I used this video in one of my last lessons. I was a little concerned that it may be a little “young” for my year 6 students, however, I was pleasantly surprised. They absolutely loved it, they were singing along by the end of it which awesome. It also stopped my mentor teacher in her tracks and she really enjoyed it also. She then said afterwards that the students needed to do a public speaking task and some students may want to choose that “rap” to do. So it turned out to be a fantastic and fun resource for the students and potentially something the teacher may also be able to access at a later date.
Returning from prac and found some great resources
It’s been interesting to read through the different posts after everyone is finishing up their pracs. It’s also nice to see the collaboration continue and the sharing of resources. I especially loved reading this blog, and reading through all the different resources found.
I too found some fantastic resources while on prac, one being the Behind the News (BTN) Website. This one hadn’t even dawned on me, until another friend who was teaching similar topics made the suggestion. And upon further investigation I found this fantastic video which explores a lot of the concepts connected with federation. The great thing about the video, was the actors who star in the video are all children, my students thoroughly enjoyed viewing this video and it was a great introduction to the lesson to begin some great discussions.
Google Plus as a networking platform
Wow, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged, have I forgotten how? Surely not. It’s been a busy few weeks to say the least. A couple of weeks ago my uncle sent me a link to a group on Google + which I thought I would share here as I believe it could be useful for networking. The group is called Google Educator Group (GEG) based in Brisbane and meet regularly, there is a heavy emphasis on technology which is even better. I was not overly familiar with Google +, but from what I can figure, it is very similar to Facebook and is basically a form of social media. It’s handy as it is connected with Google mail/gmail so we already have one of these through uni, so it makes for easy accessibilty. Anyway, decide for yourselves check it out and see what you think 🙂
Meeting my Mentor!!!!
I’m super excited to be getting to meet my mentor teacher this afternoon and then I get the opportunity to spend some time with the class on Wednesday which will be awesome, couldn’t be happier. I have a grade 6 class, the highest I’ve ever had! What always concerns me with the older grades is my content knowledge. So in preparation I checked out the schools website which has a unit overview for the term and a brief description of what they will be learning for each learning area. This helped me to be able to narrow down what I need to be researching. I’ve also been emailing with the teacher and she’s said she would like me to teach history, also a bonus because I’ve bee doing the History subject this semester so I can put some of that knowledge into practice.
So I began searching around and remembered others had mentioned how helpful Australian Curriculum Lessons had been, and true to other students word I found some great stuff to start with that I can adapt and build upon. There was a link to another website also called Lesson Planet which I also found really helpful and I’ve also gone back to the TES website too!
All will be invaluable!! Well, wish me luck this afternoon and good luck to you all with your planning and preparation 🙂
Cyber smart :)
I really quite enjoyed working through these modules and was quite surprised that I had a lot of the foundation knowledge already. I was surprised that the statistics weren’t higher to be honest, because as an adult and a big user of the internet and social media I see the nastiness the internet can bring out in people.
One thing I did find interesting was that the studies show that parents are encouraging the use of social media sites, and that the legal age is only 13. I think children of this age do not have the skills, awareness and capacity to operate in an online community. More importantly I think if they are navigating in an online environment, they are clearly not being taught how to act, what’s appropriate, safety surrounding internet use and the impact of their actions on others. As a parent, I am adamant that my children are not to have a facebook page until I see fit. I think children have enough to deal with, without opening up to an online world of so many other issues.
As a teacher however, I am not sure how I will deal with this if my students are avid users of social media. I think I would endeavour to equip them with skills which are required, as well as modelling to them the appropriate behaviour for an online environment. A good example of this was the facebook photo a teacher circulated to show students how quickly a photo can be seen by thousands if not millions of people, I discussed this in an earlier post.
I really enjoyed the model which discussed a whole school approach to cyber safety by allowing parents and families to assist with design of a policy to allow some ownership over policy. After all schools have an educative role within the community so this could be utilised as an opportunity to increase community awareness. I also like how they recommended creating expectations based upon the foundational policy and encouraging families to implement boundaries in the home to allow for a whole community effort to create awareness about cyber safety. I liked how they said teachers viewed this as sometimes an imposition, however they encourage teachers to see it as an invitation instead. Teachers are after all the educators in the community and often have insight that other people don’t. As I’ve heard a few times recently it’s about the mindset!
I thought it was great that the cybersmart website offers so many resources for teaching and learning that could be implemented into lessons for the classroom.
Education Queensland – NEED TO KNOW INFO about Portfolio and employment!
I thought I’d go trawling through the USQ website tonight to try and find some more information about different professional development sessions that might be available and things like that. I went to one last year about the Teacher Education Centre of Excellence which is a program which you apply for in your third year to undertake in your final year. You are generally assigned to a mentor teacher for the whole year, pracs as well and you are able to attend a lot of professional development also.
