Personal Blogs

The report was like wading through treacle for me!  Largely due to my total lack of experience of the normal higher education processes.  I personally have only been a part time student at higher education and even my degree was a corporate one - which took place in my place of work rather that at the University.  But I should have got past that quicker and got onto the activity because the reflective nature of it was right up my street.

To me the table is not really an indication of what "my organisation" does.  I don't have an organisation, I'm a supply teacher in a long term role and frankly I'm ready to walk!  I also have a freelance role as an assistive technology trainer which is an area I am thinking of expanding into with my own company but with a younger age group.  However for the purpose of this assignment I will treat my current "employer" as my organisation.

As you can see my organisation is very behind myself in using technology for educational purposes.  If I were to be recommending a strategy for implementing technology in their educational setting I would start with social media.  The school already uses social media for communication purposes and posts daily with school news and celebrations.  I would encourage them to start setting up social media accounts for departments to use to publish all of the following - 

• Great examples of work
  
• Coursework deadlines
• links to interesting articles
• videos being used in lessons
• Student stories from within the faculty

Adopting this technology would allow a greater connection with students and parents, a chance to showcase work and opportunities for students to further their knowledge of the subject.  The school are already using social media to celebrate success so to communicate and offer stretching tasks would merely be an extension of this use.

My second recommendation would be to move towards a flipped classroom.  Homework has to be set to meet the government/ofsted requirements and is a constant battle between staff/students.  Its a pain to mark and its a pain to police.  We also have this dreadful culture in UK schools (look out I've stepped up on the soap box) of spoon feeding our students.  This starts when the primary schools have to teach them to pass their SATs and then continues when they arrive with us.  I get so frustrated when every students first solution is to yell "Miss" as soon as they are even slightly unsure.  I want to mark WRONG answers - I want to encourage students to learn from each other but the culture is against that - and that is surely the first step towards the flipped classroom.

I have been told, by 3 separate members of staff that I spend too much time behind my desk rather than helping the students.  I struggle to understand this as I can see every student from where I sit as well as monitor what they are doing on the computers using software that is on my desktop.  When I do walk around the students ask more questions BEFORE trying to find solutions.  To me sitting behind my desk is where I should be, the students are controlling their learning journey.  I have clearly set the lesson out task by task on my wiki and they can follow the lesson through with little input from me.  I do introduce the lesson, I do go over the objectives and tasks and then I sit back and watch them learn.  My first step towards the flipped classroom.

The second step is to set the learning as homework - In my classroom I do this with a video or reading and a short multiple choice quiz to reinforce and check the learning.  The quiz is set as a google form and marked automatically using Flubaroo so that my mark book is clearly showing progress.  The homework is followed up with a lesson on that topic and I am on hand to answer any real questions, offer advice and further resources to expand knowledge.  It is this method of setting the homework in advance of the learning objective that I would recommend to the organisation.

My final recommendation would be the use of games and gamification which could be set as homework to counter the lack of technology within the classroom.  In the past I have made revision games very quickly using the simple generators on classtools and using these I have had difficult students focussing well on their revision.  During regular lessons I frequently use wordsearches and crosswords as starter activities and even offline games like hexadecimal bingo have enhanced learning.  Given that our students are of an age when they have not yet learned to balance work and fun using games and gamification is a clear forward step during lessons and revision.