jumped ship

And moved to wordpress. It’s working OK for me so far, although I haven’t had time to blog much! I teach therefore, I’m bloomin’ busy

http://tregreer.wordpress.com/

The difference Between Mixtures and Compounds

This is all I’ve got, year 8 lesson, one hour, the difference between mixtures and compounds. This will be the first time I’ve taught an interview lesson so I don’t really know what to expect. I hate teaching when I don’t know the students at all, so should I try to figure them out at the start of the lesson? A colleague of mine told me this tip, and I’ve used it in nearly all my classes, is to give them a post-it, get them to write their name on the top and draw a picture of themselves that tells me something about them. It’s useful for learning names fast, and getting to know the students quickly as well. It usually stays on the bench in front of them for the first lesson, then I keep them for reference afterwards. I could stick them to a seating plan (but I don’t use them) or get the students to reflect on themselves later in the year, or at the end of their course… but, should I bother for this class I’m teaching for an interview lesson?

I’m leaning towards yes anyway here to be honest. It’s awkward not knowing them, and this is a five minute trick that could be very useful, but will the observers think I’m wasting time?

A very wise lady once told me not to fuss too much about what the school expects from a lesson, and go with what I expect from a lesson. If the school doesn’t like it, would I want to work in a school where they’d expect me to do other than that which I think is best? I guess not! I’ll go with the post-it notes. Maybe.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to teach KS3, and I don’t know if it has changed much, so I went to the standards site, looked at the units again, ran 8F Compounds and Mixtures through wordle and came up with the above. I like using wordle for this, it helps me focus and draws out some things I might have missed.

This wasn’t my original topic for interview lesson, but the #uksnow scuppered the respiration, gas exchange and composition of the air lesson. So I think I can almost safely assume they’ve done that now and composition of the air is something that could be brought up maybe.

I’m finding this hard to plan because I don’t know where they are, if this is new information, revision, mid-topic.. Should I plan a lesson for all eventualities? Am I thinking too hard about this?

Aaaargh! This is difficult!

To play with fire, or not to play with fire….

The job I’m applying for is an aspiring AST position. It’s quite bold, I’ve not been teaching that long really but I’ve worked really hard and taken on every chance to try something new I can, so I don’t feel completely out of line with this. Plus, thanks to amazing ofsted feedback, I’m a bit braver and ready to take it on.

Because it’s this sort of a position, I really feel the need to prove myself for this interview lesson, I’m a science teacher, I want there to be a practical element to the lesson. There’s the classic mixtures and compounds practical:

Not super interesting maybe but it makes the point. There’s also:

To consider, a bit flashier maybe, but both potentially risky with a class I don’t know. The magnesium ribbon I could demo, but teacher demo’s are so dull. Sigh.

I could maybe have some non too drastic illustrations of mixtures of compounds, do some modelling with marbles and jars or something. It hasn’t clicked into place yet, and knowing my luck it’ll click the night before the interview when I’m too tired to prepare resources.

I think it’ll be OK, not knowing what to expect is hard, not knowing the students is hard, not knowing where they are in the course is hard, but then I like this teaching gig, so once the lesson starts, it’ll all be fine I’m sure.

Eep!

where am I at?

Long post - stay with me - or not I don’t mind.

Blogging

I haven’t done it for a while, I haven’t read many for a while. I’ve a bit fallen out of love with edublogs I have to be honest and am thinking of moving elsewhere. Sorry edublogs. I like your layout and format, I like that most schools don’t block you, but this move to supporters vs. non supporters is not something I do like. I’m fairly reluctant to part with my money, for a few reasons really. I spend a lot of my wages on teaching. I buy plants for the pond, silly toys and things for examples in teaching, I’ve bought pens and crayons, fancy poster board, I’ve forked out to get my voicethread account verified. I’ve paid for things for experiments, I’ve bought seeds and tools and I’ve not got a penny of it back. I won’t get a penny back if I pay for edublogs either and I’m pretty sure my school will not pay for it, and even if they did, I’m not convinced it’s worth it. The adverts are very intrusive and I have a lot more than 30 students who I’d like to use the blogs. I can have whizzy plug-ins but not my students? I’m trying to get them web savvy, why would I stunt their growth here? I a bit miss blogging, I like getting my thoughts down, If I pay up to be an edublogs supporter, it’ll be for me, but when I can use other services for nothing without the same limits, I might defect.

TTP

I had such hopes and despite valiant efforts not to, I feel a little let down by the whole thing. I’ve got pretty much no idea what happened to it after the summer, what the focus was or was supposed to be. I know there were forces beyond the control of many, but a little more communication would have made me happy. Ever since submitting my action research I’ve heard nothing, not even a note to say that it arrived, and I know I’m not the only one. I’m very grateful for the course, I’ve learned some things and changed a lot more, I love the tools I have to use at the moment and feel very blessed for it. In terms of a course though, I feel like a forgotten student, left to wonder if the work was OK or not, or even if we’re expected to do anything else. I don’t mean to criticise anyone here, nor the course, just a little blip if you like.

