foolfillment: the blog

I got a letter today!

I’ve got lots of other things I was going get around to blogging about soon (like teachmeet07) but this gets immediate attention! I’m delighted to get placed in East Lothian for next year and I can’t wait to find out which school I’ll be in. It’s great to know finally where I’ll be and I can start making some more concrete plans. As well as it seemingly being a great place to start out in, it’s also a lot easier for me as I don’t need to start looking for a place to live.

It was a bit of a shock to find out today, I wasn’t expecting the letter until Wednesday but I should have taken a hint when I got an email from the GTCS yesterday wishing us luck in our probation year.

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.

In August I’ll be doing this teaching thing for real and I expect I’ll find it hard work, there’ll be ups and downs, and I expect I will need to talk about how I’m getting on just to help me through it.

Ordinarily the two people I fall back onto for support most are my girlfriend and my mum, next August though things are going to be different - my girlfriend graduates from vet school this summer and the chances of us ending up working in the same place in August are minimal so she’s going off to do something very exciting instead by volunteering to work as a vet in the Cook Islands for two months from mid-August. I’m very jealous.

She hit a small stumbling block when she found out she’d be the only vet there at the time so asked my mum (a recently retired vet) if she fancied an adventure…

The upshot of all that is that next August when I’m starting my probationary year two of my main people to fall back onto might be larking about on a paradise-like island on the other side of the world!

That’s probably where blogging will come in as a big help. There’s an interesting discussion going on over on Don’s Learning Log about the benefits of blogging and people’s resistance to it, the idea that it is a vanity thing.
The main reason I blog is I find it helps to write what I’m thinking and feeling, putting things into written words give me the opportunity to clarify my own ideas. It then has the added bonuses of people chipping in their comments too and helps me shape my ideas further, and giving the chance to read about what other people are thinking through their blogs, in general blogging just helps me make sense of things. So I don’t do it to make me look good, I blog it because I think it helps me do whatever I’m doing better.

[tags]blogging, teaching, probationary year, cook islands, vet[/tags]

“Few are moved by the pot of gold at the end of the impossible rainbow; few, likewise, by the easy capture of the paltry.”
Biggs, J. B. AND Moore, P., 1993. The Process of Learning Sydney: Prentice Hall

Motivation is proving to be an important part of my research in my final year project. What is it that makes people want to learn? The combination of the chance of success and the perceived value of what can be learned, suggested Biggs.

[tags]teaching, motivation, quote, biggs[/tags]

Part of the school placement system on my course is that we produce a number of full lesson plans for for lessons we have taken.

I don’t feel submitting these plans has much benefit on it’s own - writing up lessons plans like these ones is bit of a false thing, what is being tested is not the ability to come up with a good idea for a lesson and carry it out well but rather analyse every detail about the pupils and their needs. You would never find a practising teacher spending their time filling out a 1000 word plan under sections headed ‘Previous Knowledge of Pupils’ or ‘Plans for Differentiation’ for each and every lesson they take. It’s not that they aren’t bothering, it’s just that it isn’t worthwhile writing it up and adapting it after each time you see a class.

I’ll submit all the lesson plans in the form they are asked for but I think far more important is a piece of reflection written after having taken the lesson looking at how it went and how I could improve. A piece like this isn’t asked for but I think it is far more beneficial than most of the other content so I’m going to add it in at the end of each plan anyway.

[tags]lesson plans, teaching, reflection[/tags]

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]