Three years later

Since my last post three years ago, I had the amazing good fortune to be the bottom of the list for a local school when they were desperate one day. From that came a Term 2 contract, then Term 3, then Term 4... and then they made it a permanent arrangement. 

Being a TRT had many challenges and many good points, but did very little to prepare me for being a full time classroom teacher. In my first year I was overwhelmed by literacy demands, and have really only just sorted that out. I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of some great maths training, and I'm consolidating those skills now. I smashed science - you'd hope, since I have a degree in it - and even spent six months last year as a NIT science teacher. Humanities were a little sketchy until this year. 

The area that has frustrated me to no end has been technology. Which, for a computer geek, is really saying something. 

For four weeks in 2014 and four weeks this year, I had no projector. This is not the end of the world, but does require a full re-plan of your teaching - a fact that administrators do not understand. It was an especially sore point this year, since I had planned a full Olympics unit and paid for premium access, only to have 28 kids crowd around a computer screen. Ouch. 

The school internet has been up and down like a cheap knock-off Coca-Cola yo-yo. I solved that problem myself, by bringing my own iPad with its own data connection. 

Many useful sites have been blocked by the department, and required individual unblocking. Not a problem so much now, but when we were in the cycle of 6 - count them, SIX techs in 2 years, getting what you needed was a slow process.

iPads were easier two years ago. Then, I could get away with buying an app I wanted and just quietly installing it on my five classroom iPads. That all went away for a year while they were becoming "re-managed". We now have what we need and it's not hard to get an app installed, but as they are iPad 2s, they're not terribly useful anymore anyway. 

We used to have a computer lab, filled with ancient crusty desktops that took hours to start up. We now have three sets of laptops that take hours to start up. These are constantly in varying degrees of charge and operability. Frequently, you can find a laptop with "Dose Note WORK!!!!!!!!!" (sic) written on a post-it and stuck to the lid. Unreported, unspecific and generally unhelpful. 

The outcome of all the technology fails has been that I rarely use it anymore unless I need to. I do project things onto the screen, and I'm beginning to put out the feelers again for more interactive tools, but having your plans scrapped all the time begins to wear thin after a while. You do need to be flexible when teaching, but with all the other variables, if I can take technology out of the mix, I generally do. 

So - while I learn, I will share. If I write a post on something, you'll know one thing - IT WORKS. Because I won't put up with it otherwise! And from this you will know - I do understand your daily challenges.

How to link to your Scootle Community profile from your own blog.

You may notice that the "Find Me" button on the right of this page has a Scootle logo. If you're an Australian teacher registered to Scootle, then you can logon to Scootle Community. Clicking on the button will take you straight to my Scootle profile.

Would you like to do this too?

There are a couple of steps involved depending on your level of time, expertise and enthusiasm. If you need more help, feel free to contact me on Scootle Community.

1. Go to your Scootle Community profile by clicking on your name. 
2. Highlight and copy the URL in the browser address bar to the clipboard (Ctrl-C or Cmd-C)
3. Pick one of the buttons below that suits your blog, download it (right click and Save Image As...) Upload it to your blog in the usual way. You can change the size to suit your blog.
4. Select the picture and add a link - just paste (Ctrl-P or Cmd-P) the link you saved to the clipboard.
5. Test it out. 

If you have more time (I'm a TRT and it's a slow week) you can make your own buttons to suit your blog using software like Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator.

Are you worried about the general public clicking on this link and getting to your profile? Don't worry, it's only accessible by someone who is logged into Scootle Community. Try it yourself: log out of Scootle Community then come back and click on my button on the right.

Questions? Comments? Scootle me!

Pinterest: why I use it, how I use it and why it's great.

When Pinterest first started I was very dispinterested... see what I did there... There was no evidence to suggest it would be useful to me, or that it would stay around long. Nothing worse than putting a whole lot of effort into something only to have it disappear into obsolescence (I'm looking at you, MySpace). Every time I logged in, something would have changed, and frankly I had nothing to pin. I don't care for wall furnishings and I'm not a collector of anything.

It really wasn't until a couple of months ago that I really got it. It all started because I was given a class one day and had to teach them art in the afternoon. Now as a TRT, you never know what's going to come up, but art was a new one because all my prac schools had actual art teachers. Lucky for me I'd done a truckload of preparation while waiting for my SA teaching registration to come through and had a whole lot of quick lesson plan cards made up. I had the kids collect leaves, do rubbings of them and turn them into characters from the stories they were writing. A few days later I had another class for art so I wheeled out the nature rubbings activity again. It dawned on me that if I had these particular classes again, I was going to become a one-trick pony very quickly.

