, along with Happy Birthday and For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.
• A miniature book of Robert Burns' poetry was carried into orbit by astronaut Nick Patrick on a two-week space mission in 2010, completing a 5.7 million mile trip and 217 orbits of the Earth.
• Robert Burns was the first ever person to appear on a commemorative bottle of Coca-Cola, in 2009.
• US fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger claims to be a direct descendent of Robert Burns.
• Burns' body was dug up 19 years after he died to be placed in a new cemetery in Dumfries. During the exhumation his skull was measured and found to be bigger than that of the average man.
• Pop singer Michael Jackson is said to have been a big fan of the poet, and there are rumours that he worked on an album, not yet released, setting the Scotsman's poems to music.

Anyone who's had the pleasure of hearing Liz Lochhead read her work will testify to the exuberance and passion she puts in to her performances, bringing poetry alive for children and adults alike.

It's interesting too that perhaps her best known poem, is not only about going to school, but is a critique of the attitudes towards Scots language in Scottish schools. Her final lines, 'The way it had to be said/Was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead' are a damning indictment not only of the devalued status of Scots in the classroom, but of so many strange notions of class and propriety which are also, unfortunately, tangled up with poetry.

I like the idea that working-class, young female Scottish (and very much alive!) students who may have felt poetry wasn't for them will be inspired to write by a strong role model such as Liz Lochhead. I'm sure that her audience will be far, far wider than that, but it's nonetheless great to think of the apple-cart of poetry being upset, just a wee bit. With , another Scottish female writer, as the it seems now's the time for young women in Scotland to get reading and writing poetry.

I'm sure we'll be hearing lots more about a certain other national poet next week, so I think it would be great if perhaps, as with a , schools allow Liz Lochhead's work to serve as the 'Reply from the Lassies', or, 'Reply from the 21st Century'. Indeed, the first appointment of our new Makar will be to open the new in Alloway. I hope that we learn to give our best poets better recognition while they are here, living, breathing, reading and writing among us - perhaps the classroom is the place to start.

Some extra reading:

At the time I'm not sure I even pretended to understand what that could mean. Later that month Ewan gave a presentation to our department, during which he highlighted Twitter with a practical demonstration, asking his followers if anyone had any messages for our team at the 91福利社 (I seem to remember the demand to "bring back "). He also showed how teachers were using it to share ideas and links.

With that, and after watching this video explaining , I was persuaded to give it a go, despite my anxiety tremors which usually kick in when dealing with anything "social...". So it's thanks to Ewan that I've managed to 'get' Twitter and go on to get things from it. Ewan's been using Twitter since January 2007 - four years on, it's apparently not a passing fad.

But despite the celebrities and programmes really trying and testing Twitter for themselves, especially over the past year, I still hear that "I just don't get get Twitter" from family, friends and colleagues. And all too often you see the aborted accounts of two tweets: "Ooh I've signed up to Twitter!" followed by "Ummm...". As an introduction I always say that I treat Twitter like a text message to no-one in particular: if someone picks up on it then hooray (or heaven help you, depending on content); don't expect an answer or feedback, but don't be shy to help or answer others too.

So here's some reasons for why I suggest if you're interested in education you should be giving Twitter a go:

• Shared links and resources - every single day you'll find something new, from personal blog posts, links a teacher may have stumbled across, the programme they might be tuning into, there'll be something to entice/enthrall/annoy/ignore. And all the way to -city.


• Conferences - this week has seen and . I'd know nowt much about them without reports back from the floor - kudos to tweets pointing to blog posts from and for starters. I doubt I'd know much about either and certainly wouldn't have attended the very special .


• Help and advice - I've seen bona fide cries for help on how to deal with difficult pupils or parents, to tips for next-day job interviews, as well as general queries starting "does anyone know..."


• Expanding your horizons - starting from a Scottish standpoint, I've found some interesting links and viewpoints from every single part of the country, as well as from teachers down south or outwith my own 'range', and noted differences and similarities from educators in America or Australia, for example. Not to mention reports from those that get to travel more than us.


• Friends and personalities - from general banter, the human touch reminds us all that we're all in this together and wee things from insights into family/personal life to social meet ups - in holiday times, or just to celebrate poetry and/or beer - it can be a very good laugh online or in person. And that's not to mention accessibility to a human voice from companies, celebrities or politicians - for example, since the start of the year education secretary .

