Blocking It Up

Our 3 week block placement started yesterday and I'm pleased to say that nothing terrible has happened yet. I'll be teaching a Year 11 Literature class, a Year 7 English class, and SOSE (Humanities) to a Year 7 class and a Year 8 class. The Year 7 class that I'll be taking for English and Humanities (my placement school calls it SOSE so I'll probably end up swapping between the two terms) is actually the same class which is great because it means I have a real opportunity to build a good rapport with them.

I got to see a Year 10 French lesson this morning which was really exciting for me as I speak French. I was able to help the girls with their work and participate in the class somewhat, and not just take a backseat role and solely observe. It was interesting to see how the teacher incorporated ICT into the lesson. There were two computer activities; first they had to log on to the website that is linked with their workbook and do some grammar work which involved dragging and dropping an answer into the appropriate spot, or filling in the blank in a sentence. Once that was done, they moved on to a website that I thought was fantastic. It's a website called Language Perfect and schools buy the program and do all sorts of wonderful language things. The teacher today logged in as an admin and uploaded a new vocab list and the girls were then able to log in and do the vocab test almost instantly. They can translate from French to English and vice versa. There's a whole bunch of languages available and I think it's a great tool for LOTE teachers.

My Humanities mentor has been teaching the Year 8's about the Australian political system and has been using the computers in the library quite a bit. One lesson the girls were shown a few videos on the Smartboard from the PEO website which has a great online education section for both teachers and students. Otherwise the girls have been using the computers to complete their work and look up MPs and find out about the different electorates.

I haven't seen any ICT used yet in English or Lit but I'm doing some lesson planning right now for the Year 7's to use a bit of ICT and create a composite Powerpoint presentation as a class. More on that once it's actually been done.

Stay tuned...

The first of many to come...

Semester 2 began a week ago and it hasn't got off to a running start. In fact, you might even call it a false start. Last Friday I got sick, was sick all weekend, missed classes on Monday and am still sick but on antibiotics. Thank you, modern science and medicine. So one week in and my perfect attendance record is ruined ;)

But all is not lost as I am in the online tutorials for this subject (ICT) and thanks to the fact that I had a blog last year while I was living in Israel, I am up and running and have got myself set up with a new blog so that I can regale you all with my tales of teaching using technology (or how not to as the case may be).

So welcome, and hopefully this will be a great learning experience for all parties involved.