Jon Hoff’s Teaching ICT (PGCE year)

Wow, well I get home from a hard days slog at the gulag (well, observing Year 10s and Year 7s mainly) only to find my humble delicious slideshow is being shared around the interweb by some of the UKs premier ICT bloggers! Happy days…a basement room presentation to 15 people one day, a world wide web phenomenon the next day.

How did this happen I hear you ask?

Well, it’s a perfect example of the learning and sharing environment that Web 2.0 can provide for us. After writing the post below which explains the context for the presentation. I then posted the link to the blog to my twitter network, still a modest 40 followers. I got a comment from John Sutton of Creative ICT fame (an excellent blog). He read it, good enough I think. John then sees Mr Doug Belshaw post onto Twitter that he is doing an elearnr session on delicious. My slideshow gets thrown into the bargin. Thanks to the power of Slideshare Mr Belshaw can then embed my presentation into his presentation on elearnr. Slideshare tells me that so far 77 people have viewed my slideshow, 3 have favourited it and 2 have downloaded it. So, I am thinking to myself, it must be useful…

All this is not for the sake of showing off. It is an example of Web 2.0 POWER! Blog. Twitter. Share presentations with slideshare, embed, blog again. You love it don’t you. I do…

Thanks John and Doug.

As a part of the PGCE IT we each had to present a five minute microlesson on a topic of our choice. I chose delicious. I had a hard time narrowing it down to be honest, I had in mind teaching some beginners CSS, using Wordpress as a content mangement system, using Photoshop as an educational tool, using RSS and news readers, the possibilities of Flickr….here is the presentation I ended up doing. Presentation is a little lazy.

I started using delicious years ago as a way to catagorise my old blogspot site. Having started my PGCE course, delicious has come into its own. I am spearheading an effort to get our department its own delicious account, and I may be introducing it to the year 10s at my first placement school.

To see what a PGCE IT trainee gets up to you could check out my course site. This site was adapted from a combination of three column and CSS nav bar templates I found on the web. I love messing around with that kind of thing! Check out the directed activities page to see the work done so far including a presentation on Baud, Bit Rate and Bandwidth and tutorials on using Adobe Photoshop for staff training and student tutition.

Here’s a poster I used as a focused discussion for Year 10’s studying for their OCR nationals ICT option. It was meant to be a starter but ended up being an hour long activity.

After a feedback session students wrote their own ICT acceptable use policies for the school. Some sensible ideas arose about the issues of having useful educational resources such as You Tube banned in school. It is certianly a subject that got them talking on topic.

Home from the first day of my first placement on the PGCE ICT.

It was an interesting day. Certainly I enjoyed the biting humour in the staff room at lunch time, the fantastic tongue-in-cheek cynicism that weathered secondary school teachers acquire (and need) to survive. The school is an all boys that has around a 50% A-C GCSE pass rate. Fairly typical. I am really going to have to impose on the classroom, drawing on all my experience of keeping rowdy classes of teenagers in order. However, the nature of these students is slightly different to what I have taught before. They are English. This may require new strategies. I am fearful as well that a trainee teacher is forever in his or her mentors shadow and never able or feeling able to break entirely free and flex their teaching styles as they wish to.

I have decided to do my Microlesson (a five minute expose to be presented to peeps at Uni) on delicious, in other words, social bookmarking. I’ve already been booked in to present this to two Year Ten classes who have just looked at bookmarks in browsers on their OCR course. My cross curricular presentation on the potential support ICT can provide in Geography is also nearly finished, I’ll embed it here ASAP. I have used sliderocket for this one, and have had a mixed experience. For a while I was trying to screencast a tour of Google Earth and then embed it in the presentation. My machine just does not have those kind of capabilities! GE Pro has a movie making facility but I am not paying $400 for the pleasure. I’ll just do a live tour of the software. I need that one trillion bit connection to be available through Virgin sooner rather than later…

Are there any other PGCE trainees ICT or otherwise out there? How is your course going so far?