I wrote the artticle below twelve years ago. As the UK government is planning to ban social media for under-sixteen year-olds I thought this might be relevant in an oblique sort of way. I’ve made a couple of corrections to website links, that’s all. I could have updfated the technology references too, but I wanted to preserve the original as far as possible.
Whatever you think of the current debate over news that the US Government may have been monitoring the online activity of not only its own citizens but those of other countries too, you have to admit one thing. It provides a great opportunity for ICT teachers everywhere to bring some real-world issues into their lessons, in a very newsy (ie current) way.
Privacy keyboard by g4ll4is Here are a few suggestions for class activities you might wish to pick and choose from -- and add to.
Find out: what are the plain facts. Or at least, as far as we know them. The thing is, we don't actually know all the facts, and that is a major part of the problem. So, perhaps a better question to research might be...
What are the issues being discussed?
How did the news/information become known?
Think about how the results of this research might be presented:
A timeline depicting the events unfolding. Students could do this in a spreadsheet, in the form of a graph.
Or how about a more visually appealing approach, using an application like Prezi, which has the merit of showing all the slides on the page (albeit in miniature)?
You can bring some programming into this, using PowerPoint. In a low-level way, students can automate the presentation so that each slide appears after a set interval. At a slightly higher level, they could use hyperlinks. For example, the first or second slide could have a series of labesl, like "Prism", "Whistleblower" and so on. Clicking on each of them would take the viewer to another slide, a video, or a website where more information is presented. They could make their presentation even more sophisticated by using Visual Basic for Applications.
They could create a website, and code it so that it's not just a static page or series of pages.
They could summarise the events in a series of tweets.
They could write a blog post about it.
They could make a (one minute) video.
Think about how the issue(s) could be made easy for young pupils to understand. Why not have some older pupils create a video or simple animation (or even an interactive game) to explain the issues to younger pupils?
There is scope also for how the research findings are used, and some of this could bring in colleagues from other subjects. For example:
Have some students make a video for a left-leaning organisation, while others make a video for a right-leaning organisation -- using the same basic information.
We have known for a long time that GCHQ in the UK, and other Government agencies in other countries, monitor web and email traffic for keywords. How about getting students to write a simple computer program to simulate the process? You will probably need to provide them with a set of acceptable keywords, or some (especially boys!) will try out every swear word they know. Discuss: is the program useful? Why/why not?
Finally, there are the legal and ethical issues.
If the USA is trawling through our data, where does that leave our assumed guarantees under EU Data Protection law?
Does it matter anyway? Is there merit in the view that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about?
How come this is news anyway? Boris Johnson has argued that ever since the web was invented you should have assumed that as soon as you do anything like send an email to someone, which goes to a server, or request information from a website (which resides on another server), anyone can read it. On the other hand, not everyone takes the same pragmatic view.
That last point raises another interesting issue: do your students know what happens when they send and email or do a Google search? There's another good lesson there too.
My courses running in June and July at the City Lit can now be applied for using a 15% discount code. In fact, you can use the discount code on courses to the value of between £99 and £500 running in June, July and August.
My next course, on 13th June, is Writing Using Constraints. More information here.
Be daring — leave the safety net at home!
From the blurb:
“What if the secret to unleashing your imagination was working against it? Discover the radical ideas of the French Oulipo movement, where creative constraints become a springboard for surprising, inventive writing. Experiment with challenging limitations - and find out what you’re really capable of.”
I asked Claude to convert a pdf flyer into an HTML format I could insert into a Markdown block in Squarespace. Here’s the result:
<! data-preserve-html-node="true"-- Paste this into a Squarespace CODE block (not Markdown block).
Set Type = HTML. Works on 7.0 and 7.1. -->
Write Like You
Mean It
Creative writing courses by Terry Freedman — City Lit, London 2026
Three Courses · All Levels · Write from the Very First Session
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">01</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">Writing Using Constraints</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ One-day workshop ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Oulipo</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Lipograms</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Queneau</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Experimental writing</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Rules that set you free. An intensive day exploring the Oulipo — the literary movement that turned constraints into creative rocket fuel. Lipograms, univocalics, style rewrites, and more.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30412973_/~tinyurl.com/tfoulipo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tfoulipo</a>
</div>
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">02</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">The 60-Minute Writer</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ 11 weekly sessions ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Voice</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Dialogue</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Memoir</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Experimental forms</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Every session, you write. No long lectures. No waiting. Just words on the page from the very first lesson — and a growing sense of what you can do.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30412973_/~tinyurl.com/tf60min" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tf60min</a>
</div>
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">03</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">Writing for Blogs</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ One full day · Jul or Nov 2026 ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Platform</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Audience</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Ideas</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Promotion</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Find your voice, find your audience, get started. From blank page to blog plan — you leave with ideas, a reader profile, and the confidence to publish.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30412973_/~tinyurl.com/tfwfblogs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tfwfblogs</a>
</div>
What You’ll Cover
Writing Using Constraints
What is the Oulipo?
Lipograms & univocalics
Queneau’s style rewrites
N+7 & snowball poems
Transformations
Design your own rules
The 60-Minute Writer
Point of view & voice
Memoir & subversion
Vibrant verbs
Magic metaphors
Dynamic dialogue
Erasure & story machines
Writing for Blogs
Why blog & where
Audience & personas
Generating ideas
Structure & format
Images & illustration
Promotion tactics
“Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Raymond Queneau — basis of the Writing Using Constraints course
Terry Freedman
Terry Freedman is a writer, educator, and the person behind writersknowhow.org. He has been teaching creative writing at City Lit for years, running courses that are rigorous, surprising, and genuinely fun. His writing and teaching draw on experimental literature, constraint-based methods, and a conviction that everyone has a voice worth developing.
How to Book // All courses at City Lit, Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Book at citylit.ac.uk
· Small groups · All levels welcome · No experience needed
Well, I didn’t like that much, so I neserted it into a Code block instead — which is what it said to do in the first place! Here’s the result:
Write Like You
Mean It
Creative writing courses by Terry Freedman — City Lit, London 2026
Three Courses · All Levels · Write from the Very First Session
01Writing Using Constraints
[ One-day workshop ]
OulipoLipogramsQueneauExperimental writing
Rules that set you free. An intensive day exploring the Oulipo — the literary movement that turned constraints into creative rocket fuel. Lipograms, univocalics, style rewrites, and more.
Find your voice, find your audience, get started. From blank page to blog plan — you leave with ideas, a reader profile, and the confidence to publish.
“Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Raymond Queneau — basis of the Writing Using Constraints course
Terry Freedman
Terry Freedman is a writer, educator, and the person behind writersknowhow.org. He has been teaching creative writing at City Lit for years, running courses that are rigorous, surprising, and genuinely fun. His writing and teaching draw on experimental literature, constraint-based methods, and a conviction that everyone has a voice worth developing.
How to Book // All courses at City Lit, Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Book at citylit.ac.uk
· Small groups · All levels welcome · No experience needed
It didn’t include the graphics I had inserted. These were a photograph and some speech balloons. I daresay I could have tweaked the code to make that happen, but you know, life’s too short!
If you would like to see the pdf flyer, click the button below. And if you’re reading this before 13 June 2026, there are still some places left on the course!
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
The FAST in the title stands for Focused Adaptable Structured Teaching. The book contains some interesting ideas. One of the things it doeasn’t agree with is when learning objectives are put on the screen at the start of the lesson, in the form “Students will be able to…” — though for different reasons from myself. The author writes:
“It is distracting to students when this information is presented at the beginning of the lesson. It does not add anything. Who do we think will be doing the work?”
— From Teach FAST
When I was observing a lesson once the teacher displayed:
“By the end of this lesson, some of you will have achieved X, Y and Z, some of you will achieve X and Y, and some of you will achieve X.”
As I said to the teacher afterwards, I don’t think that sort of formulation is helpful because some students, perhaps even most of them, will think they’re probably going to be in the least-achieved category, and that lack of self-confidence will probably end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s put it this way. I am trying to lern how to play the saxophone at the moment, and I am pretty sure that if the teacher began the lesson by stating that some of us will be able to play the F#Major scale and some won’t, most of us will think we are going to be the failures!
This book is full of useful techniques, logically set out, but in my experience there needs to be a certain degree of flexibility. For example, telling students that for the next 5 minutes they must be absolutely silent while you explain or demonstrate something is an excellent idea — but what do you do when it doesn’t quite work out that way.
The author recommends chunking: breaking up concepts into smaller learning objectives. That sounds like common sense, but how does a new teacher know or work out how small the chunks should be? This is one of the objections I have to Cognitive Load Theory.
The author also distinguishes between declarative and procedural lessons. I had not come across these terms before. Apparently, the former focus on learning a new concept while the latter focus on learning a new skill. There is a table showing the differences between these in practial terms.
There are plenty of diagrams to help the reader understand the concepts introduced. There is also a lot of focus on the nitty gritty, even down to details such as how students should hold up their individual whiteboards.
There are many good ideas here, and it would be worth using this book as a means of adding to your teacher toolkit, so to speak.
I have just received an advance reading copy of Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, subtitled (When) do leaders make a difference?
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
As the book arrived only today I haven’t had a chance to do much more than flick through it, but I always think it’s important to think about an issue before reading a book or an article about it. That way you can be a more engaged reader, more critical (in the intellectual sense), more active, rather than as a blank canvas on which to soak up someone else’s ideas.
I have somewhat dichotomous views of this question of whether leaders make a difference, or much of a difference. I think my views can be classified as macro and micro. Let me explain.
I have always been somewhat dubious of the so-called “great man” theory of history. For instance — and this is an example given in this book — if Hitler had been bumped off earlier in his life, would the Holocaust and a world war have been averted? It’s tempting to say, “Of course”, but as I pointed out in my review of Weimar, Germany was already a hot bed of virulent antisemitism and other far right views long before Hitler was even born. Hitler, in my view, was in the right place at the right time — and when I say “right”, I mean by his standards not mine.
That’s what I call a macro perspective, but turning to the micro one, leadership at a school level or even a departmental level can make an enormous amount of difference. For example, the technical suppoirt set-up was second to none in one school I worked with — until a new deputy head was appointed. He preferred his own ideas to the ones that actually worked, and the whole thing went down the pan in virtually no time at all.
Profits… looks at leadership in several different fields, including politics, sports, and religion, and I am very much looking forward to reading it. It will be published in September by Allen Lane, who very kindly sent me the ARC.
