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?

A title and image shamelessly stolen from a great thought provoking video on YouTube that really gets you thinking. It covers many points that go perhaps a bit out there in the grand scheme of things, bit the first 1:13 of the video really hits the nail in my opinion. What do you think?

Since having such a long summer break away from monitoring the learning of others (and also myself), its now time to fire up the brain again and get straight in the thick of it. At my academy, we have an approaching Ofsted inspection and I have spent a fair bit of time with an advisor as have many of my colleagues. What is astonishing is how much of a fuss people are making over something they should be doing every day, after all, the new rules (1st Sep 09) are fair right…? But there was one shining piece of advice that kept coming through the acronyms, statistics and all manner of other jargon and that was:

“Teach Well”

Bottom line, do the day job and the rest will come. Another sound piece of data / research is the recall rate of students. I have subsequently pinned the following on my desk and always challenge what I am doing on this scale, its quite interesting and enlightening I have to tell you!

]]> http://tobysba.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/focus-focus-focus/feed/ 0 Toby Screen shot 2009-09-01 at 17.43.30 http://tobysba.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/reflection-in-the-workplace/ http://tobysba.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/reflection-in-the-workplace/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:23:06 +0000 Toby http://tobysba.wordpress.com/?p=253 ]]>

Although not my brain child, my Academy is now rolling out a trial scheme with the view of creating reflective students. The whole idea comes from developing ‘parent tutor day’ which is where form tutors meet with individuals from the group accompanied by their parents to discuss a multitude of different things. This time around, instead of the tutors whaling on at the students about what they are good at, bad at and need to improve, students are taking the stage.

Students will present a reflective dialogue for around three minutes to their tutor and parents identifying key areas that they themselves have identified. This is developing several initiatives in the students:

• Development of reflective ability
• Presentation skills

Above is a sample of some of the things they are talking about in their dialogues, but there is a range. Some have done a SWOT analysis and others have gone with a more traditional exploration of themselves.

I can only hope that this idea is developed into an ongoing initiative as i think being a reflective learner is vital to progress. In education, students are pushed to the limit, rarley being offered structured time for personal constructive reflection, seeing what has been attained and what needs still to be done.

I hope to update soon with further developments.

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?

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.

Okay, so its all over now for Level one, and i await my results with baited breath, but how do i think it all went? I had done a SWOT analysis for one of my modules in the stitching, but this was mainly focussed the action inquiry. Below is a SWOT analysis that i have done for Level 1 as a whole:

Maybe i should have included this in my appendix??? Oh well, onwards and upwards!

So thats it, my first year of University study complete. It has been a real journey for me and i hope that my marks from the second semester of this year are okay. Now going to give myself a break for a week or two on the academic front, but we will see.

Phew!!!

So that was an amazing trip… I’ll let the video do the talking.

So I am off to the far east tomorrow for 2 weeks with my academy. Hoping to get internet access out there on a regular basis to update the blog with pics and so on, but it might be a quiet spell as i will of course be contending with the great firewall of China! 0816909 out… for now.

In one of my LO’s, I shamelessly used Richard Millwoods graphic from his blog as an image for the title page as it was a great shot of an AI planning session and looked very pleasing to the eye (well mine anyway). This was a LO looking at Action Inquiry from a research perspective.

A latter LO is now the workplace application. I have since become fond of this image and had the brain child of transposing it into my work setting. Below is the result. Its a little more imitation than transposition, but it is in my workplace all the same. My colleagues thought it was my world domination plan and were reluctant to remove it before lessons began. A great way to start the day at 7:27 in the morning!!!

Above is my conclusion of LO3 of UAI hopefully explaining:

• Genre selection
• Issues encountered
• Strengths / weakness’ identified

Made in iMovie 09 and my first real attempt of creating a ‘vid-cast’

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???

A question i have always tried to put my finger on. Traditionally you would think that scientific subjects are BSc’s (Bachelor of Science) and everything else would be a BA (Bachelor of Arts,) but this is not the case. I have seen an array of courses ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous with BA/BSc seemingly picked at random as a classification, but i think i have now hit the nail on the head. To put it simply its BA = qualitative data and BSc = quantitate data. These are the different types of data used by the different courses, so a dissertation (3rd year project) for a BSc course would include statistics, maths and results from a study to do with numbers whereas a disertation for a BA would have conclusions based on responses and assumptions that could not be classified as 20%, 0.05, 4:1 and so on.

Have i hit the nail on the head? Anyone think different? Answers on a postcard in the comments.

p.s. couldn’t find a more appropriate picture, so there!

“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!