First year - done!

Well, that's it, my first year is over. No longer can I hide behind my mentor when I get things wrong!! Scary!! But I have a had a brilliant year. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and actually, secretly, I am kind of looking forward to September already...

People keep asking me what I have learnt this year, and I think that is the most difficult question to answer - not because I haven't learnt much - quite the opposite! I have learnt so many valuable lessons that I don't know where to begin!

My favourite bits have been:

Developping some really nice relationships with some great classes - and I get to keep lots of them next year too :)

Getting to about February and things feeling like they were slowly beginning to 'click' into place

Experimenting lots with all sorts of different creative teaching and learning techniques

Getting on Twitter and learning soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much from some very inspirational and helpful people

BLOGGING - thoroughly enjoyed reflecting on things I have done and sharing them on here (even if not many people read it ever!!)


Things I have struggled to enjoy as much:

It has taken me a while (and I am still not there yet) to learn not to take things personally. I still struggle a little bit with those very rare but hurtful remarks from individuals - despite fully understanding that they are not really meant to hurt me.

Time management - will I ever get good at this??? (Haha)

OfSTED - actually I enjoyed it on the second day but the first day was very scary!!

Not having my own classroom - I had to teach in 10 different rooms!!!! (Sadly THS was due a New Build, which was cancelled) But now I have one and I love it :) :) :) :)


So here's to a new year - better get my thinking cap on to come up with some more experiments before then!!

iPods project - a summary

Well the iPods project is over for this group as they have now moved up into year 10 (we have an early rollover at THS). I think that on the whole it was a great success. Each of the 6 groups had a very different focus. Group one focussed on subtitling, which was really interesting and I have to say that they put me to shame with their skills in that area! Another group used Garage Band to sing the song 'Friday' by Rebecca Black, which they had translated into German. Another used iMovie to create a lovely movie based on the topic 'Meeting People'. Others used a mixture of programmes ranging from iPhoto to PowerPoint.

I think they learnt a lot. The thing that I enjoyed most about this project the most was that it was a complete experiment. I must confess that I am not the world's most 'tech-savvy' of teachers and I think that I learnt as much as they did! It was great that they were able to teach me little bits that they had picked up from IT lessons, and from just having iPods, and I think that they enjoyed this too. Equally lovely was that each student was completely engaged the whole way through - not once did I hear "But Miss, I HATE German..." or "This is just POINTLESS!!"

The downside to this project was that it was undoubtedly time-consuming. We were in the fortunate position of having plenty of time to complete the project - but I know that next time I will be planning to spend a lot less time on it! Now that I know what I am doing a bit more hopefully we won't need as long in the future.

I will definitely be doing this again with other classes. I have already started using iPods with others but have so far stuck to shorter tasks that can be slotted into any lesson plan to spice things up a bit and get them excited. That is the point of all this!