Wiki

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently re-vamping the science students wiki. They didn’t like the layout so I’m making it as easy as I can, but it’s some serious work, and a slow process, I’m quite relieved we’re at a break in the teaching material as it gives me a chance to re-jig before we get going again. There was some positive feedback from the students though so I’m happy with it. They’re still reluctant to edit it without prompts (not ideal) and strongly suspect it’s to do with ICT confidence. So have gained permission to run a student ICT enrichment. Not convinced I’m going to get many takers to be honest, but that’s a long and whiny story.

Twitter

Ridiculously addictive, stupid twitter, and horribly useful. I’m following a billion teachers and science types and have learned a lot more in this last week than on a great many CPD’s. Which is lovely. Irritatingly twitter is blocked at the college (something to work on while I’m still there) but I can get it on my mac. It’s nice that I can get it, but I want my students to have it too! My del.icio.us has been getting some serious action this last few weeks but more on that later. Twitter makes me feel very behind the times when I look at all the other teachers, so much more aware of everything than I am, fingers right on the pulse of what’s new and good. I’m thankful for the chance to learn, and to learn fast as well. Twitter for educators is an invaluable resource. There’s a few ways to find other teachers. There’s good old delicious or twitter4teacher wiki or for science types, try sciencebase’s list of scientwists!  I’m stopping talking about twitter here for now or I never will.

Del.icio.us

I don’t think I’m using this as well as I could, so am determined this half term to organise my bookmarks properly and set up bookmarks for each of the courses that I’m teaching. I don’t know the best way to do it yet, bundles? or links like this? http://delicious.com/tregreer/teaching? The students like to use del.icio.us to do their searches now, they find the idea of social bookmarking more useful than google, so there’s hope!

Spreading the word

I’m supposed to be starting a ICT working group over the next half term. This is a little daunting as any CPD I’ve been involved in has been terrifying and not always well recieved. I remember trying to show blogging to a room full of post-16 science teachers and the link not working, trying to show them some of the resources available through second life and getting blank faces, that one active learning thing where a teacher decided to argue about suitability (or lack) of a task for her particular group. I really think teachers hate being taught, which is fine by me anyway, I hope they’re willing to learn. I’m going to start with a very small group and make it personal. For a while now I’ve been trying to submit website-of-the-week to the staff bulletin. Every now and then I get some feedback for it.

I’ve been on this course (jury is still out) which encourages using action planning on small and whole school scale to improve the use of ICT. I’ve not gotten my head around it yet, but will update when I have. I’m a little nervous, but very much up for it.

If anyone has any ideas or pointers (am thankful for the flashmeeting on Sunday, gave me some ideas) please let me know.

I think that’s all for now. I’ve got plenty to do and a job interview to prep for, I honestly don’t know where half term is going! To bed! Good night!

slidecast/podcast

What a busy day, the AS students made their first slidecast and I’m quite pleased with how smoothly it went to be honest. Slidecasting is a weird and lovely mash up of a powerpoint (blech) and a podcast. I dislike powerpoint this is well documented, but I’m finding slideshare really useful. I’ve been trying to keep up the wiki, doing some of it myself, and forcing students to do the rest. Because you can upload PDF’s to it, I’ve been doing all task sheets through pages, saving them as PDF files and uploading them to slideshare. This means I can embed them in the wiki, so when people are absent or lose their sheets, they have no excuses. It’s both wicked and delicious.

The slidecast was homework - About once a month or so I do an audit with the students, I’ve been working on ‘making notes’ with them (not taking notes) so I make sure they have a full set of those, any additional tasks and we then spend the lesson making revision resources as we go along. The slidecast was aimed to be a useful revision resource that could be embedded in the wiki. The sweet girl who did the voice-over for this came to see me and I loaned her the headphones, mic and laptop (supervised in the office I might add) to get on with the recording. I think for a first time it was excellent, and I’m really pleased with how easy it was to create.

For my BTEC First group we had spent the lesson looking at whether differences or similarities in organisms has a bigger impact in terms of classification. I decided to couple this task with some key skills work and hold a group discussion. The discussion was recorded and the students came up with their own rules for the talk that generally all centred around politeness. They were quite shy but again, I’m really very pleased with how it turned out. You can download it here .

Web DNA Fingerprint

This is the Web DNA fingerprint for the student wiki I’m trying to get off the ground. From what I gather the more lines and the brighter the lines the more funky and modern and very webby your site is. I’m so web 2.0 it hurts. Almost quite literally, I’ll be blind by the time I’m thirty if I don’t put the laptop down soon.

On the other hand though I would like to share some of the pictures I’ve been taking with the camera….

It’s been fun, exhausting and limpy, but fun.

teaching and science in teaching (or why I love my job really)

image from flickr by bullish under a creative commons license

When I decided to apply to be a teacher It was late in the year and I applied, for the second time, to university through clearing. The interview was awful and when I came out I was convinced teaching wasn’t for me. Thankfully the lecturer thought otherwise and offered me a place.

