foolfillment: the blog

Since arriving at Hawick I feel like I’ve been rushed off my feet, with settling into the department and also whole school business. One project that I have been fortunate to be asked to get involved in is Global Ambition. This is a really exciting project that senior students can become involved in where they will be working with pupils from school around the world. It is being co-ordinated by Javier Vasquez, a Spaniard living in Lerwick in the Shetland Isles.

To get us started I was invited up to Shetland to spend a weekend with Javi and Stewart Hay – a legend in international education – and so I went last month with one of Hawick’s S6 pupils, only now have I found the time to write a few thoughts about this down on the blog.

Despite a stormy sailing on the Friday night we made it to Lerwick and settled down for some breakfast and the discussions began – with the rain still battering down outside. We were being hosted by Stewart, who is also hosting two students for the year. One from the Czech Republic, and one South African, both are studying at Anderson High School. It was striking just how massive an opportunity – and a challenge – this was for the two of them, but equally how confidently and happily they put themselves across during discussions on a variety of topics.

Over the weekend we considered a lot of the issues that the groups in the Global Ambition project will be tackling, and I think it was a great way for our S6 pupil to get started, it certainly gave him a lot to think about. We also had the chance to meet briefly with the group from Anderson High, a group of pupils who have a radially different lifestyle to those from Hawick, yet in so many ways very similar.

Admittedly we have been a little slow to get going with the work in Hawick but things are really under way now with pupils piecing together their personal profiles and along the way hopefully thinking about how they fit into their community – and what that word even means.

Over the coming weeks and months I expect to be writing a bit more here about how the Hawick group progress. Finally though I’d like to say thank you to Stewart and Javi for hosting us, we’re looking forward to working with you over this year.

This time last year I was getting excited about going to the Scottish Learning Festival, this year I’m not sure yet if I will be going. I had expected not to be but things have changed slightly and I might be heading up for the Thursday at least. It’s still up in the air at the moment but I’ve booked into some seminars just in case I do get to go. In a similar fashion to last year and some other people in the Scottish Edubloggosphere (how I hate that word) are doing tonight, I am going to list my plans below:
Wednesday:
09:30 Making Connections: Taking a Global Approach to Teaching
10:30 Cabinet Secretary’s Address
12:30 Why: Understanding what we need to do differently to motivate students to learn
Thursday:
10:30 Motivating Every Learner
12:00 The shape of things to come: personalisation and collaboration in education
14:00 Opportunities for Embedding Enterprise Skills for Life and Work

And, of course, if I do make it to Glasgow I will definitely be heading to TeachMeet08* on Wednesday evening. If I do make it along I’ll be adding myself to the list of speakers – possibly just the 2 minute nano-presentations – to talk about goodness only knows what

If I do end up going I’ll have to miss a few classes, which I had really hoped not to do so early in to my time at my new school, but at the same time I’m really hoping I’ll get to go.

* Yes, this does mean I’m not putting on a small scale version in the Borders on the same night. BUT, I am still hopeful of getting something sorted out in the not so distant future.

Monday the 14th of April sees the publication of the draft outcomes for Technologies. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in them and where we may be going, Technologies is such a broad name and it could cover anything we wanted it to, hopefully there won’t be a trap of covering everything – and in the end nothing to a reasonable depth. At the same time I hope we will not be sticking too closely to the ‘traditional’ view of technical where all we teach is how to make sawdust and filings, and instead we are able to position ourselves so we can teach at the forefront of advancing technologies and keep up with the demands of industry – whichever industry that may be at the time.

I also hope deep down that design will feature heavily in a way that will embed design into everything that we as technology teachers do, and also into what every other teacher does.

Awkwardly that date coincides with something else which you may, or may not hear more about later – although that may actually save my skin a little (anyone worked out what I’m on about?)

Image credit: Red Bridge – Originally uploaded by El Fotopakismo

I wrote a wee while ago about having made an overlay for Google Earth of the schools I could have been placed in. Ewan picked up on it and the possibility for filling it up with all of the schools from an LTS database. At the time I realised I hadn’t made the file available but never got round to doing it.

Today it finally made it to the top of my list, so should you feel like populating it with some more then feel free to do so. I don’t know of a CVS system for these so either let me know of one, or leave a comment here saying if you’ve made any changes and where the new version is hosted and I’ll update this post.

Without further ado: (some) Scottish Secondary Schools. Currently it only has the location for secondaries in East Lothian, Scottish Borders, Perth and Kinross, Moray, and Highland. I haven’t even added in the addresses or contact details so there is a lot of work that could be done to it.

Update: New version with East Ayrshire secondaries included. I’ve also made it available on the Google Earth Community.
Scottish Schools 20/06/2007 (kmz – compressed version of the kml)

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.

Well that’s the Easter weekend gone, now back to work. Right now I’m busy not putting the finishing touches to the first draft of my final year project.
Over the weekend we managed to get in some walking up on the southern Cairngorms. We had a quick stroll up Morven/Morrone just south of Braemar to see what we thought about the weather and work out where we’d be going the next day if it was nice. Deciding to risk it we walked in to Loch Callater and stayed the night there then got an early start (up with the sun) and were on top of Carn an tSaigart Mor by 8.

It was fantastic weather and great views all around. By 11 we were just about ready to start making our way down from Lochnagar, around the same time as it started to get busy. We were pretty shattered and fed up with eating food that’s been crushed in our bags so we made our way back to Dunbar instead of staying another night.

On Sunday we had a nice walk around John Muir Country Park (without paying for parking) with the dog then a fantastic meal at The Rocks – a nice change from working there!

Now I’m back in Glasgow and it’s windy and threatening rain. Oh well, only a few weeks before I move somewhere else.
And, I’ve just realised that I’ve already been up Carn an tSaigart Mor and Carn a’Coire Bhoideach but I can’t remember it at all, although it was 11 years ago.

I’ve been a student now for a few years and I’m quite used to being busier during my summers than my term time – going away to other countries, working to pay for those trips, and generally not having time to do nothing like I used to when I was at school.

This year will be a bit different, I’ve got no plans to go away anywhere abroad unfortunately, and I don’t have any long spells with nothing happening – that’s mainly to do with this being my last year as a student and starting a new job in August.

But I do wonder what other teachers, who are used to working 5 days a week in school and all the other hours outside, do to fill their days.

Personally I have to finish my dissertation, write another essay, then fit in an exam, an oral exam and presentation, a graduation, a graduation ball, a wedding, a caving trip (hopefully), a week or so up north walking, a week in Perthshire, a trip to Mull for the Regatta, and all the other things that will no doubt come up.

On top of that I might have to find a place to live, maybe buy things to furnish the new place, maybe buy a new car, and work out all the things that I should have prepared for my first year of teaching.

And in all of that I want to try and get a bit fitter, and learn a bit of French and improve my German somehow.

So with all of that I don’t think I’ll have much time left.