foolfillment: the blog

It’s hard to believe that my time at Ross High is almost over, just a day and a half left before the end of the Summer Term and the end of my probation year. There’s lots of things running through my head about the year and it’s difficult to keep in mind that I won’t be walking the corridors there for much longer.

It has been a really good year and I’ve gained a huge amount of experience and (I think) become a lot better at this whole teaching thing. I’ll be sad to leave on Friday lunchtime but I’m sure I’ll still be in touch regularly and I hope that my classes will keep adding material to the department’s flickr account.

I just want to finish off by saying a huge thanks to all the staff at the school, in particular the all the boys in CDT. The biggest thank you has to go to all of the pupils of course, they are the ones who’ve made all the hard work, late nights, and early starts worthwhile.

I’m looking for your ideas in this post.

A quick summary first: Today saw the final training session for this year’s probationers in East Lothian. Training really isn’t the right word for it as it was more an informal afternoon with the focus being on sharing and exploring our ideas about the Learning and Teaching that is going on in East Lothian. There was another focus - recently all the probationers took part in a sector shadow where secondary teachers watched primary classes for a day then swapped over - so this gave a lead to the discussions.

The final activity we took part in was particularly useful - both for sharing ideas but also to justify what we do to other professionals. This is where I’d really appreciate your comments.

There were two headings under which we had to describe something that we think is great practice and we want to implement or continue to do when we take up our next jobs. We then mingled and shared ideas with each other. It opened up my eyes (even further) as to the variety of things that are going on in Primary schools that are just fantastic.

The first heading was Formative Assessment/Learning Strategies.
I wrote something along the lines of: Peer Assessment - evaluating each others work, pupils are much better at praising/criticising each other’s work than their own.

The second header was Management of Learning.
For this I wrote Starter questions/exercises at start of every lesson.

I’d love to hear you share anything that you consider to be essential to good learning and teaching so please leave a comment. It needn’t be much just a few words describing something that you think works.

( I toyed with the idea of writing this as a meme, so feel free to write up on your own blog and link here, or even to tag someone else.)

I’m pleased to let you know that on Monday I was interviewed for a position at Hawick High School, and subsequently offered the job which I accepted.

I’ll take up my new position in August for the new term, with my own classroom and possibly a workshop to call my very own too, unheard of delights for a techy teacher :-).

I’ll be very sad to leave Ross High as my time there has been very positive and it is a very busy department with a lot of great staff, and a lot of fantastic classes that I will be feeling very guilty about leaving behind. However this is the way things go in the current system.

The situation for probationers this year is looking pretty grim and there aren’t many jobs coming up for teachers of my subjects anywhere in Scotland so I am absolutely delighted to have secured a full-time permanent contract, with the added bonus that this is a school and department that I am really looking forward to working in. It’s a huge relief.

It’s almost the end of the first week now, just a half day tomorrow. One bit of advice that kept coming up during our induction days last week was ‘don’t let teaching take over your whole life’ and boy do I know what they meant now!
As well as all of the teaching and preparation that goes with it there is also a whole raft of paperwork I have to be keeping up to date with for getting Full Registration, that is what I think I’ll be spending this weekend doing.

teaching’s taking over my life already, I’ve got lots of things I want to get done tonight and over the weekend, and more long term projects that I haven’t even looked at beginning yet. I’m hoping that these first weeks are a bit exceptional and that soon enough I’ll be on top of it all, but for now I’m busy all hours.

I’m really enjoying it though!

So, as I said earlier today there was a session at Campie Primary on ‘ICT in East Lothian’ for all the new probationers. I tried to keep schtuum yesterday when people seemed to think it would be a day on how to get your emails.

Needless to say people were pretty surprised to see just what is going on with edubuzz and I spoke to and heard people who were excited by the possibilities of what the tools could offer for learning and teaching this year. When it came to my turn in the blogging session my cover was blown and I was named as an active blogger, and that of course set the challenge of finding my blog.

Hello to anyone who finds me, why not leave a comment? You can start by saying how chuffed you are to get a free 2gig pen drive!

Tomorrow is the start of a new life, I suppose.

The first of three induction days for all East Lothian probationers (that’s me), then two in-service days, then a week tomorrow I’ll be a teacher.

How about that for a daunting thought.

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.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about where I’ll be teaching next year. As there is nothing I can do to influence the decision I can only guess about where I’ll be living, but I wanted a better idea of the possibilities so I had a little play with Google’s new service My Maps. It took a lot of copying and pasting but I eventually got all of the secondary schools from my selected areas stuck onto a custom map. After a little more playing I’ve added it to my Google Earth places and arranged them into subfolders, and uploaded an image of the aerial view.

Looking at them this way was a bit of an eye opener. I knew that my choices meant I could be placed pretty much anywhere but seeing them all mapped really shows how remote some of the Highland ones are. I’ve not used Google Earth much but I did wonder (after finishing this) that there must already be a layer that has all of the Scottish schools? I wouldn’t know where to look, but surely I can’t be the only git sad enough to do this?!

In just under a year I have to make some choices. Richard Ledingham had to make them recently and won’t find out the outcome until May or so.

Yes! I’m talking about the lottery that is being placed for your probation year following a teacher training course in Scotland. Now that newly qualified teachers get their first school chosen for them a situation has arisen where some local authorities (LAs) don’t get enough new teachers and other LAs get too many, to try and resolve this there is now what I like to call a bounty payment to entice people to go where nobody else would touch with a barge pole. It’s a nice idea, it means that I get rewarded for going to a place that I’d have chosen otherwise. The places that fail to attract people generally are the most beautiful parts of the country - the highlands, islands, and generally more remote parts - and as such they are the parts that I would choose to go to normally, this way though I get and extra ?6000 for doing so. The downside of it is, it could literally be anywhere in Scotland, it could be one of the places that people don’t touch with a barge pole because they are horrible places - I won’t say where, you can decide for yourself - and that is what makes it a hard decision. On top of that I could end up somewhere that is miles from anywhere Morven wants to be.

Still, I have about a year to decide, and ?6000 is a lot of money.

[tags]GTCS, probation, teaching[/tags]