Emergency INSET

My HoD is in charge of co-ordinating the trainee teacher INSET across the school. This is usually taken by AST's, SLT, etc, but yesterday he asked me if I'd do it! Today!! Don't give me much time, will you?

The topic was to be VLE's (Virtual Learning Environments) and luckily I already had a presentation prepared for a different audience so was quite happy to do it. I discussed what a VLE is, why use one and how we can use it to enhance our teaching.

MY PRESENTATION:


I made the point that the people in front of me were at the start of their careers and it was up to them to push technology as the future of learning.

I then handed out a document of all the things I could think of that a VLE could be used for:


An interesting question arose. "Is there a danger of VLE's making teachers obsolete?" Ultimately my answer is "no". Children will always need a teacher to guide their learning. But I pointed them to the work of Sugata Mitra and his "Hole in the Wall" experiment. His work is so very interesting because it shows what children can actually learn BY THEMSELVES if given the means to do it:

Two quotes I must repeat from the second video (attributed to Arthur C. Clarke):

"A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be"

AND

"If children have interest, then education happens."

Children's Shakespeare

A bit of a personal one this one.

My own child has shown an interest in reading some Shakespeare after looking at some works at school. She's 10. Now I know that if I hand her my copy of "The complete works of Shakespeare" it will frighten the life out of her and possibly put her off ever trying to read Shakespeare again!

So I put out a call for help to primary teachers on Twitter and got some replies. Apparently the BBC did a series of "Animated Tales" from Shakespeare plays so that looks pretty promising. I was also given the name of some book re-telling the stories in child-friendly speak so did plan to look them up.

But I also put out an equivalent call for help from English teaching colleagues I worked with at my previous school but am still very much in contact with. The response there was great. I immediately ordered two recommended books that tell the stories as comic strips an apparently are very popular with children. I'm yet to take delivery of them but will come back and offer my opinion of how exciting they are for young children.

Maths Unit 3 non-calc paper 2011

So I'm assuming I'm quite safe to talk about the Maths paper my year 11 sat on Monday afternoon.

It was a bloomin' pig of an exam! It missed out so much and made the questions it did have into the hardest type possible! Surface area wasn't your 'right' prisms - it was comparing cones and hemispheres! Changing the subject wasn't your standard formula - it had the new subject as both numerator and denominator of a fraction! Ratio wasn't just 'shared in a given ratio' - it had a convoluted way of working out the ratios!

All I can say is I hope that the next (calculator) paper is reduced in difficulty to counteract the harshness of this one OR they seriously drop the grade boundary!

We'll know by Friday.......