Off We Go!

The school year has begun, and I’m in that phase of not knowing yet quite what the year will be like. I had a student yesterday after class stop me in excitement to tell me what he was planning for the task I set, and another this morning getting furious with me because I had no interest in listening to what was a blatant lie. What I find (and I’m sure many others experience this) is that it’s the second interaction I’m spending all my mental energy on. Why do we do that? To combat this negative feeling I decided to come to my blog and look for inspiration. My thoughts immediately turned to a wonderful video Amanda Isherwood forwarded me last year about the power of words. It’s a wonderful reminder of what we are truly aiming to do in English.

There is also this wonderful video forwarded to me by Jonathan Scobie about the demands and implications veiled in euphemistic politeness, which is a lot of fun.

Checking my sticky note, there’s also some useful resources I’ve made note of, such as Karen Bonnano’s Using Google Research Tools, and some introductory videos about flipping the classroom. This is something I want to get into because, as the speaker of the first video said lecturing to students is an inefficient way of teaching a diverse group of learners and it’s exhausting.

Focusing on something positive, fun, and a way to improve my practice has already made me feel better. Must focus on the positive!

Awesome list of web tools

Idea

I was working with some colleagues today and was about to show them how to create a blog. As soon as they got together, like most teachers do, they went into sharing mode. Someone had a fantastic video version of The Snowman (see below) and explained how senior school students love it. Another colleague was telling others about Louis Theroux documentaries, which would be great for senior Media Studies. We all have great ideas (see the Amazing To Others video on my Bits & Pieces post) that are worth sharing, and I hope that with our blogs my colleagues and we will become more interconnected with sharing our resources and ideas.

Resource

My resource for this week is a list of web tools compiled by Karen Bonanno. It’s a fantastic list of Web 2.0 tools with the title, a brief description, and a link. to make it even better they’re sorted into the phases of inquiry based learning. I’ll be referring to it a lot.

Story

I don’t really have a story this week, but a link George Couros tweeted about that I took a look at made me think. It was called five things that really smart people do and while most of what was in there was simple and obvious once I’d read it, I found it a good ‘kick up my bum’ to become a better listener. I certainly fall victim to number 5 -judging the messenger rather than the message. I’ll leave you with an awesome music video parody a colleague showed me about being mid 30s (has some great digs at blogging in it).