Uh-oh... it's my first teaching lesson!

Aye, tomorrow morning, first thing with year 7s! Now what my school does which a lot of other schools don't do is NOT have registration first thing in the morning and instead, the pupils go straight to lesson 1 - hundreds of pupils all waiting to tell their friends what was on TV last night, what they think of Liverpool FC this year, have they done their homework, does Billy fancy Lily, blah blah blah. Sounds like the time of day when a phone jammer is gold dust to you - nice one Kevin!

My lecture tomorrow is going to be on e-safety; how to use the Internet, what info must you not give out etc and firstly, the children will be discussing in pairs, how they would go about using chatrooms safely. I'm thinking I'll kick the lesson off casually, quizzing them on emails and their favourite social networks, and eventually moving on to talking about the simple precautions they take and how parents help ensure their child's safe use of the Internet.

Am looking forward to the challenge but may have to get a few notecards ready as I could end up teaching for 45 minutes! Still, another lesson, my first observation from my mentor, another bit of evidence for the standards folder. Bring it on I say!

Back to school!

Into my second day at Orwell High School and the big challenges of this PGCE placement are now just around the corner. The school itself doesn't normally take on PGCE students and so we're all working hard in the ICT department to make sure that my placement goes smoothly! I am getting a good mix of KS3 and KS4 pupils as well as observing some A Level lessons, I have won the respect of most of the pupils I have met so far and am looking forward to teaching my first lesson. Yesterday, I came across two big, chunky folders with the teacher training standards work from a previous pupil and so have got an idea of just how much work I've got to do over the next year! I shall be keeping hold of any lesson plan, email, assessment sheets and school work I get hold off as I'm sure they'll be space in my folder for all. It already feels like my primary school placement was long ago!

A Resource For Teaching

In yesterday's lesson, I came across a small but useful online wordsearch creator called Armored Penguin, which I feel will be very useful for teachers to plan a starter for the class. I like the way it doesn't just provide you with already-made puzzles to print off but instead gives the user a simple tool needed to create their own.

As pupils progress with their ICT studies, they may come across words that will be important to them in their studies and they may be able to memorize these key terms easily through an engaging and enjoyable learning method. One of the most difficult things about being a teacher I feel will be getting pupils to revise and I feel that it's vital to get any valid information across to the youngsters in any way possible and word-searches certainly get people thinking constantly of particular words.

Should the computer equipment not work, wordsearches will be one thing the pupils could be getting on with while the teaching finds other work for them to do and since the teacher can implement any word he/she wants into the puzzle, the teacher can set up puzzles for each unit as the course progresses, giving the pupils a fun way of reflecting on what they've learned in each unit. Armored Penguin also offers it's users much flexibility in terms of what format the wordsearch is in, the size, quantity of words and even decorative images for the background. I might just give it a go when I'm in class!

http://www.armoredpenguin.com/wordsearch/

What Have I Learned Since Last Tuesday?

Mainly the importance of planning a lesson, particularly in ICT where things can easily go wrong, from pupils misusing the computers to the computers themselves not actually functioning properly. To deliver a good quality lesson, teachers should get the pupils to work the answers out for themselves rather than the boring and uninteresting method of having all the necessary theory being read out from a textbook. But in order to engage the pupils, teachers must get to know them - their names, their attitudes to the subject and areas that require improvement. To obtain this information, teachers could have a seating plan and fire questions at as many pupils as possible throughout the lesson in order to maintain a sound understanding of everyone in the classroom as well as improving academic performance of the pupils and their attitude towards their studies.

I've also gotten to know about some helpful books on teaching at secondary level that my tutors recommend to trainee teachers. I recently made online purchases of a behaviour pocketbook (Pocketbook Behaviour Management by Peter Hook and Andy Vass), a teaching guide (Essential Teaching Skills by Chris Kyriacou) and a Microsoft Office textbook (Passing ECDL4 by Heathcote and Richard) that were all recommended and I feel it will be very helpful to have a look through these prior and during the course of my placement as I'll definitely need all the help I can get!

I found the national curriculum ICT unit requriement sheets we were given in one of our first lessons very helpful in our lesson planning exercise yesterday and feel that further revision of these assessment and objective guildlines will be required once I start planning my own lessons during my placement. The unit guide enabled me and my group members to construct lesson objectives and activities and gave us a great opportunity to come up with some ideas for working material for the pupils.

I managed to get my primary school placement sorted this morning too!