Hello!
This week has been in school Mon, Tues and Thurs for Serial Placement 2.
On Monday I taught an English lesson to the whole class on the Box of Delights, which is the book they are reading. We spent half the lesson watching episode 2 of the BBC Series DVD, so I discovered that they use the IWB as a TV too and play the DVD through the computer, this is rather handy as you don't have the health and safety of moving a tv around the school and having the time constrainsts of booking it out to use, or having to move the classroom around to fit the whole year in at once to maximise the time.
On Tuesday I taught a whole class lesson of Maths, which was I thought a bit of a disaster that was totally my fault! I had spent 5 hours planning, researching and preparing my lesson on Monday night and had a really good lesson, all I had to do was photocopy cards that I wanted to play a game with, cut them up and sort them so that they were ready for the children to match equivalent fractions.... this all sounded so easy that I wasn't prepared for the mild panic that ensued. When I had photocopied 15, one between two, I realised just how many now needed to be cut, the school's guillotine was awful, and hacked at the paper as I tried to get as many sheets through as possible, I had to cut the individual cards with scissors, in chunks, which still took ages and then I realised that they were all mixed up and had to be sorted!! Luckily I have a very good TA in my class and while the children were in Carol Practice he sorted them for me while I set-up the rest of the lesson, but by this stage I was all flustered and had lost my thread. Thankfully when the children came back I was ready and the TA was continuing to sort the cards. The lesson started with an activity on the IWB using a maths programme that I have forgotten the name of, but it allows you to make shapes then divide them up and colour in certain sections. I had the children coming up to the front to first of all pull the shapes apart to see what fraction of the shape was shaded in red, then moving the partitions onto another shape to see equivalent fractions. It was really helpful. I did realise that much more practice is needed on IWB though, as I kept holding the pen when the children were trying to drag and ended up with finger mark smears all over the place!! The children were great though and kept telling me how to use it, I think they found it quite amusing!
I also used Knowledge Box to play a maths mansion video on fractions, which is a very good resource for maths as well as other subjects. The card game was actually okay, until I realised that the cards were still all in the wrong combinations. I certainly learnt that next time I need to think about how to organise them better!!!
See you next week....
Sunday, 25 November 2007
Saturday, 17 November 2007
Swomped!!
Hello! I have been so busy this week with assignment one and preparation for going into school next week that I almost forgot to write my blog!!! Can't have that though, so here we go...
I was sick last weekend and beginning of the week, so unfortunatly I missed the ICT session this week. I have had a quick read of what I have missed, but will have to go through it properly when I have a spare minute - Christmas maybe!! Looks like I missed Spreadsheets, which isn't too bad for me as I used them a lot in my last job, but I need to check that there wasn't anything specific that I don't yet know.
This week has been manic as always... the deadline for assignment one is getting closer so I've been using ICT in my final researching - webcat, online journals and search engines and hyperlinks from online articles. I'm also using it to start writing, which so far is my plan, which is on 2 pages, so it's quite detailed now. I am really confident in using Word 2000, I even have a proficiency formal exam in it from my last job, however my nice new laptop came with Office 2007 and stupidly I thought this was a good thing!! It is horribly different from Word 2000 and takes me 15 minutes to find anything! I am still searching for Wordcount, a vital tool for my essay, but nowhere in sight, why couldn't they have left it alone, haven't they heard the saying, 'don't fix what ain't broken'!!!
I did rather excitingly download an audio and visual codec, I've never heard of the things before and am not entirely sure what they are, but I still managed to download them and was rather proud of myself for doing it!!
Well I am now back to finish the plan for my assignment and hopefully find out that I can start writing it now, I like to wait until I have pretty much all my research usually, but I'm a bit swomped with research and need to sort it so it is relevant and sensical before I see if I have any gaps. The problem with this one is you could go on researching forever.... Tara!
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Quiet Weekout
Hello, I'm having a dull ICT week this week, no new or exciting technology to use!!
We had PE lecture this week, which was really good, but something I had previously thought rather limited for using ICT. Not anymore... in the lecture we talked about playing a video of a match, or the Olympics, for example to show children what they are working towards. I have also thought about using a camcorder to film children, so they can eatch themselves back to self evaluate and see how they can improve stance and technique, I also thought about using some sort of IT programme to show them how their body is moving when they, for example are throwing a javelin. I'm not sure that schools have this sort of technology mind... it's probably rather expensive... would be good if they did though!!! We also talked about the adventure side of sports, usually covered by going to an adventure centre for a week. I thought they could learn to use GPS as part of their orienteering training. I'm sure there are more possibilities out there along this line of thought, but I'm not sure I know them... ooh, I've thought of another, they could use photography to record other pupils playing sports, or use it to record their adventures.
We used photography in Geography too. Looking at images to learn about another culture. Children could take photographs of their local area/community activities and then email them to schools in a very different settlement, such as a village in Nepal, or a school in a mountain village in the Alps. The children in the other locality could email photos of their own settlement. The classes could see what they think they learnt about the other school and it's surroundings and then email their thoughts back to see how accurate they are. This gives them an opportunity to practice so many skills, but is fun and motivating too! They could do blogs, email, word-processing, Powerpoint, newsletters, photography, visual interpretation....