So I started looking online for some art lessons. I got very frustrated very quickly because it's painfully obvious that most classroom art lesson websites are designed by people who either own art supply shops or have enormous classroom budgets. Anything I used had to use little to no supplies (nothing worse than the TRT using up all the coloured cardboard you were saving for a special project) and had to be completed in one session. I'm not even sure what led me to Pinterest to be honest, it may have been a link from Google. But link I did, and all of a sudden it all fell into place.

See, what happens with Pinterest is that people "pin" (link) pictures from their articles onto a board, write a little caption and selects a category. You can search for keywords or you can just click on a category such as Education. That's all lovely and pretty but you're still not seeing why this is beneficial are you - neither did I! Until I stumbled across a picture of some birds that a class made using bits of torn coloured paper. They looked really cute, took a bit of effort, and you could tie it into whatever you were studying. I created a board called "Art Projects" and I re-pinned the image to my own board, retaining the original link to the website it came from.


As soon as I'd pinned it, Pinterest did a VistaPrint. (Have you ever ordered anything from VistaPrint? It's one of the websites I most admire for customer engagement. As soon as you create something and click order, it comes up with a page: "have you considered this matching notepad/bag/coffee mug/magnet etc. for a special introductory price of only xx". You could spend days ordering from VistaPrint). Pinterest suddenly popped up with a little message confirming my re-pin... and brought up another board it had been pinned to. The board was named something like "Classroom art", so I clicked on it. Up came a huge range of pins! I scanned through and opened up the ones I liked in new tabs (Cmd-click on a Mac, Ctrl-click on a PC, this command is your friend!). I re-pinned these and each time I was given another board full of useful things. I ended up spending hours sifting through about 50 pins, opening new tabs all the time. The result was a pinboard teeming with projects that I could do with a TRT class using just the materials in the classroom (for the most part).

I liked it so much that I went out and bought paints, crayons, pencils, textas and coloured paper, and a little A5 visual diary. I've started making a little examples book so that next time I have to teach art, I can flip to a page, show them what a finished product looks like, and run through the steps. You may ask why I don't just open up the pinboard on the interactive whiteboard? While that would be an excellent choice, I don't do this for two reasons:

1) As a TRT I can never rely on the technology working, or having access to it.
2) Sometimes I think a tangible product is nice. It says "a normal person can do that project" rather than a faceless individual on the internet. Also, it's really fun :)

While I was looking through the art project pins I came across a ton of resources for classroom organisation, maths games, writing ideas and science experiments. I've made a board for each of these, and now I have them all in one place. It's a resource that I keep adding to all the time and that is shared with the world. Why not give it a go now? Here's a link to my Art Projects board, and you can connect with me on Pinterest by clicking the button in the right-hand column of this blog.

WTB? (Why the Blog?)

Teachers are busy people. They have to A: know their students (all of them) and B: know their content, and have to plan ways to get B to A in the best way for each child. This they have to do in short blocks of an hour or so at a time with breaks, interruptions and myriad whole school activities, excursions, and holiday periods.

It's not hard to see why many teachers resist change, in many cases they just don't have the energy to learn something new every 5 minutes, much less keep tabs on what to learn.

Technology is making things easier and harder at the same time, if that's conceivable. It's easier to connect with other professionals and find information, but there is a much greater expectation of knowledge to go with it. This will get easier as time goes by, but probably not in the next ten years. Gradually we are moving from a content-based curriculum to a learning-based curriculum, so rather than learning everything there is to know about a topic, we teach students how to find, process and present information.

I commented to a friend recently that had the internet not been invented, I would probably be considered ridiculously smart. It's because I'm a prolific reader, as a child I couldn't get enough books and would read anything and everything I could find. Sometimes to my own detriment. But as a result, I knew a lot of stuff. I was a font of knowledge. Of course, now that so much information is at our fingertips, knowing stuff is largely useless. Lucky for me, I also had an interest in computers back then so I rode through on the coat-tails of Generation X showing dangerous symptoms of Gen Y.

The purpose of this blog is not unique, there are plenty of classroom technology blogs out there. However everyone brings a different perspective to the table and I hope to be able to respond to demand through portals like Scootle Community and Twitter PLNs.

In many ways the technology still just isn't there yet - we still have so many logins that it's impossible to remember them all, and I'm yet to see a classroom that has consistently reliable equipment and internet. There are however many benefits to becoming digitally literate, and these aren't limited to the classroom. There's a whole wide world out there.