I also found a presentation about job availability, interview process and a few other things, which I found on the Education community presentations for 2014 and was put together by the Teach team from Department of Education, Employment and Training (DETE). I also didn’t realise that there is a Make a difference. Teach website which has a lot of information on it! About the transition of grade 7 to high school and employment opportunities, it also has information about your portfolio and what should be included so thought I’d share 🙂
Reblogging
Today in the lecture it was brought to light the issue of reblogging. Due to being in my own little bubble over the last week I had missed this until this morning. This evening I thought I’d catch up on some blogs after completing more of the learning path and having some interesting things to blog about. As I was scrolling through the recent posts I came across David’s blog post about reblogging and had a read. Firstly can I say, I love the way David addresses issues as they are raised!! He investigates them, has formulated statistics, broken those statistics down even further for those of us who struggle with that (I’m referring to myself HA!) and then provides all of this information to us. So thank you David!
It was interesting to see how the conversation developed today and the different perspectives on reblogging. I was more inclined to lean on the side of good faith, maybe these students didn’t do this with deceptive intentions, clearly the optimist in me coming out. I have never reblogged, I’ve always just created links, I guess because I’m comfortable and familiar with this. My argument today was, if people are concerned about having their blogs “plagiarised” and I do use the term loosely, then as with making a link to another students blog, don’t you have to “approve” the reblogging of the post? I could be wrong, this is an assumption on my behalf as I’ve never reblogged and I’m unsure of the process I just guessed it would be similar to that of making links. Let’s assume I’m right (for the sake of humoring me if nothing else), then we could just not “approve” the reblog?
After all the controversy I’m definitely steering clear of reblogging, but I do hope the people that have done so, have done it not knowing that it would benefit them and lessen their workload. Rather, just to share and engage with other students.
Just my opinion, that’s all 🙂
Lesson Planning
A little late I know, as it was done last week. Assignments seemed to just overtake things in the last week. So anyway, I found this activity awesome and something that I could definitely refer back to time and time again. It was amazing how my list flowed so quickly and before I knew it there were definite things that I am aware of when it comes to planning. I also loved the fact that other people have shared their lists via their blogs like Corinna, Amanda and this one as well. I love seeing what other people have done, the similarities, differences and sometimes things I had never considered!
So here’s my list:
- Be flexible
- Clear instructions – even if its step by step only one thing at a time(dependent on students)
- Over plan – nothing worse than finishing early and not having enough prepared, so have a little bag of trick you can pull out at any time
- Set clear goals and expectations – outlining learning that will take place so students are aware of what is going on, letting them know your expectations with regard to behaviour
- Know which behaviour management techniques you are going to use
- Differentiation – catering for ALL learners as best you can, I try to plan for three different levels at least
- Know your students – their limitations, behaviours, abilities, likes and dislikes
- Plan a range of activities – hands-on, engaging – mix it up to ensure engagement throughout the whole lessson
- Always include reflection, an opportunity to recap – whether it be asking questions in relation to content, asking students to identify their learning in the lesson, what was the best/worst part
- Set up before hand where possible
- Check ICTs are working
Bec 🙂
Using Facebook as a teaching tool
I found this image on Facebook today and I was scrolling through the recent posts of my peers I came across this blog on ICT safety and it reminded me of this image that I had seen which encouraged me to go and look for it to share here.
I thought this was a very clever use of Facebook and would easily demonstrate to students how quickly an image can go viral and be spread around the internet without your control or permission. I think this is an important lesson for students to learn. In a different context, I was having a conversation with a photographer today who advertises her business online and she has decided she no longer wants to do newborn shoots, however because of her website stating this when people search for newborn photographers she will still come up on Google, even if she changes her website this can continue for a long time.
It just goes to show how powerful the internet is and how we as teacher need to be careful and teach our students this also. Leading on from this teacher, what I thought was interesting was the amount of negative comments on this image on Facebook, and how you would filter that so students didn’t necessarily need to be subjected to that? Interesting one!
From ‘at-risk’ to ‘at-promise’
I found this TED talk on the USQ Beams Facebook page. It talks about students being labelled as risk and how that can affect the success of that student. As teachers we need to change the way we think about these student, rather than viewing them as at-risk, we need to empathise with their situations and ask ourselves what we can do to make their learning experiences better? After all isn’t that our job? To be there for mentors for these kids?
I’ve been involved with the BEAMS mentoring program that the university runs for nearly a year now. I first got involved because I wanted exposure to more schools to build relationships and make connections within the community. I had the fantastic opportunity to deliver a program called StepUP (also coordinated by BEAMS) and then along with another student the opportunity to link the program to curriculum and rewrite it taking into account our experience with the pilot program.
So I’m currently doing BEAMS mentoring at a low socio-economic School within my local community, it’s been tough, some of the students have sad stories and home lives and this video made me view these kids in a different light and question how I can help and be there for these kids.
I am also about to commence the StepUP program in a new school which I haven’t been to, I met the Principal last year and loved his vision and passion for his school so I’m really excited to go there and hopefully inspire some students to think about a career and dare them to dream!
becpeacock 