And all that checkable at a glance on your computer or mobile phone.

The only little warning I'd give, if it's really needed, is to be conscious of its repercussions - it is publishing to the web, and open to all. So that tweet, whether on a whim, as an angry reaction or after a few relaxing glasses of wine, .

And finally, I've an admission to make, I'm not on that other social-media thingy, Facebook - I fear I'd be a bit too much of a compulsive for that, constantly checking. A thing I like about Twitter is in its name - it is like tuning into birdsong - and is as ignorable or as enticing as your mood allows. So if you've not checked it out, have a look and sign up if you like. And if you want help finding new friends and opportunities give a shout. Though for proper engagement and enrichment, I'd suggest start by following (), () and - and we'll put you in touch with some jolly interesting people.

.

The change in government at Westminster and the implementation of the new curriculum have made it an interesting time to be involved in Scottish education, bringing to mind that old Chinese curse, 'may you live in interesting times'. But, despite many of the headlines, it wasn't all doom and gloom.

There was so much good practice going on in schools it's hard to single out any examples. I loved seeing the wee faces of the 'class of the week' at in Kilwinning when they came striding into class proudly singing 'we won the cup!' as has become traditional after their weekly assembly. I was fascinated by the taking place in (amongst others) to enhance understanding of Holocaust education. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the Primary 6 pupils at in Falkirk who gave our producer, Gerald Strother and I and showed us their blogs and wiki pages. I think we may have found a few reporters of the future for the 91福利社 Newsroom!

If I had to pick just one highlight, though, it would be the day I spent at in Glasgow. The pupils at Hazelwood range from 2 to 19 years old, and all have sensory impairments and pronounced support needs. We've had young people from Hazelwood in the LAB , and we've previously made a film about the design of their beautiful building, which is a marvel of architecture and really empowers the pupils to be independent.

I happened to be there on November 5th, and watching how carefully they prepared for their 'Guy Fawkes' assembly was just amazing. An MP3 player was loaded full of firework sounds as the real thing might be too loud for some of the children, but the staff wanted them to have the sensation of fireworks. The bonfire was lit, even in the wet conditions, and marshmallows were toasted. My senses were alive - the smell of the fire and the damp wood, the taste of the marshmallow, the noises of fireworks, and it made me realise just how much thought has to go in to delivering learning for young people with sensory impairment.

I even had a go on a trampoline with Margaret, the , and watched as she used her momentum to get children moving who may not be able to exercise on their own. The reactions from the young children were amazing to see and the results she's had have been fantastic - children sitting up unaided, or pushing down with their arms where they couldn't before.

Combine this with the classroom where young children were listening to Polish classical music as one of their number was Polish, and they were learning about her homeland as a project - this place is inspiring and I was privileged to meet the staff and pupils there.

I'd like to say a big thanks to all the schools who welcomed me in this year - and I'll be out and about on my travels again in January. In the meantime, have a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Maybe you'll ring in the bells with the , or in a ... in either case, all the best from the team here at 91福利社 Scotland and we'll see you in 2011.

The panel was made up by , , and . It wasn't the easiest of set ups for the producer of the show after weather warnings forced the cancellation of the originally planned location in , and he was worried they wouldn't have much of an audience at the rearranged venue. Choosing a location directly opposite Glasgow University, they managed to get twenty or so hardy students into the drafty church hall, while exams were taking place in a room round the back. Brian Taylor was in good form, with his prematch warm up cup of tea, woolly bunnet and Dundee United scarf. And the panel and audience soon sparked into heated debate...

Brian Taylor talks more about the on his blog. You can download a , or read up on the .

The charting where Scottish education stands on the world stage, seems to confirm teachers' suspicions that the seemingly never ending stream of initiatives here over the last ten years caused a great deal of upheaval and didn't necessarily make a big difference to children's education.

Can anyone even remember what half of them were called? It seems a blur of ministerial launches with photo opportunities in specially selected schools.

Lots of change and lots of money over the last decade but it seems we've slumped and are now treading water in maths, science and reading.

The Scottish Government says almost routinely at the end of every press statement that the Curriculum for Excellence will tackle all problems.

head of educational research at the OECD and an authority on Scottish education, earlier this year, that he's not entirely convinced Scotland does even now have the right strategies in place. Time to go back to the drawing board?