foolfillment: the blog

Last week I wrote about my visit to Prestonpans Primary School, well tomorrow is the return leg.

At the start of this year, way back in August/September time, I still had the chance to do some observations around the school. I remember seeing a number of 1st year classes and being struck (again) by the huge range of subjects and teachers that they encounter. Our pupils live an incredibly experience-rich life, and the way most of them adapt to all the different personalities - teachers and classmates - they encounter is nothing short of a marvel.

It’s easy to forget about what happens around the rest of the school and become stuck inside your own departmental bubble, and sometimes I think it’s important to take that step back and just marvel at how the majority cope with such a dynamic life. In most walks of life outside of schools you are in a comparatively slow changing environment where the people with whom you have to engage and the subject areas you have to recall do not change every 50 minutes, so when a class arrives at my classroom/workshop and are a little hyper then it is pretty important that there are stable expectations (and the support to meet those expectations) to help them settle down and become grounded again. Without taking that step back occasionally it is easy to fall into the trap of wanting a class to ‘just’ behave, rather than working to see how I fit in with the rest of the school.

The question is, what can be done when those expectations and supports are not clear to the pupils as they move around the school? It must be easier if you have your own classroom (is it?) but when you are in a CDT department and flit between any of 6 different rooms, all being left in different states by different teachers it becomes pretty difficult to keep things settled. I suppose it takes a consistent approach and attitude from all staff in the department, but does that diminish your opportunity to make your own mark on a class atmosphere?

A rather rambling post but, my main point is it will be interesting to see what my primary visitor makes of life in a busy secondary school. I’ve tried to plan a wide range of classes for her to visit tomorrow and I wonder what her expectations of the visit and the pupils are. I think she’ll be astounded :-).

This morning I had my last lecture ever as an undergraduate (assuming that I haven’t messed up somewhere and I actually pass this year!) and afterwards Krysia took the chance to show our class the resource she’s made as part of her dissertation. It’s a website that I’ve been helping her set up and it’s been pretty good to have something to work on other than my own dissertation for a while.

Anyway, now that it’s no longer under wraps I thought I’d share a little bit about it here. It is a site that has been set up to enable newly qualified tech teachers like myself and Krysia to share what we’re doing with other new tech teachers. It’s set up so that it is (fingers crossed) really easy for us to each have a blog where we can upload resources we’ve made, share our experiences in the job, and generally support each other through what is likely to be a fairly hectic and perhaps fraught year. With the magic of RSS everything that gets uploaded can be categorised and aggregated in any number of different ways. A user might want to keep in touch with everything that’s going on, another user might only want to see things about Graphic Communication, another user might only care about Intermediate 2 things, or any combination of these. I think it’s all set up so it’s really easy to do and all me and Krysia have to do is show people the power of it and to get them started.

The idea of it has come out of lots of research and reading that Krysia has done, and what really struck me when Krysia first talked to me about it was the similarities in what she was saying and what is being said and done in East Lothian with Edubuzz. What has come out of it is technoBuzz.co.uk. When we were trying to come up with names we really struggled but technobuzz really struck a chord, the problem we faced was deciding if it was too similar to edubuzz. In the end we went for it and I hope that we’re not ticking anybody off by doing so, but the two projects do have fairly similar outlooks so I hope we’re okay.

I hate to say it but even though we’re technology teachers the majority of my class wouldn’t have the first clue how to use RSS, will never have heard of Web2.0, and haven’t even considered using the internet in lessons. The word blog just makes some people sleepy before you can explain the potential. I really wish on my course there had been something like the lectures that David Muir and Ewan McIntosh have given at Jordanhill on using new technology in the classroom.

That said I’m actually really excited about technobuzz and can’t wait to see how my classmates take to it, I really hope they see the potential this has to make next year that little bit easier to get through and get involved. It’d also be interesting to see what other teachers think of the site - once it has been running for a while and any bugs have been ironed out it could be extended to all techy teachers, or into other subjects.