She asked me some questions and at the time they floored me, and now I see how brilliant they are, and I use them all the time to floor students.

If a one year old tree has a mass of 1kg and a one hundred year old tree has a mass of 1,000kg - where has the mass come from?

My housemate and co-technology enthusiast was telling me last night that he had subscribed to Ben Goldacre’s de.licio.us tags through RSS. Never liking to be out of the loop, I checked it out. I’m not a Guardian reader I have to confess (I like to tell my other journo housemate that the worst thing about the Guardian is Guardian readers) but John Rubinstein wafted into the lab once and told me to check out the Bad Science blog. So I did and I liked it. Bad science + Science Geek = Big smiles all round really.

I was flicking through snickering at some of the funny stuff and frowning at some of the downright bad stuff when I came accross this talk on TED.

… and was taken right back to that awful interview. I’d worn tweed kitten heels especially - a horrible mistake because I’m useless in anything above a flat shoe. I couldn’t answer the questions and I don’t think it’s because I didn’t know the answer, more that I was terrified of giving the wrong one and this is something I see with students all the time. I remember observing lessons where there were always the five or six with their hands up and the rest with their eyes down. If they got an answer completely ridiculously wrong how does a teacher deal with that? It’s difficult.

Misconceptions - hard to break. If you have a toilet cistern and the water is frozen, if you wrap a blanket around it will it melt faster or slower? Students associations are there before you get to them. Can you tell them they are wrong without making them feel stupid? I’m not sure, what you can do is show them how to test their ideas and let them make the leap themselves. Naked snowmen was my idea for that one I remember. Blocks of ice in the shape of snowmen (or people if you will), some naked and some with coats. I still like it.

Students are horrible little canny creatures. You tell them a million brilliant things and they’ll forget it, tell them one slightly iffy insecure factoid and they’ll set it in stone and beat you around the head with it. I’ve never pretended to know the answer to everything and am never afraid of telling them that I don’t know. I find it a lot easier however, to answer questions with more questions and seeing how far they get with what they already know, and it’s usually always miles.

They are brilliant things students, and for me teaching is the best thing I can be doing. I get paid to be excited about science all the time around people who want to be excited about science too. Sometimes it is literally that great. I won’t pretend they are all enthralled by everything but I will say we had a massive turn out for Einsteins Birthday Party and if we get our act together Schrodingers belated bash will be some (confusing) fun too (the idea is to have a series of thought experiments wrapped up in gift boxes eventually leading to the cat).

Anyway. I carried on flicking round this TED website and then saw this video.

I was reading through the TES forum the other day and found it so miserable. It seems like there is a great deal of apathy about and like a lot of people have given up. I can see why, I’m finding it hard right now. This week off, doing virtual teaching has been amusing. I got to freak out some students by monitoring their updates on a wiki and changing my twitter updates so it would show in site I was checking their work from miles away. Scary huh? but it’s no substitute. I miss it, even if I find my job frustrating.

Creativity in the sciences is a beautiful thing and not something that’s associated enough, especially from the students themselves. They see it as logical and progressive and sometimes don’t see that creativity and imagination can play as big a part. They need their minds to be wide open to the world around them, away from overly wordy textbooks and lectures. They need to have a go, to figure it out, to use their imagination sometimes. It’s really hard work - for them and for me, but I’ll persist, because I love my job really.

I’ve forgotten whatever point it was I wanted to make writing this tonight.

But I’m still glad I did. Sometimes I have to remind myself why I’m a science teacher, truth is I don’t ever want to be anything else.

stupid torn ligaments (woes of a virtual teacher)

image from flickr under creative commons license

I took a tumble at work on monday and wrecked my ankle. Torn ligaments or so slightly offensive hospital nurse tells me after squeezing my legs over and over because of suspected achilles tendon issues. I didn’t enjoy it

So I’ve been virtual teaching via blogs, email and later today a wiki. I miss darting around the lab getting enthusiastic, but it’s been fun sitting with nice coffee, my feet up and watching Frasier while going through the fine points of protein folding with the AS students. Who last weeks were told they had to submit their homework without it being a written document. It’s given at least one interesting result,

I don’t think I could (or would want to) get used to this though.

double click

This blog is enabled with answers tips from answers.com. It’s advertiser driven (what isn’t that’s free though really).

You get yourself a bit of code and stick it in the widgets. Now, if you double click on any word in the whole blog it should give you a definition.

Lets try…

oxymoron

golgotha

necropolis

deoxyribonucleic acid….

Aberystwyth

Photo’s uploaded to flickr - about a third of them! I really must fork out for the upgrade. I plainly need more room!

We had fun, the students are having trouble accessing their blogs at the moment, but when they sort that out I hope there will be a bit more action there.

results day

Woah that was weird. It’s my first one and I quite honestly don’t know how to feel. Everyone seemed impressed with the Biology results but I can’t get the ones who didn’t do well out of my head. I don’t know if that’s normal, or where the problem lies. I’m wondering what more I can do, and where, and whatever I decide it is, I’m going to do it well.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired!