Bringing it home

Fun and games are rife at the moment as we have just had the call ‘advising’ us that Ofsted are in this week to do a full inspection over Wed & Thur. A document circulating internally to calm everyone down opens with this:

“Outstanding teachers continuously reflect on their teaching, they analyse particular aspects of their work and find ways to develop. The main purpose of lesson observation is to provide a focusing tool for reflection and improvement.”

This struck a chord with me and really highlited the value of what were all learning here. I know we are not all working in education, but does that really make a difference?

Thats a wrap.

So, that’s it, nothing more to see here… for this year anyway. Its now Toby Adams, CertHE, but this is not tobyscerthe blog, so we have a way to go yet. So what has the first year been like? Interesting, that’s all I can say. I came to all this with severe apprehension of higher education, but I now know that all bachelors are NOT equal. There are the institutions that adopt change and innovation with open arms and exploit it for all its worth in a learning environment and there are those who would have you writing with quills if they could. I am fortunate enough to be associated with the first of the two.

I can see precisely how this course has helped me and expanded my horizons in only the first year and how it really can map to any job role.

Above is a graphic from wordle.net

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

The word cloud is created from this blog, the larger words appearing more often. A great tool for visual reflection and presentation.

My project over the summer is to develop my other blog over at http://techintnl.wordpress.com

I hope to get this to its own domain and all sorts, but I would like to see the readers, hits and comments before I commit. Please do have a look and read, why not leave a comment?

‘The Purpose of Reflective Practice’

Now being used by the Universal College of Learning in New Zealand for an undergraduate course on Nursing, this is one of my assignments from the Reflection in the Work Setting module.

Thought I would share as I have not posted this here as yet.

Basic principals of my study

Here is a bit of an off-beat post to outline the components that I am so thankful for and could not imagine doing my studying / researching / learning without. First up its the underpinning element:

This is the framework on which I do 90% of my work (the other 10% is my learning journal which is a blue lined book, nothing special.) I have been involved in the IT industry for a while and without (hopefully) sounding like a bit of a bandwagon tag-along, Mac OS X has really facilitated the work I have produced so far with its simplistic file management, redundancy and time machine.

I suppose the enclosure for the previous (and all to follow) would be my fantastic laptop the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 15″ The best laptop I have ever had. It keeps on surprising me with most things, could not recommend a brand/model as much as this!

This little gem would have to be the secondary framework. Doing a research / distance learning degree would be rather difficult without web access and Firefox allows me to access all I need to on the web with the ability to support plugins such as Zotero.

The common room / lecture theatre / tutorial space and everything else, FirstClass is the University. It brings the Cohort together to engage in a communal learning environment and also allows students to connect with other cohorts, past and present.

Another Apple product now, still not a fan-boy, iWork 09. I have only been using it really in Semester 2, really to try it out. I have had all versions previous to 09 (through site license) but never really ran with it. 09 has really been a saviour for me, alleviating the need for buggy, slow, putrid Office:mac 2008 that I am only using for my reference page for each module as it has interoperability with Zotero, a feature iWork has yet to support.

Oh, now my favourite, Spotify is a service like iTunes that provides all music in its database (around 2-3 million) for free, streaming and instant. See my previous post to see the love!

I suppose this would be another component of the mix. Zotero is a FANTASTIC premise, but not fully developed in my opinion, head over to their website to read all about it and see how it can help you.

Oh come on, not everything is good with hiher education, this is how the descrepancies are dealt with!

What could you not do without???

Research Question

“How can I drive a sense of urgency and engagement in my students at both KS4 and 5?”

This is the question i will be using in the majority of my studies from this point forward until the end of the semester. I will apply an action inquiry to this question and perform reflective analysis. Im quite excited at this point, as this is so true to life and i have already started making progress with the area of engagement but hoping that studies will provide me assistance in formulating a plan. Will go nicely in the CPD evidence folder too!

Application application application

All the things i have learnt over the past few months have really helped me enrich my work and add value to my teachings. After a brief stint of research with Greenwich University about diversifying teaching large groups through a possible ICT infrastructure, i have now started to build a relationship with Wiley publishers.

Me and my Academy have used Wiley for many years and following a meeting i had with one of the people in charge of development of future media, i am now working on a project with them, testing how we can get the concepts from a book and traditional media and make it applicable in the classroom.

I look forward to seeing how this one develops and how the BALTR can contribute to it and vice versa!

Added value again!

Have just delivered a Y12 lesson on diversifying the AS/A2 pathway. Nay on everything i have learnt from my course has been applied to the lesson from project management, to learning style analysis and the then on application of that information to their individual subjects. They have also learnt the value of keeping a portfolio of their work whether it is a requirement of the course or not and how that is usefull after the course has come to a close in later life.