Week 2 - More Musings from the Big Space

Week 2

This has seen me in the ‘Big Space’ for two days - the modern learning base for our 4 year 5 and 6 classes. I have to type it like this or else I am left with a fraction ⅚

My leadership is beginning to flourish - mainly because as my confidence
is increasing so I am stepping up to the plate and getting more involved in the school community.

I delivered the outline of the teaching for the day - a great feeling
having 115 kids eating out of your hand!

When there was an incident - I offered support to a colleague and
positively handle the children involved in the altercation. I ensured
the office know about the situation and informed the other staff in
the team. I also checked the playground and spoke with the duty
teachers. During lunch I sat with the main perpetrator and distracted
him with random chat and banter.

I have introduced my first ever Google form to look at how the students
are using tech in their learning and what they have thought

of the topics we have asked them to cover so far.

Out of the 36 responses - this was introduced as part of their
can do /must do sheet - it was interesting to see 100% liked using
computers but there were huge variations on the level of proficiency.

https://tinyurl.com/ICT-feedback-Big-Space

I was also intrigued to see how many students said thank you
for the ‘quiz’ and that they would like to have more of them.

I will suggest this as part of the topic planning for the team and suggest introducing this in the form of a Tes Teach series of activities, where an assessment form can be included each time. The novelty might wear off, but it is such a simple immediate form of assessment and feedback.

Big thanks go out to Liz Ferguson who showed me how to create
a form in week 17 and to my team leader Dewedene who gave me
instruction in creating a Tinyurl link. 👍

Most of the teaching over the two days involved teaching in home groups, whilst at the same time, moving around the different teaching areas. Due to the extended Easter weekend we were involved in looking at the topics that had just been started in the previous week and also reinforcing maths problem solving as a home group.

Due to other teachers running over on their workshop time I stayed in the
same two teaching areas which had no technology - ie no projector or TV
that worked with my PC. I actually found we achieved a great deal more without the disruptive element of tech. I had a large whiteboard to layout
the maths problems and I did not have the added distraction of a large class
not being able to view the TV screen.

This basically reinforces the notion that tech should only be used when totally
appropriate - I had used technology to introduced it, but now was time to get
down to actually working  - the students weren’t expected to record their findings
electronically so why introduce an unnecessary use of distracting media?

Although another staff member wasn’t too happy about us not being seen to
adopt the principles of moving the children around the teaching area and being
taught by different people. I reiterated it was OK to introduce this gradually over
the year; as we saw in the first few weeks of term; we were trying to 'walk before
we could run'. We still have another 3 terms to introduce more shared learning.
It is more important to have the students settled and able to work collaboratively
alongside their classmates than to rigidly adhere to IB protocols.