Mr Portman | Primary School Teacher - Login

WIRBS return!

Well, sort of... the black, round thingies on this site are from a set of icons called Friendly Fire.

They were created by someone known as Sniffels, on Deviant Art.

Free Font!!!

You may think this website looks cool, but it might look positively sub-zero when you have a font called Akbar installed on your computer! Well, it did until the re-design, but you still need it!

I've arranged for permission to host the font on this site, so... download the Akbar font!

The font is based on Matt Groening's handwriting, so it's way cooler than Comic Sans. Full instructions on how to install the font on your computers are available here.

If you have a Mac, then you'll need to visit the creator's website and download the font from there.

About This Site

No pixels were hurt during the making of this site.

Neither were any animals, except for a chicken, served in a delicious Madras sauce with a warm naan bread, but that was killed before I started. Mmm...

Accessibility

I've built this site with the target audience in mind, which consists of anyone interested in learning (including school children, parents, other teachers). The site was built to be accessible right from the beginning of the design process, but please let me know if you have any problems viewing the site. It used to validate to XHTML 1.1, but I've found more important things to do than worry about that.

I haven't tested this new layout yet but I intend for it to display correctly in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE7 and IE8. I've also built in a function to identify mobile browsers and direct to a specific stylesheet, but that sheet isn't finished yet for this design. I'm not supporting IE6 because I don't have to and I don't want to.

Who are you?

I'm a primary school teacher at Trowse Primary School, Norwich. I'm also into building wbsites: as well as maintaining a number of sites of my own, I also help my wife out with her web development business, particularly during school holidays.

I trained as a teacher at the University of Bath. Before that I winged a PhD (Ooooh!) in the School of Environmental Sciences, at UEA, and before that I danced my way to a degree in geology (Ooooh! Look at you!) at the University of Derby.

If you want to know more, try googling my name... but bear in mind there is probably someone else with the same name.

If you've got a PhD, why are you teaching in a primary school?

I don't know of any other job where I can teach kids of primary school age... play with plasticine, build robots out of Lego, read stories about mythical Greek monsters, write stories about mythical Greek monsters, splash water everywhere in the name of science, run around playing hockey... the list goes on and on.

How do I contact you?

There's a form at the bottom of this page. Get there quickly by using the quick links and selecting Get in touch!

Can I use this site?

You are, aren't you? But bear the following in mind:

I'm not responsible for any of the sites I link to. With the exception of the odd few, they are not maintained by me, but by other people, most of who I've never met. If you visit them, you visit them at your own risk.

If something goes catastrophically wrong because you read something on my site and took it as the gospel truth, that's your problem, not mine. A lot of what's on the web is a load of rubbish and it is your responsibility to evaluate everything you come across. My opinions are just that.

What data do you collect??

Each time you visit my site, your visit is logged. This helps me gather statistics so I can make sure the content is relevant to you.

If you email me, I'll need your name and email address, but I won't pass them on to anyone else.

Who built this site?

Me.

Have you heard of WordPress?

Yes - this is a WordPress site.

Are you on Twitter?

Yes. Follow me here, but my tweets are protected so you'll need to make a request. I mostly tweet about education and web development.

Can I link to your site?

Yes - I'd be delighted if you would. But only if it's a suitable site, mind.