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)wiki(d)
Last year I had a go at developing a department wiki site (invite key is snab) with mixed results. Only one other teacher got on board with the idea and used it and it was all a little bit stop start. I’m not discouraged though, in fact I’ve given over a bit of time to the pbwiki summer school these last few weeks. Benefits of completion include a free top grade wiki, rather than the usually free basic (but perfectly functional) wiki site.
It’s been an interesting course. Week one homework was to “wikify” a lesson plan. Task two was to create a video or podcast and embed it into a page. The course has gone through a lot of online media resources as well as practical ways of using the wiki.
So I’ve been spending some time getting the new (2.0) wiki ready for September. It’s called Stand back! I’m going to try science! after the very brilliant xkcd web comic. Some lessons I’ve learned from last year
1. While collaboration across courses isn’t a bad idea, the students are more comfortable when they have their own area – keeps it less confusing – cross course collaborative work can be in a “sand box” which is just a space to try it out. Collaboration within courses is way easier.
2. Structure is a good thing – modeling pages and having a universal layout makes it easier to navigate
3. The more work the students do – the better for them and for me so I’m adding the structure and the templates but not all of it. Enough to show how it should look and where they can start.
4. It’s an excellent space to add tutorials and how to pages for all sorts of things – from using things online to practical techniques
5. It has to be integral not incidental - students need to get used to using it from the start otherwise they don’t engage
6. It’s an excellent opportunity for student ownership of a page or subject – for them to become specialists over the course of the year and thus be really great for peer revision later in the year
7. Collaboration and long term projects are a great idea.
I’m guessing because students have such a strong pull towards wikipedia, that their own wiki site will be a much more valuable resource. As it’s them adding the important information there should be tremendous sense of ownership with this.
Here’s hoping so anyway!
Uncategorized | Comment (0)class tools
Just working my way through the top 100 tools for teaching list. Came across http://classtools.net and am having a play with it. Don’t mind me….
I think this could be useful, it’s not the prettiest thing in the world but it’s easy to use for quicky homework/revision tasks. There’s a big list of different types of activities on there, from organisational to prioritisation tasks. Some I like more than others (I haven’t quite got my head around the fish diagram yet) but for a basic no whistles and bells task, this is quite effective. It’s tempting sometimes to always strive for the flashy time consuming tasks, they have their place and I think classtools has its place too.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)I’m thinking of a wordle…
My new favourite thing today at least is wordle.
You plug in a block of text and creates a “beautiful word cloud”. I think it is beautiful! The words that you use most frequently come up larger than the others. It’s all in ratio as well. It helps you to gain perspective on a piece of writing.
This is the wordle for the criteria of the A2 Biology coursework:
Data, it seems, is very important.
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