ICT has so many endless opportunities as a cross curricular subject!!!
See you next week! :-)
We had PE lecture this week, which was really good, but something I had previously thought rather limited for using ICT. Not anymore... in the lecture we talked about playing a video of a match, or the Olympics, for example to show children what they are working towards. I have also thought about using a camcorder to film children, so they can eatch themselves back to self evaluate and see how they can improve stance and technique, I also thought about using some sort of IT programme to show them how their body is moving when they, for example are throwing a javelin. I'm not sure that schools have this sort of technology mind... it's probably rather expensive... would be good if they did though!!! We also talked about the adventure side of sports, usually covered by going to an adventure centre for a week. I thought they could learn to use GPS as part of their orienteering training. I'm sure there are more possibilities out there along this line of thought, but I'm not sure I know them... ooh, I've thought of another, they could use photography to record other pupils playing sports, or use it to record their adventures.
We used photography in Geography too. Looking at images to learn about another culture. Children could take photographs of their local area/community activities and then email them to schools in a very different settlement, such as a village in Nepal, or a school in a mountain village in the Alps. The children in the other locality could email photos of their own settlement. The classes could see what they think they learnt about the other school and it's surroundings and then email their thoughts back to see how accurate they are. This gives them an opportunity to practice so many skills, but is fun and motivating too! They could do blogs, email, word-processing, Powerpoint, newsletters, photography, visual interpretation....
ICT has so many endless opportunities as a cross curricular subject!!!
See you next week! :-)
Saturday, 3 November 2007
School Life
Good morning! We'll what a week I have had at school, learnt so much in such a short space of time. The class I am in has a digital microscope, which I didn't use this week, but I have used one in our science lesson a few weeks ago, so i will know how to use it when I am teaching if it is appropriate for the lesson. There is also an Interactive White Board, a Smart Board version, so now I am going to download the software so that I can prepare lessons at home to use at school.
There was a spare classroom at the school that I was given for some lessons to teach a small group, so I was able to use the smartboard in my lessons. The first lesson I used it in was a lesson about using onomatopoeia's when writing firework poems. I searched on google and found a great powerpoint presentation with good sound on it, so I used this with the children and they loved it. They were able to really contribute to the lesson and were really engaged. I had them reading the Guy Fawkes rhyme altogether and a line of the poem each as we went through it. When they then wrote their own fireworks poems they worked really well were well focused and worked well as a team, helping eachother with spellings and deciding if a word was an omomatopieia. The second lesson I used it for was a program about using apostophes, it was supposed to be an interactive program, but when I asked the children to move the words around on the screen to fit into the correct boxes it didn't work. I still need more practice and to develop a better understanding of how the interactive bit of the board works, but the children were really keen and enjoyed seeing things on the board as opposed to just being read to, it helped them to connect to what they were learning.
I taught the whole class for literacy on Friday and the teacher observed me. One of the comments he said was that I wasn't talking when I was writing on the board, which could allow the children to start messing around, or start chatting. He said that I could have used the smart board and allowed the children to write on their words themselves. I had forgotten that they could do that, so agreed with the teacher that we would have a closer look at the IWB on the serial days in November, so that I am much clearer of it's functions.
It's going to be very strange going back to uni next week, I wish we were staying in schools, the children have just started listening to me and coming to me and feeling happy with my presence and I leave again! I hope that when I go back in November I don't have to start all over again with them and that the groundwork I've put in this week hasn't gone to waste! We'll just have to wait and see... Bye for now!
There was a spare classroom at the school that I was given for some lessons to teach a small group, so I was able to use the smartboard in my lessons. The first lesson I used it in was a lesson about using onomatopoeia's when writing firework poems. I searched on google and found a great powerpoint presentation with good sound on it, so I used this with the children and they loved it. They were able to really contribute to the lesson and were really engaged. I had them reading the Guy Fawkes rhyme altogether and a line of the poem each as we went through it. When they then wrote their own fireworks poems they worked really well were well focused and worked well as a team, helping eachother with spellings and deciding if a word was an omomatopieia. The second lesson I used it for was a program about using apostophes, it was supposed to be an interactive program, but when I asked the children to move the words around on the screen to fit into the correct boxes it didn't work. I still need more practice and to develop a better understanding of how the interactive bit of the board works, but the children were really keen and enjoyed seeing things on the board as opposed to just being read to, it helped them to connect to what they were learning.
I taught the whole class for literacy on Friday and the teacher observed me. One of the comments he said was that I wasn't talking when I was writing on the board, which could allow the children to start messing around, or start chatting. He said that I could have used the smart board and allowed the children to write on their words themselves. I had forgotten that they could do that, so agreed with the teacher that we would have a closer look at the IWB on the serial days in November, so that I am much clearer of it's functions.
It's going to be very strange going back to uni next week, I wish we were staying in schools, the children have just started listening to me and coming to me and feeling happy with my presence and I leave again! I hope that when I go back in November I don't have to start all over again with them and that the groundwork I've put in this week hasn't gone to waste! We'll just have to wait and see... Bye for now!
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