What am I looking for from the Google Teacher Academy?
I have a set of particular skills, skills I have acquired over a reasonably long career, skills that have meant I have wasted far too much time 'faffing' on the internet. I am not a coder, nor do I build my own computers any more as I find no need to. When I did I learnt how to fix things, from problems with the bios to the internal workings of some software. This allows me to pick up most applications with ease, and more importantly to manipulate them to do what I need them to.
I would like to streamline my administration, this is a key aspect of teaching. No matter how good a teacher is at delivering a lesson, without planning, tracking, targeting, assessment, schemes of work and the like, a teacher cannot achieve an outstanding grade. I find it highly ironic that an unqualified teacher is allowed to teach but not do any of the admin. This at first glance seems the wrong way round, and perhaps is but these are government policies and who are we to question them? To be a good teacher you almost need to be a polymath now, you need to be a decision maker, analyst, marketeer, assessor and yet most of the time we feel like shop floor workers as that is the main part of the job.
Students more often that not are disorganised. They are still training and discovering how to work effectively. Some are too organised and spend far too much time worrying about each tiny pixel that they never grasp or see the whole picture. Its about finding the happy medium, giving them something to refer to that gets them easily back on track after the distracting wasp has left the room.
I am going to the Academy with a completely open mind, but need a goal. This primary goal is to find out how I can use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to eliminate most of my planning next year (as it will be set up over this year). Every day we refer to a scheme of work, in maths the schemes repeat. Most topics fall within other topics, most are about building up a structure upon solid foundations. Gaps in the foundations mean that anything new has no support.
We at IPACA are lucky enough to have a cohort of students each with a Chromebook. We are still not using more than a tiny fraction of this resource, though lessons are starting to be delivered with many more ICT aspects and the foundation skills are there. We need to use the efficient organisation that computers give us. I plan to start sending my lesson outlines to the students, fed from a spreadsheet to a calendar appointment. This way the students can see the big picture, they can see how each topic builds up a full set of mathematical skills, and more importantly they can see what they are missing.
How I will do this I do not yet know, I can see it is possible. This is what I want to learn from the Google Teacher Academy.
If you have any thoughts on how this can be achieved then please let me know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading.
I have a set of particular skills, skills I have acquired over a reasonably long career, skills that have meant I have wasted far too much time 'faffing' on the internet. I am not a coder, nor do I build my own computers any more as I find no need to. When I did I learnt how to fix things, from problems with the bios to the internal workings of some software. This allows me to pick up most applications with ease, and more importantly to manipulate them to do what I need them to.
I would like to streamline my administration, this is a key aspect of teaching. No matter how good a teacher is at delivering a lesson, without planning, tracking, targeting, assessment, schemes of work and the like, a teacher cannot achieve an outstanding grade. I find it highly ironic that an unqualified teacher is allowed to teach but not do any of the admin. This at first glance seems the wrong way round, and perhaps is but these are government policies and who are we to question them? To be a good teacher you almost need to be a polymath now, you need to be a decision maker, analyst, marketeer, assessor and yet most of the time we feel like shop floor workers as that is the main part of the job.
Students more often that not are disorganised. They are still training and discovering how to work effectively. Some are too organised and spend far too much time worrying about each tiny pixel that they never grasp or see the whole picture. Its about finding the happy medium, giving them something to refer to that gets them easily back on track after the distracting wasp has left the room.
I am going to the Academy with a completely open mind, but need a goal. This primary goal is to find out how I can use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to eliminate most of my planning next year (as it will be set up over this year). Every day we refer to a scheme of work, in maths the schemes repeat. Most topics fall within other topics, most are about building up a structure upon solid foundations. Gaps in the foundations mean that anything new has no support.
We at IPACA are lucky enough to have a cohort of students each with a Chromebook. We are still not using more than a tiny fraction of this resource, though lessons are starting to be delivered with many more ICT aspects and the foundation skills are there. We need to use the efficient organisation that computers give us. I plan to start sending my lesson outlines to the students, fed from a spreadsheet to a calendar appointment. This way the students can see the big picture, they can see how each topic builds up a full set of mathematical skills, and more importantly they can see what they are missing.
How I will do this I do not yet know, I can see it is possible. This is what I want to learn from the Google Teacher Academy.
If you have any thoughts on how this can be achieved then please let me know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment