Education begins the gentleman

I think I'm going to start collating Learning Platform features on here as I think of them, so that when I come to write my own I'll have a start on the spec.

The obvious ones are not being built on sharepoint, not being so blooming slow (see point 1) and not having a stupid server setup where the images aren't served over the secure server.

What's just occured to me is that I'd like to be able to archive/retire content so that when we come around to doing Ancient Egyptians again, I can just stick my ancient egyptian links back on the front page. If there's a way to do that, I can't see it...

Actually had a really productive planning session this afternoon. Am actually feeling re-engergized in general, having had a rather nasty time early on last week where I was feeling tired and rubbish and stressed out, having had a weekend to work solidly in has really sorted it out. Lesson learned - don't plan dinner parties too close together because with the best will in the world, I really can't seem to get much done on Saturdays, which means I kind of have to be able to do some work on Sundays.

http://www.itnsource.com/ - full of old (and new) news reel footage.

OK, as of now, 1 day and half an hour unti the end of term! I really really can't wait! Staffroom a little strained today, as one of our teachers didn't come in this morning after last night's Xmas party! Am looking forward to watching hung over TA's doing the panto though :)

Ugh. Am being observed tomorrow and am really not looking forward to it. We are doing maths calculation work and if the lesson we did today is any guide, they're all going to find it really really hard! I think I need to revisit my plan and tone it down back behind what we did today. Am finding planning a real strain this week - too much to think about, given I've not been that well, I guess.

According to a parent of a child who's friends with a lot of the year 6s in my class, the Facebook review of my performance so far is "hard but fair" and with a "scary voice" sometimes. Not bad for term one! In fact, more or less what I was going for - I was really rather chuffed! I did ask my class if they knew that they weren't really supposed to be on Facebook yet, given their age and they assured me that they did know but no-one checks after you tick the box when you get your account. So much for COPPA.

I've just managed to nab a new printer for my classroom from the Head becuase she was replacing her own printer - another score for me. My old one stopped paper feeding last term and I managed to fix it. I've never been very good with printers.

Have managed to rearrange my classroom, and it's looking quite nice again now. Lots of 4 person tables, rather than 6 person ones. Should hopefully be much easier to deal with.

Am finding that I'm really looking forward to coming in and rearranging my classroom over half term. Not sure if it will fit in the way I'd really like it, but we'll see. Worth a shot, anyway. I should really measure it all and map it out on Gliffy. Wonder if I can get some of my class to do the measurements for me tomorrow...

Well, something is causing all the sockets in my classroom except the one which is separately fused (used to be a cooker point by the look of it) to trip, but so far, we've no idea what. It's very annoying, because it meant the IWB was out of action for most of the morning.

I've also just spent half an hour trying to figure out whether we have a volume licence for Office 2007 or not but there doesn't seem to be any way other than to try and install it and see what happens! Le sigh.

Hmmm. I think the honeymoon period may be over. My class, this morning, don't feel lovely, they feel noisy. And are incapbable of following a simple instruction to sit down and read a book without talking for five minutes together. Although guided reading was better today. Except for me forgetting their GR record sheets.

Need to actually start to plan some handwriting work, and I think perhaps I need to adjust some of my expectations down a little bit. High is good but one has to be practical. Partly it's that the planning style here isn't ideal for me because it's not very learning objective focused. There's a day by day unit plan for the literacy with a huge chunk of objectives at the top ganked from the national curriculumn but no indication of how they link with the each individual lesson which means my teaching ends up feeling unfocused. The trouble is, the way I'd rather address those learning objectives is completely different, so it's not obvious how to adapt it. Needs a bit more thinking about.