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.
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!
Uncategorized | Comment (0)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.
Biology, blogging | Comment (0)just post something already!
Photo by Chaparral [Kendra] under a creative commons license
So it’s the summer holidays technically, although the boss wants some work emailed to him by Monday, it’s technically kick back time. I’ve slept so much since end of play on Friday that I might have qualified for hibernating.
Under some sage advice I’m not going to be over-working through my holidays as well. Although, I will be doing some stuff, probably not as much as I had planned when I was thinking about this last term.
One of the things that has been set up for the A2 students over the summer was coursework blogs. So far, there’s not a lot going on with them. Only one or two students are doing any updating. I won’t lose hope yet though. I’ll keep on cheerfully blogging in the hope they catch up. All else fails, enthusiastic emails should shame them into at least token posting.
Sigh.
Uncategorized | Comment (1)for no real reason
It is a little strange this post, I’ll freely admit it.
Today has been a deeply interesting day, I’ve had my first exposure to the mac, I’ve been introduced to a hundred new things to do with a computer, my head is buzzing with ideas and I need an extra bunch of hours in the day to get all of them done.
So today I’m blogging, on well, none of that.
After a long time staring at a computer this afternoon, I needed a lie down and went to bug my housemate because he has better stereo in his room than I do. He is obsessed with maps, loves them, really truly loves them. I’ve never seen anyone derive as much pleasure from an A to Z as this gentleman.
So much so he subscribes to the blog of strange maps. The one he was looking at today was the Amnesty International map of war. I liked the look of it very much so made him email me the link. further inspection was quite impressive, there’s a wealth of information associated with each map, for the one I’ve mentioned there is a heap of interesting quotes and statements and this would be a great start for a discussion….
While this doesn’t obviously link to science there’s some maps in there that would, in the very least, kick start a conversation or give an interesting perspective. You’ll Never Moonwalk Alone for example. I think with a bit of exploring there might be something in there for a lot of subjects.
In conjuction with that I’m also adding a link to a site I’ve been using recently for display work called Block Posters. It’s a simple little tool where you upload a photo (up to 1 megabyte) choose how big you want it (four landscape pieces of A4 wide or two pieces of portrait A4 wide or however large you need for however big a space you have to fill really) and it outputs it as a paneled poster in PDF that you put together like a jigsaw.
I might make my housemate a giant map. I think he’ll like that.
I’m not sure if that’s the best way to enlarge posters like that, so if you know of a slicker technique, please do tell me!
Blogs, Maps, transformation teachers | Comment (0)Why blog, why?
I’ve been playing around with blogs for a little while and have tried to use them in different ways. Moving from personal to educational blogs was an interesting transition and the first steps in this direction were in setting of cover work. The students were given the link to a blog which outlined the detail and information of whatever cover work they needed to do. This was ideal for those last minute illnesses because I could email the link from my sick bed.
As I’ve gotten more used to them I’m getting a bit more confident. The BTEC students had their own blogs for a Chemistry assignment, they were meant to be more informative than anything and were met with mixed reviews. Some students took to it like a duck to water, from others I’ve had the odd You Tube video posted and little else. We have a department blog that is meant to inform parents, students and the local community what exactly it is that we are doing on the science floor, and we have a number of revision blogs set up for the A-level students.
In terms of the work I’d like to do with students, I hope that at the start of the new academic year to set up individual blogs for the students so they can reflect on their progress and collaborate on their ideas through the comments system. Maybe not strictly for submission of work, but also to vocalise some of the frustrations and triumphs of the course, and summarise their learning. I see some good potential here with the coursework that the A-Level students will undertake next year.
In terms of obstacles, blogs can sometimes be limiting for collaborative work, the comments and action on comments system is good in terms of feedback, but in terms of project collaboration I haven’t yet seen an easy way to do it through blogging (as opposed to say a wiki). I’d also be concerned about those students who just don’t have access at home,
I hope to continue with the departmental blog, set up class blogs for students and encourage them to keep their own blogs through the next year.
blogging, transformation teachers | Comments (7)Learning to edublog
I’ve used blogspot for a while now, but hitting F5 on the school computers in a desperate attempt to bypass the sporadic internet filter has gotten boring so edublog looks like a quite wonderful alternative.
It’s quite slick looking too. See, I got a birdy
blogging, transformation teachers | Comment (0)
