A SUNDAY shift on The Herald’s Politics Watch tends to begin the same way, with an early trip to buy the papers. Usually it is just myself, a couple of other larks, and the woman who keeps an eye on the self-checkout area. All quiet on the supermarket front.

AN item for the “there’s always one” file. Only days into the great lockdown and some people are just not coping. Take the holidaymaker – British, of course – who decided she would flout the rules and have a dip at Paradise Park in Tenerife.

OKAY, the tale that follows is not exactly up there with the yarns spun by those Florentines fleeing the plague in The Decameron, but bear with me. It is hard to be a Ustinov-standard raconteur when that big wide world you took for granted has shrunk to the size of an egg.

ONE trusts the stork’s passage across London was peaceful, its job of delivering Baby Johnson to his delighted parents made easier by the emptiness of the skies. Congratulations and welcome, young man.

HELLO and welcome to Step on a Rake, the game show where clever people do dumb things. Previous winners of the show have included Catherine “Second Home” Calderwood, Scotland’s former chief medical officer, and Robert Jenrick, England’s well-travelled Communities Minister.

Crave pragmatic, honest, clear-eyed conversation about the realities of ed tech? Here's a reading list from Education Week, as presented at ISTE 2019.

The only way an ed-tech company can have a meaningful impact in schools is by addressing a specific problem and offering a real solution.

Fewer than one-third of America's teachers say ed-tech innovations have changed their beliefs about what school should look like, according to a new Education Week survey.

Effective management approaches are not skills principals typically learn through the traditional pathways of education. To fill the gap, they are turning to business programs and publications.

Teachers say the technology ecosystems they experience in their schools are largely characterized by incremental, rather than transformational, changes.

The Florida Department of Education is in a bitter dispute with a software company it hired to create online resources aligned with the standards for teachers and students.

Industry observers attribute the rise to heightened interest in ed-tech initiatives, decreasing technology costs, and the move to Common Core standards.

Following the thrill of launching new businesses, two ed-tech startups are facing the challenges of making smart decisions to attract more customers and grow revenues.

When it comes to school technology, Superintendent Doug Brubaker emphasizes robust infrastructure, regular refresh cycles, and training. Taxpayers and teachers are buying into the practical approach.

The public-private initiative between the technology company and a city school aims to prepare students for future careers.

Analysts and business officials wonder if the education technology market faces the risk of a crash, similar to what occurred during the dot-com bust in the 1990s.

Education Week asked senior executives from some of the biggest and fastest-growing companies in the United States that question. You might be surprised by what they had to say.

A private equity company plans to acquire Renaissance Learning for $1.1 billion in a deal that will be one of the largest acquisitions ever in educational technology.

A new nonprofit that will convene technology experts from across business, nonprofit, government, and education sectors will begin its big-picture problem solving in the educational arena.

The resignation is the latest change for the educational software giant, which is facing increasing competition in selling learning-management systems to schools and colleges.

The growing popularity of voice-activated technologies is forcing educators to think about the role such tools play in preparing students for the jobs of the future.

Two professors propose a plan to launch a new organization that would evaluate education technology solutions and report those results to schools and ed-tech entrepreneurs.

"Folks in some foundations are quietly expressing frustration that they've been cautioned to stay in their lane and only fund things aligned with their pre-COVID strategy," says Stacey Childress.

Less than 20 percent of respondents to a new CoSN survey marked any items on a list of cybersecurity threats as "high-risk" from their perspective.

FIRST it was Bond, then Peter Rabbit, followed by The Secret Garden. Due to the coronavirus crisis, film distributors have been pulling movies from the schedules left, right and centre and postponing their releases till later in the year.

WHILE we may not be able to venture far from home in the coming weeks, that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the wonders of Scotland – city skylines, beaches, mountains, woodland and rugged wilderness – safely from the comfort of our sofas.

The Conversation

IT’S all too easy to lose track of many of the quirky, moving, interesting films that have been shot in Scotland over the years. Some of the sparkling gems on these pages attracted decent reviews upon release before fading from view; others slipped under most people’s radar. The 10 films here are funny, or dark, or insightful. All have something to say; all are worth tracking down, and watching, whether it’s for the first time, or the first time since they were released.

“THE little island of Todday is a completely isolated community,” declares the voiceover at the start of the 1949 Ealing Studios classic Whisky Galore. “100 miles from the mainland, 100 miles from the nearest cinema or dancehall. Oh, but the islanders know how to enjoy themselves. They have all that they need. But in 1943, disaster overwhelmed this little island. Not famine, nor pestilence, nor Hitler’s bombs, or the hordes of an invading army, but something far, far worse: ‘There is n

What's the story?

FOOTBALLERS are performers, we all know that. But can they tackle a film script? Can they find the head space to turn out a tricky line on a crowded set? And what of football managers? Can they take to acting? We’ve long believed them to have the ego of an oligarch and to make the demands of a dictator. Does any of this suggest those born to kick balls around a park can turn their hand to thespianism?

LIKE many of your readers, I would imagine, I am a fairly enthusiastic armchair football supporter with no real club affiliation.

NEIL Mackay (“Johnson? Sturgeon? When it comes to coronavirus they are both the same”, The Herald, May 5) lambasts Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson for both taking an almost identical approach in their fight against Covid-19, somehow implying that this is in itself a fault.

IT is good to see that one of your readers, R Russell Smith, has been enjoying our wildlife and fresh air, having “walked over fields and alongside the burn close to home, enjoying the sunshine and company of lambs gambolling” (Herald letters, May 5).

YOU report (HeraldScotland, May 5) that Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the UK government’s key advisers on the current lockdown restrictions, has resigned after breaching the government (and his own) strong advice on the need for social distancing.

BEING a full-time, voluntary, unpaid carer, since November 2018, for my wife, who has dementia, I would like to ask a question of the Scottish Government, especially Jeane Freeman, the health secretary.

THE Herald has reported (May 6) on another economically and socially “lost generation” of children and young people due to Covid-19.

New findings on a state initiative in Wisconsin suggest that to make the most out of smaller class sizes in the early grades, teachers should focus on basic skills when they have one-on-one contact with students, ask children to discuss and demonstrate what they know, and have a firm, but nurturing,

Gov. Jeb Bush has warned that Florida won't meet class-size limits without taking such steps as expanding private school vouchers, lifting restrictions on the number of charter schools, and moving to year-round schedules.

The proposed budget from the Trump administration eliminates the Title II grant program, which pays for professional development and class-size reduction efforts.

A majority of states have at least one policy that limits the number of students that may be in a general education classroom, according to the Education Commission of the States. Among states that have changed their class-size policies since 2008, all have opted to relax those constraints.

Renee Moore questions the wisdom of the the idea—raised in recent days by both Bill Gates and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—of paying effective teachers more for taking on larger class sizes: Giving the most effective teachers larger classes is NOT a way to reward them, but it is a way to

In an opinion piece published by the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peter Smagorinsky, a professor of English education at the University of Georgia, questions the value of recent policy reports showing that increases in class sizes do not have a detrimental effect on student test scores. Most peo

Keeping preschool class sizes at or under 20 children, and keeping child-teacher ratios at 10 to 1, will work for most children in preschool, according to a new study.

In recent years, reducing class size has gained increased prominence as a school-improvement strategy. Some 40 states now have class-size-reduction initiatives in place, and federal money is available for such efforts as well. The teachers' unions, meanwhile, routinely tout class-size reduction as a

Class size does matter for teachers and students, but only if the instruction used in the small class size is different from those instructional practices used in a large one.

Only very large reductions in class size are likely to lead to significant long-term effects on student achievement, a new research synthesis says.