Learning, Teaching and ICT

 picture by Brian Vass - Tofino sunset

Well … I survived my first day. In fact it was quite pleasant

 My diary is filling up and my new phone with the much needed ’sat-nav’ facillity is very much appreciated - and needed :

(my lack of sense of direction has been the topic of many a Carronshore staffroom ‘chuckle’).

Good luck tomorrow to the new primary 5L/W, and to the new Ist and 2nd year Larbert High pupils!!

More soon  ….. 

I’ve changed my blog theme and my blog title ….. and I’m thinking about my new secondment that I’ll start tomorrow.

I’m not the only one making a fresh start tomorrow. Miss Law included a great post about her thoughts on moving on from a student teacher to a probationer …. thanks for the lovely comments, Miss L

Primary 5L/W are lucky to be getting a new teacher who is very enthusiastic and genuinely excited at the prospect of helping them to enjoy their learning experience.

And, of course, last sessions Primary 7’s are all geared up for their new adventures at Larbert High

I hope that at least some of them continue to post to their blogs ……. and wikis.

Bethany’s last words to me in Primary 7 were that I should keep an eye on her pbwiki, because she intended to update it over the summer. Click on her weemee below to view the revisions she’s made to her stories - the most recent was just 4 days ago. I hope she keeps it up because I love reading her adventurous stories - and her awareness of audience is very apparent

Bethany’s PBwiki revisions can be viewed by clicking on her weeme here :   

I had trouble recently with receiving comments on this blog. I left a message in the help forums and noticed a post about ‘edublogstv’. It’s possible to transfer videos from Youtube, etc. over to edublogstv - great for getting around blocked access at school. There are teething problems, however, because it appears that only one video can be uploaded to a blog’s homepage … previous edublogtv videos then disappear. Hopefully they’ll find a way around this soon

Meanwhile, here’s an example. I’ve seen this somewhere on the blogosphere, but on Youtube (I’ll need to pop the code in, then ‘publish’ right away for it to work. As I can’t ‘preview’ it first … fingers crossed!)

 This post was partly inspired by Ferghal  who has just completed module 1 of the Chartered Teacher course (well done!). In his post, he wrote:
I’m hoping that as my confidence grows, I will be able to post my assignments online before submission and make use of this community.

I really wish that I had done just that with all my modules, too. Blogging about the final dissertation stage and receiving words of encouragement - or maybe just the occassional comment from others online was definately very benificial to me. Even just writing for a potential audience forced me to focus more on the different chapters. Rather than leaving loads of unfinished drafts, I felt the need to ‘tidy’ them up a bit before submitting them to the ‘world’.

David left a comment on Ferghal’s post to congratulate him and to ask what his next plans were. He mentioned ‘double modules’. I only heard of this option recently. Stirling are allowing the choice of completing the Chartered Teacher pathway in 3 years by opting to write double the amount of words on half the amount of modules (or so I’ve been told?)

 With the UWS route, I completed  four core modules at Post graduate certificate level:

Reflective Practice: Critical Self-evaluation and Development
(Module 1, Self-Evaluation)
Effective Teaching for Effective Learning
(Module 2, Learning and Teaching)
Equality and Diversity in Education
(Module 3, Education for All)
Essential Personal Communication
(Module 4, Working Together)

Followed by 4 Option Modules. The modules I chose were:

Teaching and Learning of Core Skills: Numeracy
Developing Cognitive Flexibility
Mentoring and Supporting Students, Probationers and Colleagues
Introducing eLearning, eTeaching and eAssessment

Each of these modules had to contain between 3 to 4000 words (I think it started out as 3000, but as the course progressed the ‘wordage’ crept up to 4000). It took 4 years to complete these eight modules. I then had the choice of undertaking 2 smaller dissertations (10-15000 words) over 2 years, or one larger dissertation (20-25000 words) over 1 year. I chose the larger dissertation over 1 year.

When I began the CT journey, there was no option to complete the course by doing double modules. I’m glad I completed all 8 core and option modules because I learned so much about so many different topics. If the Stirling option had been available, would I have chosen it ….. probably :)    

(although the cost would have been an issue - presumably the double modules cost double the money, meaning an outlay of around £2000 a year instead of £1000?)

Ferghal also shared his essay via scribd (I tried to leave a comment on his blog explaining how to embed it in to edubuzz, but I linked it to the carronshore blog by mistake. I’m not sure what happened but it seems that some comments appear right away and some require moderation??)

Anyway, if anyone wants a VERY long read, here’s my dissertation

The post arrived this morning, and along with the usual ‘here’s your latest bank statement / junk mail’ normal stuff, there was a very large brown envelope.Here’s what it contained

Oh my goodness! Now I’m there

I think it was worth all the hard work and I’m glad I finally got round to ‘going that extra mile’. My 800 word application was quite easy to write after all