Education begins the gentleman

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.

Well, I seem to be being given the red carpet treatment by new school! When I went in a week or so ago, I took home the computer which had been left in my classroom to fix it up. It's very slow(!) and needed more RAM desparately as well as lots of rubbish being uninstalled from it. I visited today though and have been told that actually I am being given the ICT co-ord's old laptop instead (not that they want me to do the ICT stuff yet, of course, I am assured :) ). Have got it home and what a difference! 2.5GB of RAM and looking at it, it's hardly been used - barely anything in the programs folder and a nice clean looking install! I'll actually be able to use this for serious work at school which is rather nice. I'm passing the other computer on to one of the year 3/4 teachers, but I'm going to go ahead and stick some more RAM in it anyway, since we have it lying around :) Also have been accused of being keen by my team leader and told by the Head that I can do anything I like to my classroom, including repainting units.

Cleaned out the desk and the cupboard today. The cupboard is huge! It could use a hoover actually. There's a sink in there and a rather large selection of miscellaneous DT supplies, but also quite a load of good stuff, including lots of books (like 100 Literacy Hours) which should be useful for pillaging for ideas. Also, quite a few miscellaneous posters in various states of tattyness. I threw some of them away - I can't stand motheaten posters. I'd rather make some myself!

Classroom still hasn't been cleaned so I still haven't had a chance to look through the bookshelf as it's blocked by all the desks, which have been shoved into one corner to enable the cleaning. Perhaps next week...

OK, so this is a prime example of why it is that I want to completely re-write the ICT curriculum. What the hell! Basically, if you want to talk about representing data graphically, pictograms are one of the most fiddly things to generate using ICT resources. Also, they've only just started getting the idea of representing data graphically anyway. I'm not at all convinced they're ready to take that to another level - you could get them to generate a pictogram over a couple of lessons, I doubt you can make one in ICT. Frankly you'd be much better off postponing the module until Year 4 and then teaching them to use Excel to make graphs. In the mean time we can do the Year 6 creating hyperlinks module!

ETA OK, so there is software which has been (as far as I can tell) specifically written for this module - RM Starting Graph. Which is fine, and means that you can produce a pictogram but what they get out of it is (a) what pictograms are and how they work, which is good, but it's Maths and (b) how to use RM Starting Graph, which is not a transferable skill and a total waste of their time - I stand my my plan to do it in Year 4 and teach spreadsheets to do it with.

Ok, so now that I've completed the whole week, what did I learn from foundation subjects training?

• Half a day without time to reflect and observe afterwards is not enough. It's almost not worth doing, although you do get some interesting online references so that you can follow things up.
• I'm going to need to be careful about how I teach subjects that I don't really like, like PE. Actually, in my current school, I'm going to have very little need to teach any PE anyway because most of that is taken care of by AG, who does some PPA cover for everyone by taking games lessons. Still, I should remember that I can find *parts* of the subject that I like (e.g. country dancing) and try to arrange with other collegues to cover those rather than just soldiering through on pretending to be fireworks or other bits of dance which don't work for me.
• The history curriculum seemed a lot less varied than I'd have liked, which means that some of the more adventurous history lessons I might like to do on periods not often covered will have to be re-thought. Not neccessarily removed, but rethought, definitely.
• Given half a chance, we're dashing through the ICT curriculum at top speed and then getting on to interesting stuff. There seems to be loads of stuff there that kids can already do (I saw bookmarking websites on a Year 5 weekly plan!) and it's wasting the opportunity to get them excited about technology. It'll depend to some extend what sort of school I end up teaching in though - at the moment I think all the children in my class have at least one computer at home and often one of their own separate from their parents but that won't be the case everywhere. Also, we will have computers in my classroom, damn it! I liked the idea of getting a visualizer (as suggested by the geography tutor :))
• I need to have a think about drama. There's a tendency for drama to devolve into playing drama games and just "come up with a scene about x" and I think that can be quite disengaging. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to deal with that is, but I'll have a think and see what I can come up with. It would help if there were more playscripts for kids that didn't make me cringe though.

I figure I might as well post this here since I have the computer in front of me.

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